Home is where the… mind sees???

(From Saturday, 14 July 2012)

Today seven weeks that I have been in Greenland, and in eleven days it will mark the official halfway point of my experience!  I cannot believe how quickly time has passed!  I feel like I just got here!

I have to say, though, that between moving to Washington, D.C. in September 2011 (after having lived in the same town for seven years) and then eight months later moving again to Nuuk, Greenland to live for four months… my brain has been having a lot of trouble bringing up the correct mental picture when I think of “home”.

When I first moved to Washington, D.C., I maintained my job in Charlottesville, Virginia (100 miles or 160 km south of D.C.), and I traveled back a number of times on the weekends throughout the fall.  That entire fall, I felt like Charlottesville was home, and that I was only in Washington, D.C. temporarily.  When I would think about something as mundane as going home after class, I would actually see my apartment in Charlottesville in my head.  And every time I returned to Charlottesville, I felt like I was just coming home from a couple weeks’ vacation.  I actually started driving to my old apartment a couple of times rather than to my friend’s house where I was staying!

A similar feeling resurfaced when I was in North Greenland a couple weeks ago.  When I would interview tourists for work and tell them that I did not live in Ilulissat but rather came from Nuuk, I was feeling like I had been in Nuuk all my life!   And when I was saying goodbye to the film crew, I kept thinking, I’ll see them the next time they’re in Greenland! I was missing the fact that yes, they will be back to Greenland, but I will (most likely) not be here when that happens.

And lately when I am at my desk at work, I completely forget that this is not my permanent job… that I am merely a summer intern.  I am so far removed from the fact that I am still a student in the United States, and that I still have two semesters of graduate school left!  In some ways, I feel like I have subconsciously jumped ship – that because from the very beginning I tried so hard to assimilate and blend into life here that I actually took this on as my “real life” and lost sight of the fact that I am only borrowing it.

So maybe home is the initial image your mind produces when you say the word…

Do this!  Listen to the song linked below.  Where do you see in your head????

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Oqaatsut to Ilulissat Hike – 22 km

(From Saturday 30 June 2012)

With Taste of Greenland done and wanting to take a day of relaxation in the beautiful Disko Bay area, today I did a full outdoors day with friends of a friend.  There were four of us in total, and we were lucky enough to get a lift (via boat) up to Oqaatsut to eat at H8 Restaurant before walking back to Ilulissat.

This settlement is home to approximately 40 people, and it has tried to make an economic comeback with both a seaweed production factory and also with a little bit of tourism.  A German couple started a restaurant there called H8, and there is also the Hotel Nordlys and a small youth hostel where tourists can stay overnight.  There are no roads whatsoever, and I think there are not even designated pathways – it is all just natural rocky and grassy terrain.  There is one supermarket, Pilersuisoq, and a church that also doubles as a schoolhouse.  And then aside from the restaurant and two lodgings, all other buildings are residences.

It was eerily yet peacefully quiet in the settlement with virtually nobody walking around.  No motorboats in the water making noise, no planes or helicopters overhead, no cars, and no music even… just the sounds of nature.  In the beginning, I kept having a weird feeling that I couldn’t put my finger on, but I finally figured out what it was.  It felt so strange to be at an inhabited place but not see or hear things common to a habitation like vehicles, loud noise, or hustle and bustle.  It really was people just living.

 

We walked around the settlement for a little bit before eating lunch at H8.  There was a nice bench at the top of a small hill, so we headed for it.  Along the way, an adolescent Greenlandic dog (that did not yet have to be chained) took quite an interest in us.  He nibbled my fingers and was very interested in the strap to my camera!  Then he accompanied us the short way to the bench – it was as if he had been designated our Canine Guide!  He actually stayed with us the entire 15 minutes or so that we sat there and took in the view, and then when we got up to head to lunch, he got up, too!

The restaurant was really quite cozy!  It was big enough for perhaps six farm tables; there were exposed wooden beams and a few very small windows in the walls that faced the water.  The windowsills were filled with small Greenlandic handicrafts, and the tables were decorated with country-style placemats and napkins.  There were also simple little flower arrangements in bud vases on the tables – fresh cotton grass and Niviarsiaq.

Lunch was a fantastic spread of breads and delicious foods from the sea!  There was shrimp, saarullik (cod), kapisilik (salmon), qaleralik (halibut), breaded and pickled ammassak (capelin), cod liver, mattak (whale skin & blubber), and whale meat.

