mmalabanan
- Faroe Islands is experiencing continuous decline in population.
- There are approximately 2,000 less women compared to men.
- Faroese men have gone looking for partners outside the island, particularly Thailand and the Philippines.
Good news for single Pinays who have given up on finding love in the Philippines!
There’s still a chance for you to find your “forever” but this would mean going to a faraway place. There’s a shortage of women in Faroe islands and local men are actively searching for potential wives from countries like Thailand and the Philippines.
Faroe Islands, a Denmark-islands between Norway and Iceland, only has a humble population of 50,000 and it’s further declining. To date, there are approximately 2,000 less women compared to men in this island.
Consequently, Faroese men have gone looking for partners outside the island. Many of them found their spouses, mostly Asians, with the help of social networks, online dating websites as well as other existing Asian-Faroese couples.
Now, there are more than 300 women from the Philippines and Thailand who decided to leave their countries to live with their husbands in the island. But it isn’t as easy as it may look.
Faroe Islands may appear to be your dream destination but Southeast Asians may find the weather, culture and landscape very hard to cope with.
Those living in tropical countries like the Philippines and Thailand may find the island’s wet and cool climate particularly challenging, especially that a good summer day could have a temperature of 16°C.
Faroese cuisine is very distinct with locals favouring dried cod, fermented mutton and occasional whale meat and blubber. Traditional herbs often used by Asian are not available in the island.
Also, many locals don’t speak English as they have their own Faroese’ language, which newcomers may initially find hard to learn.
But for Antonette Egholm, a Filipina who left everything behind to live in Faroe Islands, living in such different environment somehow feels like home.
“I’ve never experienced any negative reactions to my being a foreigner. I lived in metro Manila and there we worried about traffic and pollution and crime. Here we don’t need to worry about locking the house, and things like healthcare and education are free. At home we have to pay. And here you can just call spontaneously at someone’s house, it’s not formal. For me, it feels like the Philippines in that way,” Egholm told BBC.
