GREENLAND: HOTEL ARCTIC AND WALKING THROUGH ILULISSAT'S "DOWNTOWN"

June 15, 2019

After our midnight sun iceberg cruise, we took the opportunity to sleep in the next morning. At this point we had moved to our second hotel, the Hotel Arctic, which was situated on the outskirts of Ilulissat in an area where there appeared to be some development going on.

Although it was supposed to be the better hotel, we weren't all that impressed. It was pretty basic, and our view of the bay was better in the Hotel Icefiord.

The Danes have definitely left their mark on Greenland's sense of interior design:

It is always fun to run into familiar things in an unfamiliar place:

Well, at least the PICTURES are familiar. Check out the text. Greenlandic words are SO LONG:

I loved the art hanging in the lobby. These figures are pieced from many fabrics, like a quilt:

I spent a long time looking at this Escher-esque print, also in the lobby. The Danish caption Lys og liv i nord means "Light and Life in the North":

After breakfast the ten of us decided to walk to the downtown area of Ilulissat, which was about a mile or a bit more from our hotel. And so we set out, a band of intrepid travelers, sometimes having a sort of sidewalk . . .

. . . and sometimes not:

We passed by rocky outcroppings guarded by Greenlandic sled dogs. (Can you find them in this picture?)

We had a bird's eye view of the harbor, which from this vantage point looked rather quaint and less industrial than it had when we were at water level the previous day:

When we arrived in town, we tried to do some souvenir shopping, but we discovered that the most exciting places in town were the two all-purpose grocery stores. Laura and I discovered marzipan cakes in the bakery in this grocery store and bought one to share. Super yummy. Greenland must have picked up a taste for marzipan from the Danes.

We wanted to learn a little about Ilulissat, and the signs were SOOOOO helpful. By the way, notice the use of double letters in Greenlandic. Weird. It's got to be hard to teach children to read this language:

We did find one boutique that had some beautiful items, but everything was incredibly expensive. However, I may have missed out on one good deal. These handmade Kazuri beads are imported from Kenya, a country more unlike Greenland than any country in the world that I can think of. How did they make it into this shop? The shop lady saw me snap this picture and got upset with me, but I got enough detail to see that the price on some of the tags is 350,-.  What does the comma before the dash mean? If it is just 350 Danish krone (Greenland uses the same the monetary system as Denmark), that would be about $52, a price close to what you would pay in the U.S. on Etsy (but way less than what you'd pay in a department store). That would be a pretty good deal--not the $10 - $15 we paid in the Kazuri shop in Nairobi, but still a good deal. It seems way too low for this chichi boutique in an incredibly expensive city.

The only other thing that really caught  my eye was this traditional child's outfit, but it was not for sale.

Here's a close-up of the beaded collar:

. . . and the seal fur shorts:

We stopped for lunch at Cafe Iluliaq, which was only average and didn't hold a candle to the meals we had eaten in our hotel:

I had a halibut and shrimp sandwich:

Bob had fish and chips:

In another place, we might have thought this was good, but the bar had been set pretty high by our previous meals in Greenland.