*Painting by Minannguaq Zeeb You know how it goes. You get into a casual conversation with someone you’ve not met before. They say something like, “Oh, you’re from Australia. My cousin lives in Melbourne. Perhaps you know him?” Of course you don’t know him. Over four million people live in Melbourne. But there are …
There are many frustrations about living in Greenland – some small, some not so small. One of the small ones is that Greenland apparently doesn’t exist. I expect there are other parts of the world with the same problem. Think of New Caledonia, Gibraltar, or Puerto Rico. All have a similar status to Greenland, which …
October is late in the year to be sailing. It’s cold. An icy rind is forming around the shore and a blanket of frost now rarely releases its grip on the land. We took the boat out for one of our last trips of the season. The bay we sailed into, only a short distance …
A Greenlandic taxi driver picked me up for the ten minute drive into town. On the way I gazed at the calm water and commented on how beautiful it was. He looked across the the bay to the colourful new apartments and related to me a story of their construction, around a decade ago. The …
Owning a boat is an unrivalled way of experiencing Greenland’s natural beauty. It’s also an effective and efficient way of getting into a great deal of trouble, as learned by our friends. What’s in the box?” J asked, heaving it onto Ane, the 18 foot Hansvik the three men shared. She was a nice little …
My family and I are outsiders. We speak English. Our eight year old son speaks fluent Danish; I speak reasonable Danish; my husband speaks and understands basic Danish. My son understands some, but does not speak, Greenlandic; my husband reads a little, and speaks basic Greenlandic; and I know virtually no Greenlandic, other than a …
Fishing in Greenland is like, well, shooting fish in a barrel. I grew up spending my Christmas holidays in Australia, on the beach with my family, getting sunburnt, building and destroying sand castles, filling buckets with soldier crabs. Fishing was an integral part of those holidays. It was a serious business, overseen by the menfolk. …
*Photograph by Elis Hoffman. There is a brief moment in the early Greenlandic summer when a confluence of factors make it seem that the very essence of living is presented for your personal pleasure. The weather is warm enough to relax outside, albeit perhaps not in your Hawaian shirt. The snow has, largely, melted. The …