Picture this:
- dead seals floating in the harbour
- shotguns sold in the local shop
- human bones visible under a pile of stones
- half the village drunk at noon on wednesday without any visible reason. And thursday and friday too...

The moral of this first paragraph?
Never underestimate the effect of presentation before you make up your opinion of a place, a person, an idea, an event, of whatever.
It is probably easy to see and describe Kulusuk, Greenland as a sad, sad place.
If you want to.
But if you look, most things have a history, a meaning and a purpose. So I stayed there for a week and had a look. Kulusuk is not worse and not better than what I know from home, - it's different. It's a society that obeys to other rules and conditions than the ones I had previously known.

Kulusuk is at about the same latitude as Akureyri, just under 66°N. As Greenland does not profit from the Gulf Stream as does Iceland, the climat there is colder, the vegetation more barren. Agriculture is impossible on the island of Kulusuk, frost never leaves the earth. Even if it did, there's hardly any soil to grow anything, - the island is mostly just rock. That's why christian burial traditions do not fit well with the kulusumi landscape, there just aren't any six feet to bury people under. More like one foot deep, - or even no hole, just a pile of rocks on the body.
The inuit solution is much better adapted to these conditions: leaving the body on the packice and letting it fall into the sea as the packice melts. Because in the inuit religion, the sea would be where everyone wanted to go when the earthly life was over. That's where all their riches came from, there you had plenty of food. Heaven, on the other hand, was a cold and miserable place.

Since agriculture is not possible, the Inuit, the native Greenlanders, were nomad hunters until western "civilization" reached them, - the first white men coming to Kulusuk and the Ammassalik district in 1884.
Greenlanders still are hunters. However, their kayaks are not made of seal skin anymore but of fiber glass or plastic, and in the summertime they use motorboats. Their anoraks are not homemade from seal skin, but neon-coloured plastic ones from Iceland. The traditional harpoons are still used for some kind of hunting but shotguns are now indispensable. Every hunter has one, most have two or three, or six or seven... So it is not at all surprising that they sell guns in the shop in Kulusuk, just like everything else one needs.

The sea freezes in wintertime. The packice can be some 10-20m thick. In some places it is not, that's why snowscooters are too heavy for going out to sea. That's where sled dogs come in. You'll see them outside every house, howling with hunger or just sitting there watching you with their yellow, wolf-like eyes. Children are taught to throw stones in their direction to scare them. Cause when the dogs are not scared of you, that's when you should start being scared of the dogs.
Some of these dogs are only skin and bones. They aren't fed much, at least not in the summertime when they are not being used. Some leftover seals for dogfood are kept in the harbour, the sea conveniently being at the perfect fridge temperature when not frozen...

If you're a hunter, and you catch four seals in one day, that means you can have a big feast and you don't have to go hunting for the days to come because you have enough.
If you are a greenlander today, payday comes once a month, be that payment for a job or just the dole. But on that day and for the days to come, you have enough. Enough to buy loads of booze...
- Alcohol is one of the mixed blessings western civilization has brought to Greenland. It didn't exist before Europeans came in. And it took Greenland by storm, unlike any arctic storm they had ever known.
That's why three Greenlanders declared their neverending love for me: all in broad daylight in the street. One was a sixty year old lady that hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. One was an old man, wrinkly and toothless. The third one was a young man, crawling up on the dock after having fallen into the sea, wet and shivering. But he took his time to try and chat me up, just grabbed another beer and a cigarette from his bag, and refused to go home to change. No, he was a Greenlander, he wasn't cold.

He was a Greenlander. Trying to find his place between traditions and modern times. Profiting from the mixed blessings of the Danish Government.