Xenophobia and the North Atlantic

I just had a run in today with a man who goes by the name of Hans Birgir Hansen. My readers in Tórshavn may know this man, who often writes in Yggje Tíðindi and sometimes hits the nail on the head with his opinions, but not often. My 'conversation' with him started off in Nero, the local ice cream shop. I bought a cup of coffee and sat down to read my pages and write a little bit. He was going on about cheap labor by foreigners ruining the market for everyone else. I got the impression, I am not the kind of guy he likes; I wasn't born on the Faroe Islands. The suspision was confirmed on his return to the library, where he took out the paper and insisted I look at the opinion piece he wrote. He then proceeded back into Nero to confront the lady behind the counter, a lovely young woman who doesn't have the correct skin color, understood as to mean at least one of her parental lines crosses through Africa, but I could be mistaken and the line crossed another region outside of Europe. After being told he is not welcomed to enter the back room, he left, only to return again. This time, he stood in the library and it seemed he was waiting. Well. I walked back to my computer in the reading lounge and he started to stare at me. Then he took his mobile and started to talk, very loudly, about the same ol' thing, plus about how I was sitting here. There will always be people like him who will stand in my way, but I think the tide of time is against him.

But, for now, Hans Hansen has his opinion piece and his influence in the union and I need to deal with the difficulty of finding work with people like him in high places.