Last Saturday was Culture Night in Greenland, an annual event in many cities or countries, when public and private institutions alike open their doors and show the public what they’re up to, what they do. Nuuk has embraced the idea. There’s always so much stuff you don’t know about even in your local environment, so Culture Night is a fabulous opportunity to find out more. Normally behind closed doors, you can visit Greenland’s only bottling plant, which can recycle and fill 36,000 bottles of soft drink or beer per hour, or you can get in amongst the massive, deafening diesel generators that serve as backups to the hydropower that drives Nuuk, or you can explore one of the Danish military’s coastguard ships and treat your kids to messing about with their rifles and handguns (kids and guns – what could go wrong?).
As well as finding out about the secrets of everyday life around you, the things you already know are also amplified – like the lack of systems that service life here, or the obvious safety or security measures that slip through all those cracks that are such a part of life in Greenland.
Take the buses in Nuuk (which are, incidentally, surprisingly good in general). On Culture Night, it’s common knowledge that Nuup Bussi – the bus company, which runs the four bus routes – puts on free buses that visit all the institutions and companies that are open for the night. But is there a published schedule? No. Not in the official Culture Night program, and not on the company’s website. So it’s ‘guess the bus schedule.’ Both when and where buses might turn up or drop off is anyone’s guess.
This year, one of the places our family visited was the post office shop. The sorting areas and offices were all open to the public to wander about in. Great! But as I passed by one of the unattended sorting areas, I noticed a pigeonhole labelled with our street’s mailing addresses, filled with mail. I am pretty sure it wasn’t stunt mail. We could have just picked up our mail that was en route, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Then there was my workplace’s own contribution to Culture Night fails. Quite a big fail as it turned out. Our open house featured lots of activities for kids, including a movie about the work we do in Greenland. It was all going fantastically well. Unfortunately, our best intentions of providing popcorn for people to enjoy during said movie went badly wrong. The smell of burning drew me to the kitchen where one of my colleagues, who seemed quite stressed, was desperately trying to dissipate the smoke from a burnt bag of microwaved popcorn. ‘No big deal’, I thought. And then the fire alarm went off. For a few horrible moments the two of us just looked at each other, registering the sinking realisation that the alarm was now going off on every floor of the nine-storey building, and that the hundreds of people visiting multiple different Ministries on different floors of the government tower building, during the busiest time of the evening, and including the Premier’s office – and the Premier – were now flooding into the stairwell to evacuate.
I guess we won’t make popcorn next year.
