Monday, the 4th of August was moving day. We were able to get a later checkout from our tiny apartment and then we waited at the bus stop for an hour-and-a-half for bus 55 to come along and drop us off at the airport. We got ourselves checked in and bags dropped and then went through security. We had chicken burritos and chips and guacamole and then did some work on our travel plans for later this year. Our Icelandair flight departed Keflavik a little after 6pm and with the one-hour time change, we landed in Nuuk, Greenland a little after 7 pm – just about a two-hour flight. Crossing the Greenland island and its ice sheet was beautiful and then coming into Nuuk, flying over the fjord (one of the world’s largest fjord systems) was stunning – I kept saying “this place is crazy.”
We hopped in a taxi and arrived at our new home – a spacious apartment with great views over the water a little before 8 pm.
We walked down the street to Siam Orchid, a Thai restaurant and had chicken dishes that were ok. We stopped at the small grocery store next to our apartment building and picked up a few things to get us started with our stay here.
Tuesday was a day to walk around the town and get a feel for where we now live. Nuuk is the capital (and largest) city of Greenland and has a population of around 20,000, but it is very walkable. We checked out a bar called Daddy’s where we will look to get a beer over the weekend, the cultural center, the mall, the gym, and we did some more grocery shopping. There are several good grocery options here – Brugseni, Pisiffik, and then Akiki is more of a discount store. We were back home at 3:15, had our Greek salads, worked on more planning activities, had eggs and toast for dinner and then went for a walk down by the port after dinner.
Wednesday, our first stop was the gym – FitnessGl. It took 30 minutes or so to get set up for our week-long membership, but Kukalars was very patient and helpful. Once we were set up, we each did a weights and cardio workout. After the gym, we walked to the art museum to see historical pieces and contemporary pieces. I am reading The People of the Polar North by Knud Rasmussen and one of his traveling partners on the expedition was Harald Moltke – he had several works in this museum, which was cool to see. After the art museum, we stopped at Café Esmeralda – Sandy had salmon from the Faroe Islands (not as good as Captain Brian’s in Sarasota) and I had a veggie omelet that was very good. The art museum put together a brochure that highlights 19 different art installations around Nuuk, so as we walked the town, we read about the different sculptures and paintings. This took us down into Old Nuuk, the colonial harbor.
We went up the hill to see the statue of Hans Egede (the first modern European settler in Greenland – he was a missionary from Denmark and his arrival triggered the colonization of Greenland by Denmark). We also went down to the water to see the Mother of the Sea sculpture. This is based on an Inuit tradition of the woman being banished to the sea by her family because of misbehavior. Sea animals get caught in her hair at the bottom of the sea and when she is angry, the food supply for the Inuits would run low. They would send a shaman down to the bottom of the sea to make peace with the Mother of the Sea and comb out her air so that she is more comfortable and she then releases the sea animals (food source for the Inuits) so they can again successfully hunt for food. There is also a long boardwalk along the fjord. We walked that and as you walk along it, you really get a sense for how air conditioned the air feels because of the ice in the water coming down the fjord from the glaciers at the edge of the ice sheet. Our temperatures so far have been right around 50. We’ve had great weather with mostly sunshine and a little bit of wind.
After our walk, we went to the culture center in the center of town, which is where the movie theater can be found. They have one hall in the culture center that is set up with a large movie screen and risers with theater-style seating. It’s a very good use of the space. It seems like they show four or five different movies in a given week and with only one screen, those movies are rotated. We went to see the new Naked Gun movie. It was in English with Danish subtitles. It was fun to see – English is widely spoken here and it was clear that the silly humor was being picked up on easily by the locals. I’d guess there were 20 people in the theater and we were the only non-locals. After the movie, we stopped at Pascucci for fruit smoothies and then headed home.
Sandy went for a four-mile run on Thursday morning while I took the day off. While she was out, she got to see one of the small icebergs in the fjord do a cartwheel. We had our Greek salads and spent most of the day working on the blog and reserving upcoming lodging. There is a music festival this weekend that we want to attend, but it requires an hour-long boat ride up the fjord and we have been having trouble finding boats that are going according to the festival’s schedule. We finally found one via the recommendation of a woman at the art museum and so in the late afternoon we walked to Kang Tourism to confirm their schedule and pay for our ride to and from the festival. That was nice to get resolved. On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store. For dinner, we baked fresh Greenlandic halibut and potatoes – it was a delicious dinner.