Once our bellies were full, we started on our walk. It was a distance of 22 km/14 miles, and some people had told us it would take around 7 hours to get back to town. Good thing the sun is out 24 hours a day at this time of year 😉 One never has to worry about beating the clock to get home before dark! We found the orange trail and at half past 12 we were officially on our way!  The time passed by effortlessly.  The girls kept saying that their English was rusty and that they were having to think really hard before they said anything, but I thought they spoke perfectly!

In the end, the 22 km hike only took us 5 hours. I think we must have sped through it faster than anticipated so to keep the mosquitos away!  But I still had the chance to snap these photos along the way!

 

Once we returned to town, we celebrated our day with a hard-earned latte and dinner at Hotel Arctic! So it ended up being an entire day of good company, great conversation, and stunning views.  Just another day in Greenland 🙂

That’s A Wrap! (Taste of Greenland)

(From Friday 29 June 2012)

Today was a very relaxed day.  I did tourist interviews with cruise passengers most of the day (definitely easier than doing land-based interviews because they are much shorter) while the Taste of Greenland crew went up in a helicopter to do some amazing aerial shots of the Ice Fjord, etc.  They got to see a pristine lake on top of the glacier as well as a humpback whale very close to the surface of the water!  I happened to bump into them in the late afternoon on their way to go sailing, so I tagged along.  We went out on a large boat to go ice fishing – and by that I mean literally fishing pieces of ice out of the water with a net!  They melt it down and use it for bottled water and also for making Isfiord Vodka!

Then we drove around town looking for pretty views and filmed some quick “tourist” shots, and then the four of us had a lovely dinner at Hotel Icefiord.  I was definitely getting a little sad thinking about this being the end of the road of Episode 5 (and Taste of Greenland on the whole).  In the last ten days, I had so much fun and really felt so lucky to have been a small part of the experience!  As I said before, it was personally special for me to meet the Ace & Ace team since they produced the video that inspired me to come to Greenland, but also some of them have been friends and working together for twenty years, and you can definitely feel the closeness!  If I am sad thinking about it being the end, I cannot even imagine how everyone else is feeling!

That’s a wrap on Taste of North Greenland – Skål!

Final Night with the Whole Crew (Taste of Greenland)

(From Thursday 28 June 2012)

Today the majority of the Taste of Greenland crew left (Chris, Anders, Eskil, Adrian, Yuki, and Christine) leaving just four of us – Anne Mette, Esben, Finn and me.  So last night to celebrate our final night together as a group of ten, we went to dinner at a place called Mamartut that had a buffet composed entirely of traditional Greenlandic ingredients.  It was quite the spread!  They served lam i tomat og kanel (cinnamon lamb meatball with tomato sauce), rødfisk sashimi (raw redfish), hellefisk sashimi (raw halibut), rype terrin (grouse terrine), sæl lever (seal liver), hval i rødvin (whale in a red wine sauce), gravad lam (pickled lamb leg), tørret lammekølle (dried lamb leg), røget laks (smoked salmon), røget hellfisk (smoked halibut), bagt hellefisk (baked halibut), sne hare i føldsauce (mountain hare in a cream sauce), moskus bov med æbler (muskox shoulder with apple), stenbidderrogn (lumpfish roe), marineret terret hval (home-dried whale), marineret amassatter (pickled amassatter), and mattaq i asparges og rejer (seal blubber with asparagus and shrimp).

Dessert was presumably less traditional (tiramisu), but we changed that by returning to Hotel Arctic to have Greenlandic Kaffe!  It was extremely fun to just relax and laugh and be really loud!  One by one a couple people turned in for the night, but some others and I stayed up until probably 3 o’clock in the morning!  I would say that we were attempting to stay awake to watch the sun come up, but that’s not possible here above the Arctic Circle because the sun never goes down in the first place!

This evening I had the pleasant surprise of having dinner with Pia, Ulrik, and Aviaja.  They are here in Ilulissat visiting Ulrik’s brother, Uffe, and his family, Sophie and Suluut.  Also, Ulrik’s parents are in town, and the whole family will go to Eqi tomorrow!  So I went over to Uffe and Sophie’s house for dinner; we had fried chicken, potatoes, tomatoes with Parmesan cheese, and cucumber salad with Tzatziki sauce.  It was nice to meet more of the Bang family, to relax with everyone, and also to see Aviaja since she will go directly to Denmark from Ilulissat and will not return to Nuuk until the middle of August!

