The Faroe Islands are a bit too remote to be on many people’s bucket list and that’s a shame. Halfway between Scotland and Iceland in the windy north Atlantic, they offer a rugged beauty equal to any adventure travel destination.
This shot from user kanelstrand from Gadling’s Flickr pool was taken early one morning after some rain. The mixture of light and shadow, the deep color of the sea and of course the rainbow give you an idea of the allure of these distant islands.
That lonely little lighthouse shows that, indeed, some people really live here. In fact, about 50,000 people do in an autonomous nation under the Danish Realm. Amazingly, the islands were first settled by Irish and Scottish Christian hermits way back in the sixth century. St. Brendan may have visited on his fabled trip to America, followed by the Vikings. The modern Faroese are a tough people of mixed Scandinavian and Scottish descent who are proud of the life they’ve carved out of a harsh yet alluring corner of the world.
Love books? You’ll want to be in London this June when seven book fairs will all take place over a nine-day period.
Billed as the world’s largest book fair in a press release by the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, it runs June 8-16 and features not only rare books and first editions but also maps, photographs and ephemera.
London has several annual and monthly fairs, but this is the first time seven of the biggest have decided to run in the same two weeks. Participants include the huge London International Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia, the PBFA London International Summer Antiquarian Book Fair down the road at Earl’s Court and the London Map Fair at the Royal Geographical Society. The literary neighborhood of Bloomsbury will have the most events, including the Ephemera Society London Fair, the Bloomsbury Summer Book Fair both, the Bloomsbury Summer Ephemera Fair and the London Photograph Fair.
A free shuttle bus service connects some of the fairs and one ticket allows entry into most events. You can see the entire schedule and buy tickets here.
I’m addicted to “House Hunters International,” the HGTV reality show that profiles people who are moving to another country or buying a vacation home outside the U.S. Aside from the fact that the program whets my appetite to visit the places that are profiled, I love the way it plants seditious seeds in my head about places that were never previously on my radar.
If you watch enough HHI – and the show is on about 14 times per day – the idea of picking up and moving to Buenos Aires, Bruges or Kathmandu on a whim seems downright normal. As someone who has moved to and from three foreign countries and several U.S. states since college, I find it comforting to learn about people who are even crazier and more transient than I am.
The show is what the network likes to call “scripted reality.” It’s essentially based on a true story stuff where they take a real situation and jazz it up to make a more cohesive story. Travel writer Matt Gibson, whose move to Taiwan was featured on the show in 2012, wrote an amusing take on his HHI episode entitled, “House Hunters International is Fake, So What?” in which he catalogued all of the details of his story that were changed.
I watched the episode, then Googled him and saw the post. I probably should have felt cheated, but I didn’t. The fact is that I got a chance to see what $200 a month buys in Taiwan and I don’t really care about the details that were scripted – when he left Canada, who his real estate agent was, when the decision was made to rent the apartment and so on.
For those who haven’t seen the show, the outline is as follows. First, a narrator shows the couple in their native habitat and explains why they are moving, against the backdrop of some annoying but very catchy music. Then they meet with a real estate agent – who may or may not be an actual real estate agent – to outline what they want and how much they have to spend. Then they see three properties and take a walk, usually somewhere scenic, where they hold hands, weigh the merits of each place, rule out one property, make the decision and then share a kiss.
The show concludes with a tour of the new home some months later, after they’ve had time to pretty the place up. Here are some observations from someone who has spent way too much time watching this show. (They apply mostly to expatriates, not people who are buying vacation homes, as I tend to skip those episodes.)
You’re Moving Where?
Many of the expatriates featured on the show fell in love with a place while on a vacation but some move to a place solely based on Internet research. And most who are moving to a place more or less for the hell of it, rather than for a specific career move, are going from some place cold to some place warm.
Slow Down and Simplify
It’s remarkable how often couples and families say that they’re moving to country x to “slow down” and “simplify” their “hectic” lives. But is this their actual motivation or do the producers of the show ascribe this narrative in order to appeal to the legions of “busy” Americans who have time to watch six hours of TV per day but claim to be too busy to do much else?
You Need What?
There are some people who want to completely go native and find a place abroad that isn’t at all like what they have in the U.S., but others have a list of amenities they “need” that can be somewhat hilarious. I’m always amazed by people who are adventurous enough to move from say, Kansas City to Antigua, Guatemala, but insist that they need an in-ground pool, four bathrooms, stainless steel appliances and 4,000 square feet of living space, all for $100,000 or less.
But our Dog Needs His Own Swimming Pool
I’m a dog lover myself but people who seem to have no criteria for house hunting aside from what their cocker spaniel, Fritz, might prefer crack me up.
Cheapskates of the World Unite
One of the appealing aspects of HHI is how it gives viewers an idea of what it costs to live in a variety of places around the world. And when you watch an episode where Americans move to a dirt-cheap country it’s hard not to feel the temptation to leave the country. For example, I remember watching an episode where a couple found a not-too-bad looking apartment in Potosi, Bolivia, for $200 per month, and thinking, “I can’t afford NOT to move to Bolivia!” despite the fact that I had previously never given a moment’s consideration to moving to this landlocked Andean nation of 10 million.
And HHI episodes can also reveal cheap places to live in relatively expensive countries, like Italy, for example. Recently there was an episode that featured an American travel writer named Valerie who bought a $40,000 apartment in Trivigno, in Italy’s Basilicata region. The place looked like a dive, but after the couple put $25,000 into a renovation, it looked pretty darn nice.
Your Kids Aren’t the Reason You Are Moving to Belize
HHI tends to gloss over the logistical aspects of an international move, but as the father of two young children, I always wonder where families who move to off-the-beaten track countries will send their kids to school. I don’t think the U.S. has a monopoly on good schools, far from it, but on several occasions I’ve seen parents justify their moves to obscure places based upon a supposed desire to “do what’s best for their kids.”
