It was a still day, cold and quiet, as I walked alone over rocks and snow. My heavy boots crunched through the crisp crust into the softer snow beneath. I stopped for breath by a small lake, ringed by rocky outcrops and, after my breath slowed, I realized that my breathing was all I could …
“We should get a car,” said my son, looking out the window at the morning snow falling on the dark, lamp-lit street. “Why?” I asked. Rapidly realizing that his personal comfort and convenience was not a good enough reason, he replied, “It will be faster getting to the shops. “Will it?” I asked. Together we …
I have always felt a reverence for libraries. As a child, a favourite outing was the weekly visit to the local public library. A squat, 60s, concrete building, it was nothing to speak of architecturally, but seeing it still makes me draw breath. We would enter from the brilliant sunshine of the street outside into …
Trudging across the sea ice – three geologists, returning from a day’s work amongst iced-in islands in east Antarctica – we spotted a dark slug-like shape in the otherwise completely white expanse before us. It was a Weddell seal, languishing by its breathing hole. One of my companions decided he wanted to know what a …
Two nights a week, I took the bus an hour across Copenhagen to the school where Danish classes were held. I arrived late at the first lesson, walked into the classroom, and sat down. A middle-aged man with dark curly hair was speaking in Danish to the dozen or so attentive students of various nationalities. …
It was a lot of meat. I had stopped by the gate leading down to the pier to look at the large plastic bags, about ten of them, filled with dark red meat and pale bones. I assumed someone was returning from their last reindeer hunt of the season. But something didn’t quite look right. …
Greenland is the least densely populated country in the world. Even when you subtract the inland ice, which accounts for about 80% of the area of Greenland, it is still the least densely populated country in the world. There are literally thousands of kilometres of coastline where you will not encounter another human being. Even …
Tiny, idyllic-looking settlements are sparsely scattered along the coast and fjords of west Greenland. They’re beautiful, but there’s not much work. One of the few jobs is working as an attendant at the local shop. We visited a settlement at the head of a long fjord, small colourful houses dotting the hills, looking down to …
The surprises one meets in Greenland might be out of the ordinary, but the responses one becomes accustomed to are perhaps even more surprising. Such was the case last week. The scene unfolding in our bathroom stopped me in my tracks and the phrase, ‘Destroying the evidence,’ popped into my head momentarily. Then I registered …