A TEENAGER has swapped the glacial terrain of Iceland to study at a Bolton school.

Icelander16-year-old Emma Grimsdottir has been studying for A levels at Turton High School Media Arts College in Bromley Cross since September, after she decided she preferred the English post-16 education system.

And she has lost count of the number of people who are under the impression people live in igloos in Europe's western-most country.

Emma, whose mother hails from Bolton and is married to an Icelander, is currently staying with her grandparents in the town. While she has settled in well and made plenty of new friends she admits that she does get homesick for her family.

She said: "A lot of people have been asking me if I used to live in an igloo but Iceland is not like that at all. In fact life is very much the same over there as it is in England.

"There are less daylight hours in the winter - it gets very dark, but then for two or three months in the summer it is continuous daylight."

Iceland, which is about the size of Ireland, is sparsely populated with just three people per square kilometre, so living in an English town with hundreds of thousands of residents has been quite a change for Emma.

She said: "I think Bolton and its surrounding districts probably has a bigger population than the whole of Iceland."

The jet-setting teenager decided to study in Bolton because she wanted to specialise in her favourite subjects.

In Iceland, Emma would have had to continue studying a broad range of subjects, but in England she is able to drop the subjects she does not enjoy and concentrate on three or four of her best subjects.

She is currently studying Media, Psychology, Food Technology and English Language at Turton.