The Faroese Coincidence

So, it had been a while, pretty much all summer, since I had experienced any of the psychotic coincidences that characterized last Spring. Remember, the mutual friends I had in common with the Norwegian guy studying here, the many uncanny similarities between Danial and I, that I knew the exact area this one guy lived in Brazil, that I'd been to Elisa's Naantali, etc...

Another one just hit. And I think it will have more of a useful effect on my life than the others. You see, it turns out that I am not the only person in the world who is learning Faroese. I am not even the only American learning Faroese, or the only Midwesterner. In fact, there are two other people here in my home state of Missouri who are learning this odd but awesome language - and they live a short twenty minute drive from Columbia!

Enter Kristel and Zac. They approached Uni in Uni's Meebo chat, and Uni thought he'd put us in touch with one another, since we all live in the same state. As it turned out, we live close enough to meet weekly! Kristel even used to be an MU student, so we decided to meet at nearby Memorial Union, which we both knew well.

So far it's awesome. They're very nice and we've had fun together. We have the Lockwood text from the MU library (which they repaired over the summer - the new binding even matches the title on the cover :D), and they are planning to order the famous 'new' books any day now. What I'm trying to figure out is what's the most unlikely part of the whole situation:

A.) That I exist

B.) The they exist

C.) That despite living twenty miles away from each other, we met through Uni, who lives thousands of miles away from any of us

:)

Not only is this all fun, it is giving me the motivation to actually work on Faroese, both because I have people to be accountable to, and because I sort of take the whole thing as a sign. Faroese is not easy and it's not even always fun, but I'm starting to get there. I'm at least starting to understand the complicated framework on which everything hangs - and, once you can visualize the framework, the language becomes possible. I remember when this started to happen with Finnish.

Uni and I have put in a lot of long hours working on my pronunciation, and I'm actually starting to learn. It's a thin line, though, since I don't want to forget how to pronounce German and Norwegian on the way, so I'm trying to break it up and speak those every once in a while. The spelling doesn't seem quite as chaotic as it used to - patterns are starting to emerge. And it amuses me greatly that however I mangle a word initially, Uni always seems to say, "You sound just like people from ____oy!!"