After dinner, Uffe took us midnight sun sailing around the UNESCO Kangia Ice Fjord.  It was just beautiful to be out amidst the icebergs at this time of night.  Even though the sun is up 24 hours a day, the light does change over time – during the midnight hours, the light is much softer and more yellow golden, and it makes the icebergs really sparkle.  I kept thinking about how amazing it is that even with global warming and the sun shining twenty-four hours a day for about two months straight, the icebergs are still as big as they are.  I can only imagine what they would be like without global warming!  Pia, Ulrik, and Uffe say that they can see a change in the icebergs even from just a couple of years ago – that they were much taller and bigger!  It’s extremely scary that in only a few years they can actually see the difference!

   

When I got back to Hotel Arctic, I found Esben and Finn filming a time lapse shot.  I played tourist for a little bit to give them a shot of people in the patio rocking chairs and then called it a night!

Eqi Ice Camp (Taste of Greenland)

(From Sunday 24 June 2012)

This morning, the Taste of Greenland film crew, Ace & Ace, and I left first thing in the morning to sail to our next destination: Eqi Ice Camp next to the very actively calving Eqi Sermia Glacier. I should clarify that when I say we sailed I do not mean we were on a sailboat.  In Greenland, any trip is called sailing even if the boat has a motor!  We sailed northwest around the Nussuaq peninsula and made a stop at the furthest most western tip to see an ancient polar bear trap!  There would be delicious smelling and tasting meat inside the structure to lure the polar bear close.  The entranceway was quite small so that the polar bear had to wedge its way through to get to the meat.  The movement and struggle would cause a large boulder, positioned in the roof, to fall at the entranceway and trap the polar bear inside.  The structure looked like a small, square stone house, but the way you could tell it was not a house is because there were no windows, and also, the walls were far thicker than a house would have had.  They were thick so that the angry trapped polar bear could not break through.

(Note: the picture below is not the polar bear trap, but is at the same location!)

The next stop we made was near the abandoned coal-mining settlement on the east coast of Disko Island called Qulissat.  It was built in the 1920’s and had been abandoned by the 1970’s because the coal ran out, although this fact was anticipated from the beginning.  Some say that it was a blessing the inhabitants left when they did because not long after, a very large piece of the mountain directly behind the settlement broke off and toppled to the bay, causing a large tsunami-like wave to wash over the land and destroy a sizable portion of the settlement.  Forty years later though, what is left of this settlement is preserved in near-perfect condition!  A few of the houses are leaning and deteriorating, but most are still standing.  It was as if the town was empty only because everybody was out in the mine or out on the water for the afternoon!  There is scheduled to be a celebratory reunion of sorts in the settlement starting on 6 July.

It was here, in the waters between Disko Island and Nussuaq that we met a large crab boat to film with.  The film crew got shots of the boat from far away, from close up, appearing from around an iceberg, disappearing behind an iceberg, with Chris on the boat, with Chris off the boat, and shots of the entire crabbing process… essentially we spent a few good hours more or less stationary!  Around this area, we also saw a pair of humpback whales!  They blew a couple of times and did some deep dives to show their dorsal fins and tail flukes!  I, unfortunately, was unable to get a picture – with a handful of other people crowding around to get pictures and video for the show, I was definitely low man on the totem pole for getting a decent spot to stand!

After close to twelve hours on the boat, we finally reached Eqi!  The water was, well, glacial blue because of the extremely cold temperature of the water, and it was so filled with small icebergs that we had to sail slowly in order to weave our way through the maze of ice.

 

We sailed right up to the rocks at the base of Eqi Ice Camp, unloaded filming gear and luggage, and then carried it all up the hill to our cabins.  The camp is owned by a local tour operator, World of Greenland, and consists of 18 huts and a kitchen cabin.  Four of the huts are newly renovated and called “Comfort Cabins” because they have amenities like running water and electricity.  Chris got a comfort cabin, as did the girls (Anne Mette, Yuki, and I), and everybody else (Anders, Esben, Eskil, and Finn) was in a standard hut.  The standard huts are very basic, with no running water or electricity.  The comfort cabins, on the other hand, are basically just like a hotel.  Four twin beds with very comfortable linens and pillows, a small seating area with a fully stocked wet bar, a private restroom, hot running water, three electrical outlets, a private balcony with chairs covered in muskox furs… oh yeah, and not a single thing blocking the million-dollar view of Eqi Glacier!

