FAROE FRIDAY: THE AWKWARD RETURN

The holidays are well behind us and the normal rhythms of life are returning. So why not bring back that long neglected feature that has all the blog readers scratching their heads, Faroe Friday? It's the feature where I spout news and trivia from a set of 18 isolated islands in the North Atlantic that have never been to but am nonetheless obsessed with. This could probably be controlled with medication. But I do this instead.

Why not bring back the feature? I'll tell you why: because English language news from the Faroes is extremely difficult to come by. There has been a decided dearth of Faroes news over the last two months, and my best source for the stuff has been AWOL for about a month. So I'll attempt to dredge some up myself.

First I went who what I'm assuming is one of the better online Faroese news sources. I wasn't able to figure much out, because I don't understand Faroese. I may have stumbled upon an article about possible air service between the Faroes and Paris. Honestly, I don't know if that's what it's really about. There's a picture of an Icelandic airplane, and the word "Paris" somewhere in the article. The word "Atlanta" is also in the article, and I'm pretty sure they aren't opening air service to that city any time soon. I clicked on a link that I thought might be a radio story, but wound up being jarring computer voice reading the article in Faroese.

But after a little more digging, I actually did come up with an actual news story of some importance about the Faroe Islands: they're having an election on Saturday. Whether or not to declare independence from Denmark is the normally the big debate in Faroese elections, but that appears not to be the case this time. The economy is doing well, unemployment is very low, and Copenhagen is not stirring things up too much on the islands. So instead the election looks like a debate on the quality of local schools. Pretty much bread and butter stuff.

This weeks Faroe photo comes from Zinnie's photostream on Flickr. It's a photo of the capitol city Torshavn (population: 19,000). Zinnie has a lot of good photos of the Faroes on his stream. I think I'm quite jealous.