Saturday 26 September 2009

Today we visited the capital city of Greenland - Nuuk.

And the Fram brought the winter to southern Greenland, for it started with the snowfall during the night - the same weather we had experienced the last ten days more up to the north. But down here the people were not expecting such an early winter and chaos came to town: the busses had not changed to wintertires and stayed at home, as a thick layer of app. 15 cm snow and ice covered the streets! It seemed a little bit strange to see "Arcticers" caught and confused by snowfall, just like in every other middeleuropean town when winter starts ...

That changed our plans for sightseeing-trips and shuttle-busses, so we had to walk into town with our local guides and hired some 4-wheel-cabs as a substitute for the Bus-shuttle. So everybody was still able to get to the town and also to visit the old colonial part of Nuuk, where the National Museum is located. This offered a really well done exhibition about the old Inuit way of living as well as a newly set up way of presenting one of their most well-known items - the greenlandic mummies from about 1475.

We left Nuuk in the late afternoon and had to head out for the open sea where we ran into a nice storm lasting the whole night. It kept the most people to stay in their cabins ...