  

Despite the extra amenities of these accommodations, there are two things about the location that not even luxury can overcome.  First, there are literally hundreds of mosquitos around, but some good “Mozzie Cream” (as the Ace & Ace guys call it) and a mosquito net for the head pretty much remedy that situation.

Second, since the cabins are oriented westward in order to have a direct view of the glacier, the “setting” sun shone directly through the great windows that practically take up the entire wall.  It was so incredibly hot most of the night that it was difficult to sleep comfortably.  To be fair, though, I would say that the thunder-like sound of the glacier calving all night, and then waking up to look directly at the magnificent view without even getting out of bed, 95% made up for the down sides!

Also, the group of thirteen very cute Arctic Fox that scurried around the camp left a good impression 🙂

(From Monday 25 June 2012)

Today was another cooking scene – this time to cook up the crab that was caught yesterday near Qulissat.  The film crew selected a site not far from the Ice Camp that gave a great view of the Eqi Glacier behind Chris as he prepared and cooked his Crab Risotto!  A few times the glacier calved during filming which was perfect!

 

The mosquitos were definitely problematic for shooting this scene because they were rampant around the camera and the food.  So what did we do?  We doused the finished plate in mosquito spray with hopes that the mosquitos would stay away long enough to take some still photos of the final dish without seeing little black dots all over the white plate!  I joked that we should do a outtake called “Taste of DEET”!

Since there were no tourists to interview in Uummannaq, and only three to interview at Eqi (one of which declined to participate), I ended up returning to Ilulissat a day early in an attempt to make up for lost time.  So while the rest of the Taste of Greenland crew took a private boat charter to Oqaatsut (Rode Bay) for the night, I hopped on the Disko Line tourist boat and sailed five hours back to Ilulissat.

To the Heart of Greenland – Uummannaq! (Taste of Greenland)

(From Friday 22 June 2012)

The fog was still pretty heavy today, but we got word that Air Greenland was running flights, so I went ahead and checked in at the airport.  As my boarding time got closer and closer and then passed, I got a little nervous that maybe I would not get out of Ilulissat, after all!  About twenty minutes after the plane was originally supposed to leave, we got an announcement that between luggage and passengers, the weight might be too much.  So all the passengers had to line up at the check-in counter to be weighed individually on the baggage scale!  Evidently we were close enough to the weight limit because we were all allowed onto the plane!  Once we had taxied and actually taken off the runway, everyone broke into a great applause!  It was one of those moments when people did not believe it until they saw it actually happen.  And away I went to Uummannaq!

I should start by saying that Uummannaq is THE most beautiful place that I have seen in Greenland thus far!  It is an island with a town of less than 1,500 inhabitants crawling up the base of a 1,170-meter tall mountain.  Uummannaq means “heart-shaped” or something similar in Greenlandic, and some people say the town is named so because this mountain has two rounded peaks that look like the top of a heart.  Other people say that many places are called Uummannaq because when hunters and fishermen return from a trip and first get a glimpse of their hometown mountain on the horizon, their hearts are suddenly filled with a warm and happy feeling because they know they have made it home safely once more!

I feel SO lucky to be able to experience this town!  Maybe it is the mountain wearing off on me, but I get a pretty warm and happy feeling being here myself!  In Nuuk, I have met a couple of people who are from Uummannaq, and they both have so much pride in their roots here.  Now having seen it firsthand, I can understand why.  I would want to be from here also!  This town – the small size, the quiet and slower pace of life, the smell of the icebergs, the howling of land-bound sledge dogs… I did not know it until now, but THIS is where I wanted to live when I came to Greenland!  THIS is what I dreamed of!

 

As if the ambience of the town was not impressive enough, a midnight feast at the private home of Ann Andreasen proved that people who can change the world are not just in big cities – they exist everywhere, even in the far reaches of the Earth!  The Children’s Home has roots back to 1929, but it really started becoming what it is today in 1992.  Ann welcomes, cares for, and nurtures children from troubled homes from all around the country.  She has such a big heart, taking in these children who basically have no other chance, and she thinks nothing is unattainable.  The program has gained recognition all over the world, winning multiple awards and grants and even being featured in the soon-to-be-released movie, Inuk (see my blog post titled, “Inuk”).  For more information on the Children’s Home, see here: http://www.bhjumq.com/UK/index.htm.

