Taking It Easy In Tórshavn

Morning at the AirBnB was warm and much quieter than the ferry. I had one more night here, so there was no rush to pack my gear.

I just adore these little ceramic doodads. In other people’s houses, at least. I don’t think I’d have the patience to dust them at home.

I headed in the general direction of the harbor, looking for a nice breakfast spot. A local fish market was winding down as I arrived.

I grew up near San Francisco and was no stranger to a good fish market, but the method of capture and preparation on display here felt interesting to me.

I was amused by the fact that I found non-mechanized non-factory methods of catching fish to be novel enough to document.

The local wildlife posed for photos as well.

I found a cafe next to the one I’d visited yesterday, and got a really delightful smoked salmon and egg plate with a salad, a muffin, and a mocha.  An 80-something woman in a motorized chair came out and parked next to me, which would have been companionable except she started smoking one cigarette after another nonstop, and the air blowing in from the sea pushed the smoke into my face.  Even so, the air was a lot fresher than inside, and I was warm with my rain pants and hat on, so I stayed put.

She struggled to light each new cigarette, carefully propping it in her mouth and then leaning way down to reach the lighter in her hands, and I waged a bit of an internal war over whether I should be chivalrous and hold her lighter, or whether I should refrain from making it easier for her to kill herself, which she seemed determined to pursue.  In the end I split the difference and said nothing.

I was also amused by the sight of a table full of American men – or at least, men speaking English in an American accent (so they could have been Dutch, for example) – talking about real estate prices in different countries and how best to take advantage of the rapidly recovering global economy. They all had the same style of dress: Short immaculate haircuts, no beards, collared shirts with short sleeves that were tight against their arms, slacks, business-casual shoes, ostentatiously rugged-looking wristwatches. A perfectly coordinated performance of wealthy masculinity I was familiar with back home in the Silicon Valley. I couldn’t help contrasting them, and their conversation, with the fishmongers I’d seen outside in their seaworthy outfits and cold-insulating beards and hats.

I suppose generally the comparison is between a mode of dress that’s mostly utilitarian – the fishermen – and a mode that’s for social signaling. I can relate to both, of course. I wear sweats on my bike so my legs can move, but I’m wearing pants today because I’m not biking very far and I feel more civilized in them, and that’s a purely social motive. But what I was seeing here also had an element of class division. Poking it further, I realized I had a default feeling towards the American men somewhere between suspicion and hostility, that I didn’t feel towards the fishermen.

I had to pause my work and think about this, because it was bugging me.

My Dad would always grumble, “If you don’t like the way I look, don’t look.”  He was a big dude when I was growing up (not so much now at the age of 87), and definitely into eating healthy and exercise, but he never wore clothing designed to accent his musculature.  It’s not hard to show off: Just wear short sleeves and a shirt that’s maybe half a size too small, even when it’s cold, and better yet, cross your arms with your fists next to your biceps to make them stick out; that sort of thing.

I observed him in little pieces over my teenage years and learned that he looked down on men who did that.  He called it “looking macho”.  I never asked him why but it was easy enough to connect the dots:  He was big partly because of genes, and partly because he’d spent most of his youth doing farm labor to help the family survive. Same with his teenage friends.  He wasn’t the biggest among them, which meant he got picked on as much as he picked on others, and he had a temper, and that meant lots of trouble and fights.  In that era I think he learned two things:

1. The slightly overweight guy in the loose dirty work clothes could usually kick the crap out of the guy in the tight shirt.
2. He has nothing to gain by doing so, and knows it.

Then later on – probably in college – he learned a third thing on top of that, which led to the attitude I saw:

3. The guy in the tight shirt doesn’t know thing number 2, and doesn’t believe thing number 1, and that makes him kind of a fool.

He’s dressing that way as a social signal – maybe to fit in with a wealthy crowd, maybe to attract women, and also as a show of intimidation – and he thinks that the reason the pudgy hulk in the corner isn’t in his face is because it’s working.  Taking that back another level, he’s demonstrating that he assumes that guy is his competitor, rather than his potential friend.  And to my Dad, that’s the real sin:  Acting like you have more to gain from fighting rather than cooperating. Fighting’s easy, win or lose. Avoiding a fight and forming an alliance instead — that’s the smarter play. Definitely the attitude of someone who grew up in the shadow of World War II.

Years ago I asked my Mom why she’d been drawn to him, when they met.  She laughed and said she’d actually wanted to go on a date with his housemate to a basketball game, but the housemate stood her up, and Dad was home so he volunteered to take her instead.  My Mom was even more intensely the outgoing, chatty version of herself back then, and she found in my Dad a guy who could more than easily make good conversation, and was handsome, but completely un-macho, which suited her just fine because she’d lost patience for male competition — “boys with toys,” as she put it. Even if toys implied wealth, her family had wealth, so that didn’t impress her either.

And there it was. I was suspicious of a signal because it had implications about being “macho” – about male exclusivity and dominance – and I was suspicious of men who liked to broadcast that signal. If Rudyard Kipling told them, “Don’t look too good, nor talk too wise,” they would reply, “Why not?”

Of course, that’s a lot of assumptions to make based on a mode of dress. There are people in my own extended family who fit that mode and don’t seem to be aware of how it looks to people very different from them, mostly because … well, how would it ever come up in regular conversation? And, dress standards vary hugely from one social stratum to the next, even in the same place, and here I was at a ferry terminal 1/3 of the way around the planet applying my perspective from back home, so how could that even work?

If I asked one of the locals selling fish nearby, he would probably say, “Eh, they bring in money and they don’t leave a mess, I’m fine with them.” And if I asked the men at the table to give an opinion, it would probably be, “Yeah the Faroese are alright; they’re polite and honest and they stay out of our way.” And then they would get back to talking about real estate.

So, this all says much more about me than it does about the people I’m seeing, doesn’t it.

When the cafe closed I rode further up into the town, picking streets randomly. There was more art to be found!

My wanderings took me back through the old town, and the Tórshavn Cathedral, built in 1609 and recently (re)renovated.

I parked outside another cafe I’d passed a few times before.  It was very cozy inside.  Groups of people were chatting together, creating a level of engagement that I almost never saw at cafes in my home town, which had been colonized almost completely by people with sketchpads and laptops — like mine, ha haaa!  I was so delighted by a pair of young men playing chess together that I asked them to pose for a photo.

I got a sandwich and a hot chocolate, and settled in to do some writing.  As the evening wore on, the group speaking Faroese at the table next to me was replaced by a couple speaking French, then a group speaking rapid-fire Ukranian or Polish.  I could only parse a tiny fraction of their words with my very limited Russian, but it was fun to try.

The sandwich was good and the cocoa was marvelous.  I was having a grand time but around 10:00pm I crashed into tiredness, almost to the point of being unsteady on my feet.  So I stacked my dishes, then rode through the light rain back to the AirBnB and let myself in.

I’d only been in the quiet house for 20 minutes when I decided it was time to crawl into bed.  The sudden crash was disturbing. Was I fighting a cold? Could this be COVID-19, blunted by the vaccination?  I wasn’t sure.