Greenland Is a Beautiful Nightmare

Summary

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 thi...