On Friday, we headed back to Pascucci for Sandy Starbucks time. Sandy had vanilla chai tea and I had hot chocolate. Afterward, we went to the Greenland National Museum. The order in which we went through the museum was chronologically backward. In hindsight, I think I’d have preferred to start at the far end of the museum and work my way toward current times. It’s a fantastic museum though. Lots of interesting displays and probably the most amazing is a family of three mummies. They lived in the 1400s and they were discovered 500 years later inside a stone-protected cave. The cold conditions of Greenland had preserved their bodies exceptionally well – even being able to distinguish tattoos on one of the faces. Just wild. These are not masks on their faces in the picture.
After the museum, we went to the Kunguak café and had muskox burgers – really not too different from the taste of beef. Then we spent time in the Local Museum, which is specific to the history of Nuuk. More interesting learnings, especially learning about Block P. This (and other blocks like it) were built by the Danish as they thought it would overall help the Inuit population – bring them closer to education and health services – and bring labor needed to support the fishing industry from the remote settlements into the city of Nuuk. It was clearly a controversial move with some benefits and certainly some negative consequences. Block P has been destroyed, but quite a bit of the block housing still exists. We are shocked by how much housing we see – it seems like there is twice as much housing as there are people – and more being built. After the museums, we stopped at the mall to pick up mosquito nets for our trip to the festival on Sunday, a couple more fruit smoothies at Pascucci, and then we went to Daddy’s for a beer. It was very much a Friday-after-work crowd and very loud. We enjoyed a couple of the beers made onsite and then went next door to Killut for a much quieter experience. We got to try the other three beers made by the brewery there and talk with the bartendar, Francis, for quite a while. He is from the Philippines and talked about his experience immigrating to Greenland and some of the challenges faced as an immigrant here. Overall though, he seems to really enjoy living here and has been here for six years. We also talked with a couple of Danish guys who are here working for the Bank of Greenland. Their group was celebrating the 40th birthday of one of their coworkers. For dinner, we walked over to Kylling and Company. Kylling translates to chicken and we both had grilled chicken skewers and a very good salad bar. Tomorrow night, we are making reindeer steaks for dinner so we prepped it tonight to let it marinade overnight and through the day tomorrow.
Saturday was a day to get our workouts in and stay around the apartment. We had eggs and avocado toast and Greek salads. We went to the gym for weights and cardio. For dinner, I found a great and easy recipe for searing a reindeer steak on the stove top and then finishing it in the oven – just like I used to do with beef steaks sometimes. For this one, the marinade and the addition of garlic and rosemary made it fantastic. This is one of the better meals we have made and I’ll get the recipe added to our recipe page. The reindeer tastes very much like beef but it is very tender. This cut was a filet so it was expected to be tender, but I mean it was really tender. Along with broccoli, we enjoyed a bottle of Carmenere from Concho y Toro (now one of our favorite wines after visiting the vineyard in Chile). For dessert, we enjoyed Ben and Jerry’s ice cream – it runs around $9 per pint here. We have been talking about watching the movie Key Largo for around three years since we visited the Caribbean Club during one of our trips with Forrest (our RV). We finally did that after dinner.
Sunday was our day to head out to the Qooqqut Festival in the fjord. Before heading to the dock, we went to Café Esmeralda for their excellent brunch buffet. We had omelets, waffles, pancakes, bacon, sausage, yogurt, a smoothie, plus lots of other things available. The waffles and pancakes were so good. We headed over to the dock after breakfast and met Malik, our boat captain.
Two women joined us – both locals to Nuuk, but originally from smaller towns. We enjoyed talking with them – it was interesting to learn their perspectives on the Danish coming to visit Greenland and how it frustrates them that the Danes expect the local population (90% of which is Inuit) to speak Danish. It speaks to the tension that exists between Greenland as a Danish colony and some of the history that exists. The ride through the fjord was bumpy and Malik didn’t play around – it felt like we were speeding across and up and down the waves. We arrived a little before 3 and experienced everything we could at the festival.
There was a traditional drum dance, four different live music groups – all from Inuit culture and the Inuits span a lot of the Arctic, so some artists were from the north of Canada and one was from Alaska – the throat singers were unbelievable (we have to remember to check out Sylvia Cloutier) – similar to the throat singing we saw in Mongolia last year; there was a game where people attempted to jump up with both feet at the same time and kick a hanging ball, there were arts and crafts.
