“Does Nuuk have a chocolate factory?!” asked my son excitedly, having overheard a conversation between my husband and I. “It’s not that kind of chocolate,” I replied. “Oh,” he said, disappointed, realising what we were talking about. The chocolate factory is the sewage pumping station on the southern end of a peninsula close to the …
*Photo by Peter Mark Jacobsen. See The Fourth Continent. October swings around again, with the prospect of autumn storms, and I am reminded of this photo of a bus stop in Nuuk. It gives you an idea of what the storms can be like. When the wind blows, it tears across the sea, ripping the …
I was flicking through Air Greenland’s in-flight magazine – Suluk – when I saw an interview with Greenlandic singer Julie Berthelsen, who lives in Denmark. She was asked, “What is the biggest difference between Greenland and Denmark?” Her answer was,“Everything.” The word stuck in my brain as I disembarked and negotiated my way through Copenhagen …
The whop whop whop of the helicopter blades grew in the distance. We’d been slumped, resting on the packed boxes, waiting for that familiar sound, and now we leapt into action as the red machine curved into view around the low hills. I stood arms skyward, back to the wind, directing the pilot to a …
As we sail toward Nuuk, the boat crouches in the low space beneath the hovering fog and the mirrored sea, the still water stretching seaward like a sheet of grey metal. The white gates of the cemetary appear on a sloping shore, announcing the approaching town. And stretching out from the gates, two white fences …
Imagine you lost your phone seven hundred kilometres from home on an isolated beach reachable only by sea? What do you reckon your chances of getting it back would be? In Greenland, they seem to be better than you would think. The other week, my husband was working in a field camp in Disko Bay, …
Things got weird last week. Life is always weird in Greenland in one way or another, which is kind of nice generally. But last week they got weird in a bad way. First Trump said he wanted to buy Greenland. That was pretty funny. But while we were all laughing, Trump was getting cross. A …
Last Thursday, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Then I made the fatal error of switching on my phone. This is what I saw. “President Trump Eyes a New Real Estate Purchase: Greenland.” An article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had, for some …
The two boys had been playing all day and, with dinner approaching, I told my son’s friend it was time for him to head home. “Dad can’t pick me up at the moment,” he said, disappointedly packing his bag to head down to the bus stop, “He’s butchering a reindeer.” The first of August is …