The Faroe Islands - Anchored in Time by the Sea

I can invite you to step back in time and experience what life was a couple hundred years ago, but leave the steam punk and expectations of wooden sail ships. The Faroe Islands has kept itself the same over the centuries, even with the introduction of the newest technology and the knowledge that can be gleaned is in demand all over the world.

The industrial revolution saw a change in how people live in cities. Not only how you work changed, but what you worked with. You worked with machined tools and machinery. Children became a popular source of labor. Unions were forming and the first true factories were built. Few farmers were needed and fewer were employed in old trades as trades men became more effective. Little of that happened up here.

The Annoying Part of Getting a Job

Whoohoo! I just got a job!
Ohhh nooo! I just got a job!

When we are employed, we always must change our schedual to fit our employment. Unfortunately for me, my schedual has kept me out of the school room. Now that I was unemployed, I was looking forward to actually meeting my teacher. Now that I am suddenly employed, I must miss another day of class.

How so very annoying.

Sailing in Denmark

Sailing is big in Denmark. It is difficult to overstate that when comparing Denmark to countries such as the United States, any South American or African country or even the U.K. There are about 406 islands according to Wikipedia and economic factors have lead to only 70 of them remaining populated in recent decades. Add onto those 70 the Faroe Islands and Greenland and you start forming a picture of a maritime culture. That culture has historic roots that rivaled the U.K. during its greatest periods.

While I was crashing with my mother's cousin, who I will refer to, incorrectly, as my uncle from now on, I sailed with him on several occasions and became repeatedly sea sick. But, I must admit to a certain attraction with sailing. The freedom. The peace. How cool it is to say you have your own yacht.

Father Knows Best - When Government 'Helps'

Welfare isn't something I view as shameful. If you have been on the public dime, I wont look down on you and say you are a dead beat living off of my hard work, because I have been there. If you are a social worker who deals with the unemployed on welfare though, I will think of you as a waste of public money who should go out and get a productive job.

That is not what most people expect from a tax paying citizen, but I said it and I mean it. I say it because when I was on welfare, the case worker did nothing to help me and threatened to take away my welfare if I tried to find a job on my own. Well, not directly threaten, but made clear she was not happy when I left for a job interview when she had nothing planned for me job wise. It was around that time I changed my view on government. I went my own way, as I said before, and turned things around as soon as I started ignoring the social worker, kommune and governments 'demands', which really were empty threats.

Næstved - Distant Family

After IPC, I honestly did not have anywhere to go. I crashed with my mother's cousin, who had a small house in one of Denmark's historic cities. I saw plenty of it before hand. I was more or less ordered to use all the money I was given for my stay in Denmark on ticket to visit him every weekend. It was worth it though. The family is nice and welcoming. The city is not that bad a place.

My stay with him was always a period of transition. From IPC to language school. Language school to agricultural school. Agricultural school to an institution in Lolland... That I will cover later. Reflecting on his help tells me the importance of family. Without him, I would be no where and I owe him a lot. Not just for putting me up in his home for a while, but also connecting me with resources in Denmark, mentoring on Danish society.

To Contact Old Friends

 I am not the kind of person who gushes over friends and keeps a long list of contacts I write to every single day. I have people I keep close to myself, who I see often enough. I guess I should be the kind of person who puts down roots and doesn't move around a whole lot, but I am the person who moves, a lot.

I suppose one of the joys of loosing contact is regaining contact after many years. I have been doing exactly this over the years. I contact friends I went to school with or trained with and have a good time chatting about what we have been doing. Some people I am happy to hear have not moved on because they were.... less than the best of friends. I am glad to hear others do well or at least make ends meet because they changed who they are. Some I am happy to hear from in general because they were and still are good people.

Quick Three - Parenting

Abuse is a pretty touchy subject. The line between doing what is best for a child and what is worst for a child can be pretty thin. Sometimes, it is just a matter of perspective that separates the two. This topic came up recently when a New Yorker from Eastern China made his son run nearly naked through the snow. The son was born prematurely and it seems the actions of this dad are premeditated, directed, pointed. From his perspective, this is was is best for his son and seen through the perspective of Eastern Chinese Philosophy, it just may be true. The Western perspective is quick to condemn this kind of behavior and may even question the Chinese ability to parent a child in the Western world.

But freedom to decide how one raises one's own child has not always been universally agreed upon, demanding decisions from the Supreme Court. Education, what kind of or if there should be any at all, is a child welfare issue taken up from time to time. In the United States, parents have a great degree of control over what their children learn. However, in Europe, education is stricter. Some commentators have questioned if teaching religion to a child is a form of child abuse by it self.

Then there are cases where the government insists on presenting a picture of a parent that doesn't match up to what the rest of the world sees. Kerry McDougall fled the UK at night for Ireland because social workers claimed she was too stupid to marry or care for a child. That kind of ruling happens...often enough that it would make more sense to ask you to Google it and pick a story than link to all of them. One would expect a judgment in one country to hold up in another country, however, the social workers in Ireland disagreed with the UK and Kerry has recently given birth to another child and seems to be doing well. Child abuse doesn't always means abuse at the hands of the parents and government systems that have the power to take children away are supposed to do it right the first time. If the Western world can screw up and traumatize kids by taking them away or by not (Baby P), what right do we have for judging a dad who makes his son run through the snowy streets of New York City if there is a specific point and benefit for the child?

The death of Dad

This is one of those hard subjects for me to talk about.
It isn't like him and I were the closest people in the world.
Some people close to me have chastised me for caring about him.
But people never see me ball up and sob about his death from time to time.
You cannot choose who your dad is.
Even if you could, the perfect ones would be swamped.
You get who you get and you love who you love.
I wish people would understand that before they tell me what I should feel.
It was even harder for me, since it all happened when I was over seas.
At times, I wonder, if I am a psychopath for trying to be so logical in handling other people.
But I wonder just as often, if everyone else is a psychopath, because they seem unable to understand.

Stories from school

We partied that night. We drank, socialized and went to bed buzzed. We had expectations the next twenty weeks would be smooth and we were all going to be great friends. It is naive to believe such, but we hold on to our hopes going forward and try to take the best paths through life. Waking up one morning, that naivety was laid bare and a harsh dose of reality was given to the school and its students.