As we walked around, we were grateful to have our mosquito nets as the gnats or midges were active although they could have been worse. We each ordered spaghetti Bolognese in the onsite restaurant and shared two beers – 1664 Blanc and Leffe dark. The sun came out and what was already a stunning setting became even more so. After dinner, we went to the bonfire and that was the best part of the day. The performers from the day spontaneously would sing traditional Inuit songs and tell the stories of the songs and do the dances. The kids and some adults roasted marshmallows. Loved this experience.
We had to leave the bonfire around 9:15 to get our boat back to Nuuk.
It wasn’t any smoother on the ride back, but there was more sun and the scenery through the fjord was breathtaking. Sandy wasn’t sure that Malik understood that if he would drive slower, the waves would be less harsh and it wouldn’t feel like the “roads” in Mongolia. She wanted him to pay closer attention to the icebergs in the water instead of focusing so much attention on the cute girl on the boat. She also wished there had been a safety briefing and we had been given life jackets. We made it safely and walked home in windy weather that gave us a feels like temperature of 30 degrees. This was a great day of experiencing the Inuit way of life.
Other than our workouts, Monday and Tuesday were more working days at the apartment – working on lodging and travel for the next couple of months. We had Greek salads. Sandy made chili on Monday and that gave us our dinners for both days. We started watching a new show – Destination X. We’ll see if we like that but the first couple of episodes have been good. We are watching America’s Got Talent and Frasier as well. We briefly got to talk to my mom and Aunt Terry on Monday night. That was fun. Sandy got our laundry done on Tuesday.
Yesterday (Wednesday, August 13th) was supposed to be our last day in Nuuk. We went to the gym for the last time and then we went to another coffee shop we have wanted to try – Kaffivik. This one is just down the street from the apartment and it was nice because it was much quieter than Pascucci. We planned our time for being in Ilulissat. Shortly after we confirmed our ride from the airport to our new home tomorrow, Jannik (our host in Ilulissat) wrote back to let us know he had received notice that our flight is canceled tomorrow. So we quickly pivoted and made the necessary arrangements. We saw that Air Greenland booked us on an early flight out now on Friday morning instead of Thursday. We contacted our current apartment host and he had the flexibility to allow us to stay an extra night. We canceled our taxi to the airport for Thursday morning and now we should be set with our new arrangements. We later learned what I had suspected – Air Greenland was proactively canceling all of the Nuuk flights (except the two earliest flights) on Thursday because of a storm coming in with lots of rain and wind. Well, I guess we’ll be here to see it. For dinner, we went to Restaurant Charoen Porn, a Thai restaurant that we keep hearing about. We shared the mattak soup. Mattak is whale skin and blubber. Unfortunately, they were out of the mattak, so the soup only had the whale meat in it. The consistency of the boiled whale meat and the color was very much like boiled beef, but the taste was much closer to fish. It was good, just took some getting used to the taste we expected based on what we were seeing. Sandy had shrimp and chicken with noodles and vegetables, and I had chicken and vegetables in green curry. The dinner was pretty good, but we are in Greenland having Thai food so it’s only fair to have minimal expectations. It’s not easy to get all the ingredients here as fresh as what you can in warmer parts of the world. For example, a lot of the chicken here has to come from Denmark and comes in frozen. It’s almost impossible to get fresh chicken here as there are no chicken farms to provide at mass levels. Knowing the weather tomorrow, we stopped at the grocery store on the way home to get what we needed so we don’t have to go out at all in the rain and wind storm.
And now we come to our what really should be our last day in Nuuk. I’m writing this watching the rain blow sideways as we have hit wind gusts up to 68 mph. The steady wind has been around 50mph for a couple of hours. We are in a corner apartment (facing the wind) on the fifth floor of a six-floor building and we could feel the building sway at times. The feels like temperature is 17 degrees (that is Fahrenheit, or minus eight Celsius). Other than working on the blog and trying to reserve a 5:00 am taxi to the airport for tomorrow morning, we are enjoying the TV today and staying warm inside. Sandy did a 30-minute workout on the apartment staircase. For food, we had bananas and cereal earlier. Pre-prepped lasagna from the grocery store. Pita and hummus. Just a chill day and watching the nastiness outside. There were supposed to be two cruise ships in port today but they weren’t able to dock. Not that the passengers would have wanted to be out walking around in this anyway. It’s supposed to calm down later tonight and then fingers crossed, our travel plans stay on schedule tomorrow.