I celebrated the latter two anniversaries whilst in the Faroe Islands. For those of you who don't know, the Faroes are a group of 18 islands situated in the North Atlantic, sort of in the middle of the sea between Scotland, Iceland and Norway.
I went there for a week to break up my time in the UK, to visit two Germans I know through CouchSurfing - Eleonora and Hannes. They're originally from Dresden but during this year they spontaneously decided to move to the Faroe Islands. Crazy, but I was intrigued by this new home they'd chosen and decided to make my way there.
It's right up near the Arctic Circle so daylight is limited to about 9:30-15:30, but that didn't stop Eleonora, Hannes and me seeing as much of the islands as we could in a week. Although there are 18 islands, with a car you can reach all the central ones, which are the biggest and most important, using undersea tunnels and bridges. Over the first few days I was there, I saw Vágar, Streymoy, Eysturoy, Borðoy, Kunoy and Viðoy.
We also took one car ferry to Kalsoy, and spent a night on a farm at the top of the island, which I really enjoyed because it really felt like a genuine Faroese experience. Thanks to CouchSurfing (the people on the farm are relatives of a CS friend of ours), I've seen so much more than a normal hotel-staying tourist will ever see. Anyway, the week I spent in the Faroes went by too quickly, and before I knew it I was back in London, this time for the last time.
Luke joined me. He's going to appear in all my blogs from now until further notice, because we're travelling together for three weeks. Luke's just finished his bus tour around the continent and took the Eurostar to London, where he joined me in staying with Sharna for the next three nights. I've just searched back through my blogs and have not even mentioned Sharna's name, which is misleadingly unfair because I've been staying with her for many weeks now, she's an Australian who decided to move to the UK for an adventure and the most open friendly person you'll ever meet. For the latter two nights at Sharna's, we also had Emma with us - another friend I have not yet mentioned, who I met through Alexandra, she's also German and is working as an au-pair in the south of England, coming to London most weekends because it's so much more exciting.
However, as I knew it would, my last time in London flew by and before I knew it, I was saying goodbye to Sharna and Emma as Luke and I made our way to Paris on the night bus. This bus was scheduled to travel from 22:30 on Sunday until 7:30 on Monday, but because the Eurostar service is being halted, there's a lot more traffic attempting to take the transport trains through the Eurotunnel and our bus had a mega five-hour delay just before the Eurotunnel and ended up not arriving in Paris until more like 14:00 on Monday! This successfully took up half a day of our short stay in Paris, but we still managed to make something of the day and checked out the Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Élysées and the Louvre Pyramid, before dining expensively with our CouchSurfing host, who's a 60-year-old concert pianist called David.
Today, Luke and I had even more ups and downs. The biggest downside of the day was that we found out all the trains to various places in the next few days are full, meaning our plans to go to Luxembourg tomorrow were seemingly dead and buried. We scoured the internet for other options, most of them using ride-sharing websites, but had no luck until very late in the afternoon when David found a ride for us that will take us to Luxembourg (we hope!) tomorrow morning. So that's one of the upsides of the day. Another upside was that we visited the Eiffel Tower, one year since I was there with my family, which is a pretty weird feeling. Another downside of the day was that today, there was heavy fog and you really couldn't see anything from the top of the tower. It wasn't so bad though. We enjoyed skipping the long queues to go up the tower because we'd bought our tickets online already.
I hope to be able to write my next blog, not having had some awful experience to further complicate travel plans!
All I can say for now is my impression of the French train service has not been improved from the 0/10 rating it got from me in January! (see posts from one year ago)
from Patrick in Paris next to Luke