One episode in particular stands out. A family was moving to a remote area of Belize and I remember the dad saying that they were doing it because it was somehow better for little so-and-so, their son, who, as I recall was about 10 years old. Maybe so, but I found myself shouting at the TV screen: “No! You’re moving to Belize because YOU want to live in Belize. Be honest and quit trying to claim you’re doing it for your child!”
Nothing But Happy Endings
I love the show but my biggest gripe about it, other than the fact that they leave out important details (visa status, where will your kids go to school, etc.), is that they offer nothing but happy endings. In the final shot of each episode, where the expatriates show off their new homes, they almost always rave about how great the place is and claim that their decision to move to Puerto Banana or wherever was the wisest one they’ve ever made.
The truth is that moving to a place you fall in love with on a trip doesn’t always work out. Any place seems nice while you’re on vacation and have no responsibilities or work to do. It’s always nice to hear about people who moved abroad and love it, but I think it would be even more interesting to feature people who moved somewhere and hated it, or bought a house that turned out to be a complete disaster. Let’s face it; Americans like a happy ending but schadenfreude can be just as sweet.
I was at a laundromat in Santa Cruz, California, reading the New York Times travel section. It was the spring semester of my senior year of college, a period of complete uncertainty for me. I was about to graduate. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I only knew what I didn’t want: to stay in Santa Cruz or move to San Francisco and get an office job of some sort. I needed a purpose. I needed a direction.
And that’s when a life-changing thing happened to me at the laundromat. When the guy next to me, who was reading the main news section of the Times heard the buzzer to his dryer go off, he dismissively tossed the paper over his shoulder. It hit me in the face. Well, okay, it skimmed my face. Alright, it almost hit me in the face.The point is … I picked up the newspaper and the first article I saw was about how bird poop and pollution (poop-lution?) were combining to rot the statues on Prague’s Charles Bridge.
I’d been to Prague three years earlier. I was only there for three days but I was almost paralyzed by its beauty. It had a down-on-its-heels feel to it, having just come up for air from 41 years of Soviet negligence. I met a young American couple that told me there were thousands more like them there. Young yanks just hanging out. They had planned to open a pizza-by-the-slice placed and call it Brooklyn Pizza. I moved on to Berlin a few days later but I couldn’t stop thinking about Prague.
And then here I was reading the article about the city and its eroding statues. What was in the article was unimportant to me. I was having an epiphany, a realization that was so simple I never thought it was possible. I thought my life needed direction and I was going to take that literally. I needed change and it almost hit me right in the face. I would move to the capital of poop-lution: Prague.
So that’s what I did. I spent my days teaching English and my nights drinking beer with drunk old men in smoky pubs. I wandered the city’s narrow streets, gawking at the Baroque palaces. I took classes on the art history of the city. I stood around Charles Bridge – yes that same bridge that was supposed to be dying from asphalt cancer, and one of the most beautiful bridges in the world – staring up at the Prague Castle with the gothic St. Vitus cathedral plopped in the middle.
OK, so I still didn’t have a purpose. In fact, in Prague I had less of a purpose in life than I had in Santa Cruz. At least there I was getting a college degree.
But, while sitting in a café in Prague on a random Tuesday afternoon, I realized, that was sort of the point. Prague let me exist there; it let me hang out and do nothing except for live a rather debauched life, and it didn’t care. It didn’t judge me.
To be fair, though, I didn’t exactly move to Prague to live like a bohemian (and I mean that with a capital “B” and a lowercase “b.” I actually wanted to go somewhere slightly out of my comfort zone. I wanted to struggle a little – to learn something about myself. Yes, I could have chosen a more challenging place (Afghanistan, anyone?). But the beer and sausages are so much better in the Czech Republic. Anyone ever had an Afghan sausage? They’re TERRIBLE.
And so for three years I lived in Prague. I traveled around the country. I made friends. I even learned Czech. How I didn’t come away from there with a gorgeous Czech wife is a miracle. It doesn’t sound very challenging but three years later, I was a profoundly different (and, I hope, a better, stronger, wiser) person. And then one day I woke up and realized my life was so great in Prague there was nothing left to do but to leave it, to find another challenge.
And so I waved goodbye to the City of a Hundred Spires and did something else. But now over a decade since then, I still go back again and again and again.
Why? Because Prague is me. I am Prague. Prague is the reason I’m a traveler and a writer and a travel writer. I go back to get that reminder of the lesson that Prague first taught me: it’s OK to not live a normal life. It’s OK if you don’t have an office job and live in the suburbs (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s OK that I’m not making a six-figure salary. It’s OK to go out in the world and let yourself drift. You’re not a loser for doing that! Unlike my mom and dad, Prague never said: What?! You want to be a travel writer?! But they make no money and, really, they’re just losers who can’t do real journalism.
Kafka likened his home city to a mother with claws that won’t let you go. Perhaps. But to me, Prague is more like your friend’s cool mom who lets you party at her house. And after you drunkenly jump off her roof into the pool, she’s standing there waiting with a towel to wrap you in.
Landscape photographer Ole C. Salomonsen’s main area of focus is capturing the arctic lights. Lucky for him, he lives in the right place: the Norwegian artist admits his home country is a “photographers dream.”
“[Tromsø] is one of the best places in the world to experience the northern lights as we are perfectly located under the aurora oval, even during low activity,” says Salomonsen on his website.
Most sequences in the video above were shot in Tromsø, including the city sequence toward the end of the video. Give it a watch and you’ll understand why Tromsø is nicknamed “The Northern Lights City” – and you may be inspired to add Norway to your travel bucket list.
