Wind-fermented, an unforeseen vigor

Day 17 - September 7, 2023 - Sea to Tórshavn to Sea (?km / ?mi)

It is a long and somewhat rocky evening. We sleep until 11:00 and miss the window for breakfast — chocolate croissants and coffees in the Undir cafe will have to do until we get access to a basic buffet lunch.

We spend most of our afternoon in Laterna Magica (a popular place to perch), reading, writing and watching the boys play soccer on the mini pitch on the top deck before landing in Tórshavn, the capitol of the Faroe Islands. From the deck of our ship, the MS Norröna, we see the city from all angles as it does (2) impressive 180° rotations within 8 minutes to pull harbor slip by 4pm, giving us a little over 3 hours to roam.

We explore the old fort and walk into the colorful, low-rise downtown core along non-linear streets intersecting across complex rolling hills. It feels like such a perfect scale and balance of ancient and fresh, bold and subtle, unique and familiar. After poking our way through side-streets, reading historical placards and browsing tightly curated shop windows, we take a break for coffee and browse books at Paname Cafe.

The English-language section is very small, the row on U.S. affairs, even smaller. It feels good to see our particular concerns de-centered, to see some common themes that are a bit more universal (longing, disappointment, malaise, dreams, nostalgia) and after chatting with some staff, meditating on what it could feel like to grow up in the a once-isolated Faroes, or to run a shop that accommodates weekly waves of tourists for maybe 4 months out of the year and see the creep of globalization start to flatten a distinct culture with its own ethnicity, customs and language (Faroese) in the city that receives the least amount of sunshine in the world (840hrs/yr), especially after the airport terminal and runway was expanded in 2011 and 2014 to accept more aircraft types from many new countries — change has been swift.

The situation reminds me of the economic swings and identity struggles faced by the residents on the island of Ithaca in Greece; a group of classmates and I spent the summer of 2010 there with our professor Nicholas Zaferatos, developing sustainable development plans and fishing for EU grants for the seasonally-stretched, tourism-dependent village of Kioni to preserve its resiliency. (Here is the pdf report, with baby faced photos of me).

With a lot to think about, we take a short urban hike through even smaller cobblestoned alleys, surprise staircases, and so many near-impossible Escher-like vistas of overlapping buildings. We finally reach the shipyard to gawk and appraise just how many nautical miles a big wooden schooner Norðlýsið has logged through the years. We trod back into the depth of the historic sod-roofed part of town, passing many windows with lace curtains, roads with exposed bedrock, siding with decades-thick layers of paint, a happy white cat on a stoop and multiple Michelin-starred restaurants in humble buildings with chalk menus and seating for 8-10.

We land at The Tarv for our dinner reservations. The fish we order (the island’s number one export) is disappointingly overcooked, but the setting, vegetables and charcuterie are top notch, including a Faroese wind-fermented mutton, the darkest, weirdest and most complexly old-tasting pile of meat on our board. The ferry departure time draws nigh, so we speed walk back in the light rain to the dock to reboard. We watch the departure warmly perched back in Laterna Magica as we pull away from Tórshavn and enter an infinite fog layer. It begins to grow dark. The sea tosses us around with an unforeseen vigor.

We seek a distraction from the storm by catching a movie in the boat’s underbelly cinema: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which is brainless fun, until I come down with another fever and hop shivering into bed, just hoping this is a fluke and sweating it out until morning.