Dearest Rachel –
Traveling by cruise ship can be a series of cultural shocks as you move from one city or country to another. Customs and habits change with each location – to say nothing of the weather. Even as it’s to be expected on an intellectual level, sometimes the differences catch you by surprise.
So it was as we were pulling into Nuuk this morning. We’re as close to the Arctic Circle as we can ever expect to get in our lives, but it’s still technically ‘summer’ here; the autumnal equinox won’t be arriving for another couple of weeks yet. So while we’re not in the middle of midnight sun territory, you’d expect the sun to be up reasonably early – or at least, a fair amount of daylight upon rising in the morning, despite the overcast that’s been around since leaving Qaqortoq (which was disappointing, as I thought that the clear sky we experienced that day would have meant an ideal night for viewing the aurora; no such luck, with fog so think it would make one hungry for pea soup if it weren’t for the fact that the dining rooms here have so much tastier options on offer).
On the contrary; I woke up only a few minutes before seven this morning (and this after having retired before ten, in order to make sure we were up, dressed and fed before our 8:30 appointment in the theater for our shore excursion) to near pitch darkness outside. I was shocked by how dark – and how late – it was. ‘How is this possible?’ I thought to myself, as I slowly pulled myself together and watched as we drifted past a few buildings on our way to the docks.
Still, with an hour and a half lead time, the two of us had no real difficulty getting ourselves started for the day. Daniel started to get worried as I finished typing my last letter to you (with far more opinion than actual research, I have to admit); “You’ve got an awful lot to say, don’t you?” If we weren’t down to our last ten minutes, I’m sure it would have been said more out of amusement than concern.
As it happens, both of us have difficulty in determining how long it takes us to get from point A to point B – like father, like son, it would seem. Thankfully (and likewise), we both err on the side of imagining we take longer than reality proves, and as a result, we were there with a few minutes yet to spare.
This meant that, as our number was called, we actually wound up leading the parade out of the theater and toward the gangway (as opposed to a staffer taking the paddle and having us follow them)… which turned out to be a bit of a mistake. Heading down the stairs from the theater was okay at first, but when I started down to the third deck (and further; our last port had us board the tenders from the second deck), someone called out that I needed to reverse course. Apparently, the exit here was from the fourth deck aft. In the confusion, several folks turned down the port hallway as I handed the paddle over to Daniel and proceeded through the starboard hallway – only to have to cross over once we got to the centrum, since this time around, the port was, in fact, on the port side.
Somewhere along the way, Daniel had handed the paddle off to a staffer, so by the time we actually found ourselves on solid ground, there was a local brandishing the ‘lollipop’ by a large van, not unlike the one we had ridden outside of Reykjavik (only black, and with narrower seats). I’m not sure how it had gotten so far ahead of us; maybe the paddle didn’t need to have its security card scanned in order to get off the ship.
We rode the van into town; a shorter hop than in Reykjavik (as it should be, given that the town is barely a tenth the size of Iceland’s capital), but long enough for there to be a little more confusion. Our guide seemed to think that ours was a tour of the local museum and historical center, while those on the tour pointed out that it had been billed as a “walking tour” of Nuuk. To be sure, time spent inside a museum would be preferable to standing out in the freezing rain – even our guide, who you’d think, being a local, would be quite used to cold weather, acknowledged that it was lousy weather (“It’s not so much the rain, though, as the wind,” he insisted, which I can vouch for; the concept of ‘wind chill’ is all too familiar to a Chicagoan) – but it’s not what we had signed up for, and there were those that let him know as much. At least I wasn’t the only one caught by surprise.
In any event, he did what he could to accommodate us, taking us through the local shopping center on our way to the old church and harbor, where the historical society had preserved the old harbor and built a museum about the area.
From there, he informed us that we could either hang back at the museum or make our way with him back to the van, which would return us to the port. As we were barely two hours into the day (and once portside, we would probably not be able or willing to get transport back into the town), we decided to stick around and make our own way back. The first thing I wanted to do was to get a shot of the statue of the town’s founder, one Hans Egede, at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. This proved to be more of a challenge that I’d expected, especially in the process of getting down. One tends to think that the difficulty of climbing a mountain (although to call this that would be exceedingly generous) is in getting up to the top, but in fact, it’s the descent that is the real challenge. You can’t just stick your foot out and let gravity do all the work, unless you don’t care about safety.
But, as I’d gotten myself into this situation, I insisted on getting down on my own as well; the only help I accepted from Daniel was to have him hold the camera as I lowered myself down the last few stones.
Once down, there weren’t quite so many surprises as we made our way about the town, stopping to change course once or twice as we realized we were going in the wrong direction. Even the stores we wandered into felt familiar, if surprisingly large for the clientele they serve (although in fairness, one thing that Greenland has plenty of, it’s ‘land.’ Maybe not so much ‘green,’ but definitely ‘land.’ So why not have spacious places to offer their wares?)
One final shock as we got ‘home’ (aside from the mild twitch of realizing what I just typed to describe our cabin) came when I plugged in the old phone that I use as my video camera; after only four hours of wandering about, it was down to 1% of its battery life. For all that we could have spent another few hours wandering about the place, we wouldn’t have been able to get any more of it on film. I’m thinking the phone was trying to keep itself warm, but I’m not tech-savvy enough to know if that’s true.
But that’s how our day went, in the midst of cold and rain. Here’s hoping we didn’t catch it (nor it us, for that matter). To that end, I’d appreciate it if you could keep an eye on us, and wish us luck; we’re probably going to need it yet.
Letters to Rachel 