I’m in the Faroe Islands, starting to work on a new travel guide book. You won’t find this place on many maps; it’s really small. 1399 square kilometers of land, or 540 square miles. Smaller than any state in the United States small; even little Rhode Island is more than twice as big. Though there are still several dozen countries that are even smaller. Singapore, Aruba, and Andorra, just to name a few.)
Zoom (way) in, and you can see the 18 individual islands that make up this country, which is technically a self-governing country within the Kingdom of Denmark.
The dot is where my son and I are: Tórshavn, the capital. Population 20,000, give or take. That’s out of a total population of around 50,000.
But this place doesn’t feel small. They have their own airline. I bought a ticket with Air Iceland Connect, but it turns out the flight was really with Atlantic Airways, the official airline of the Faroe Islands.
There’s a beautiful harbor, with multicolored buildings as you’ll often find in Scandinavia. Notice that a couple of those buildings have turf roofs; there are plenty of those, interspersed with more modern structures.
There’s a modern mall, with a surprisingly enormous grocery store and a technology stores and clothing stores and a Burger King (really) and a children’s play area with animatronic dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs are only temporary, though Burger King is not.
There is a National Gallery, even though artists from the Faroe Islands only became known internationally beginning in the 1930s. Lots of the art focuses on the landscape here; we’ll venture out to start seeing some of that tomorrow.
And there’s life-sized statue of a man who is holding a live rose; I assume the flower shop down the street provided that to him, but somehow it didn’t seem right to ask.
And there’s a lot more. I fear we’ll only scratch the surface over the next few days! More tomorrow from the Vestmanna Bird Cliffs.