Greenland is a complicated topic here in Denmark. The former colony that is still treated a bit like a colony is something that inspires a lot of emotions. Greenland has been subjected to a lot of unethical experiments by Denmark, from taking their kids to wild experiments in criminal justice. But there is also a genuine pride a lot of people have here for the place and you run into Danes who grew up there more often than I would have guessed.
When the idea of going to Greenland was introduced to me, I was curious. Having lived in Denmark for awhile, you hear a lot about the former colony and its 55,000 residents. We were invited by a family that my wife was close with growing up and is Danish. They wanted to take their father back to see the place he had spend some time in during his 20s and had left quite an impression. A few drinks in, I said "absolutely let's do it", not realizing we had already committed to going and I had missed the text message chain.
A few weeks before I went, I realized "I don't know anything about Greenland" and started to watch some YouTube videos. It was about this time when I started to get a pit in my stomach, the "oh god I think I've made a huge mistake" feeling I'm painfully familiar with after a career in tech. Greenland appeared to have roughly 9 people living there and maybe 5 things to look at. Even professional travel personalities seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. "There's the grocery store again!" they would point out as they slipped down the snowy roads. I couldn't tell any difference between different towns in the country.
It reminded me a lot of driving through Indiana. For those not in the US, Indiana is a state in the US famous for being a state one must drive through in order to get somewhere better. If you live in Michigan, a good state and want to go to Illinois, another good state, one must pass through Indiana, a blank state. Because of this little strip here, you often found yourself passing through this place.
Driving through Indiana isn't bad, it's just an empty void. It's like a time machine back to the 90s when people still smoke in restaurants but also there's nothing that sticks out about it. There is nothing distinct about Indiana, it's just a place full of people who got too tired on their way to somewhere better and decided "this is good enough". The difference is that Greenland is very hard to get to, as I was about to learn.
Finally the day arrived. Me, my wife, daughter, 4 other children and 6 other adults all came to the Copenhagen Airport and held up a gate agent for what felt like an hour to slowly process all of our documents. Meanwhile, I nursed a creeping paranoia that I'd be treated as some sort of American spy, given my government's recent hobby of threatening to purchase entire countries like they're vintage motorcycles on Craigslist.
The 5 hour flight is uneventful, the children are beautifully behaved and I begin to think "well this seems ok!" like the idiot I am. As I can look down and see the airport, the pilot comes on and informs us that there is too much fog to land safely. Surely fog cannot stop a modern aircraft full of all these dials and screens I think, foolishly. We are informed there is enough fuel to circle the airport for 5 hours to wait for the fog to lift.
What followed was three hours of flying in lazy circles, like a very expensive, very slow merry-go-round. After the allotted time, we are informed that we must fly to Iceland to refuel and then we will be returning to Denmark. After a total of 15 hours in the air we will be going back to exactly where we started, to do the entire thing again. We were obviously upset at this turn of events, but I noticed the native Greenlandic folks seemed not surprised at this turn of events. As I later learned, this happens all the time.
The native Greenlanders on board seemed utterly unsurprised by this development, displaying the kind of resigned familiarity that suggested this was Tuesday for them. I began wondering if I could just pretend Iceland was Greenland—surely my family wouldn't notice the difference? But the pilot, apparently reading my mind, announced that no one would be disembarking in Iceland. It felt oddly authoritarian, like being grounded by an airline, as if they knew we'd all just wander off into Reykjavik and call it close enough.
We crash out in a airport hotel 20 minutes from our apartment after 15 hours in the air and tons of CO2 emissions only to wake up the next day to start again. This time, I notice that all of the people are asking for (and receiving) free beer from the crew that they are stashing in their bags. It turns out soda and beer, really anything that needs to be imported, is pretty expensive in Greenland. The complimentary drinks are there to be kept for later.
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