A Wonderful Trip to Greenland

If you’re leaving Iceland after 14 days where do you go? Do you go home? NO – you go to Greenland.

No one goes to Greenland in November. But this trip was one of my best ideas ever! I started planning last April – even arranging a flight was hard and took weeks. After finding my flight, I was directed to a travel agency in Nuuk – Greenland’s capital city.

Malena of Tupilak Travel arranged the most successful portions of my trip. I told her I was a photographer who wanted to take pictures of people and their cultural institutions, not of landscapes. Like most Americans, I had no real conception of who lived in Greenland or what life there was like.

Malena arranged a basement apartment on the fjord for me. The apartment was in an older home in an old section of Nuuk and came with my own iceberg sitting outside my window! Perfect. Exactly what I wanted.

Loritha Henriksen, left, with her granddaughter, was my delightful landlady.

Before I arrived I had pictured Greenland, even the capital city of Nuuk (population 18,000), as a collection of small houses. Like these, a couple of minutes’ walk from my apartment. Small, cozy, warm homes which would be perfect for a vast world of snow and ice. Except this year there wasn’t any snow yet in the lower elevations

I think I envisioned the relatively large capital would look like this. Still small homes but with simple apartments to accommodate the larger population. All should be nestled in a small valley next to a fjord.

I also expected a remote village on a fjord would look like this. The icy waters and snowy mountains announced a cold, harsh life.

Greenland itself would have two pieces. The glacial fjords and mountains would look like this. Because the ice sheet was a long distance away it would be too difficult and too expensive for me to see, but I could picture it as a featureless snowy sheet of ice.

But what I saw was unexpected. The new Nuuk is quite modern with new construction going on everywhere. Not unlike Raleigh where I now live.

I could have photographed this scene in Raleigh. A bit colder in Greenland perhaps, but much of Nuuk looked like any city. Life in Greenland was very different from what I expected. I could only see a small part of Greenland in a one week trip but I was fascinated by what I did see.

I think we have to simplify when everything is complicated. Greenland is no exception. In these posts I’m going to use “Greenlandic” to encompass at least three Inuit peoples and their cultures, plus some Nordic and Danish influences. If you ever take your own trip to Greenland, explore the subtleties and forgive me my simplifications.

So for the next couple of weeks I will take you on a limited tour of modern Greenland. Then maybe next year I can return and see more of this incredible country.