Walking into Ann’s home is like walking into the coziest, most authentic museum that ever existed!  It is simply oozing with Greenlandic culture and history – beaded crafts, tupilaks, furniture made from wood and bones, artwork, photographs, polar bear skulls, furs, books, and the list goes on.  Narvhal (narwhal) tusks lean in the corners of the living room, and there is such a surplus of them that they even serve as curtain rods!

For dinner, Ann gave us a meal that rivaled a Thanksgiving Feast!  The table was set with beautiful linens, hand-beaded coasters with Greenlandic Flag designs, tall candlesticks, bottles of wine, and large platters of fish, salad, vegetables, and Greenlandic lamb soup.  As a sort of pre-feast blessing, one of Ann’s staff members, a young Venezuelan man named Ron Davis Alvarez whose aim is to use music to connect with people around the world, played Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the violin.  The music plus the welcoming nature of Ann and her staff was simply overwhelming!  And so began dinner at midnight, and it went well into the two o’clock hour!

(From Saturday 23 June 2012)

Today the Taste of Greenland film crew, Ace & Ace, shot various scenes around Uummannaq; they also went fishing for ammasetter, a sardine-like fish, with a few of the kids from the Children’s Home.  There was not a single tourist in Uummannaq for me to interview, so I was free to accompany the Taste of Greenland crew for the day!  In the morning, I went sailing with Anne Mette and Adrian to get shots of the icebergs and the town from the sea.

After lunch, Anders and I went up to the Children’s Home to clean the ammasetter that the crew had caught.  Cut off the heads, cut off the tails, snip the fins, and clean out the insides!  There were probably more than fifty fish to clean, but it went quickly with teamwork 🙂

In the afternoon, I went with Esben, Eskil, and Yuki to film Chris walking around and into the local supermarket, Pilersuisoq.  This was the first time that I had seen Chris working in front of a rolling camera, and it was great to see the show from “behind-the-scenes”!  Chris really is a natural – he did not have a script, no rehearsals… just going with it and making it entertaining.  Which it was!

The final event for the evening was shooting the cooking scene – again, this was the first one that I had seen so it was very exciting for me to see the whole process!  The site was a small hill on the outskirts of town looking out toward the large peninsula called Nussuaq.

All of the filming equipment had to be carried up to the site and unpacked, cameras positioned and focused correctly, Chris’ cutting board and mis-en-place arranged, and a fire started… the set up process took longer than the actual show!  Once everything was perfect and ready, it was quiet on the set and cameras rolling!

After the cooking scene, Ann and some of the kids from the Children’s Home came up to the site to be filmed dining on the ammasetter that they had helped catch earlier in the day.  They also brought more food and the whole lot of us had dinner up on that hill in the midnight sun!  And, just as on the first night, Ron Davis Alvarez serenaded us with his beautiful violin music while the others sang a traditional Greenlandic song!

Nationaldag (Taste of Greenland)

(From Thursday 21 June 2012)

Today was an early day.  The Taste of Greenland film crew, Ace & Ace, went on a mission to film National Day activities around town, but I think perhaps they were not as successful as hoped because of bad weather.  Also, from the looks of the daily program, it seems that National Day is not really a celebratory day but rather is much more serious and formal.  Practically the only way one could tell there was anything out of the ordinary on this day is that beer could not be sold until after kl 18.00!

Anders and I spent the morning driving around to the airport and different hotels in search of tourists to interview.  I felt a little like I was in the movie Twister or on a wildlife photo shoot – ready to hit the pavement on a moment’s notice because a rare species of Greenland tourist was spotted across town!

At lunchtime, the name of the game became “Be Ready for Anything and Go With the Flow”!  Originally, I booked a flight so that I would fly to Uummannaq tomorrow with the rest of the Taste of Greenland crew.  But in an effort to make last-minute plans to get the Royal Greenland team to Uummannaq as well, there were a few switcheroos!  So I packed all my things and got to the airport ready to fly to Uummannaq this afternoon, a day early.  Unfortunately, a great fog came in (which I later learned was quite epidemic all up and down the West coast), and it took three hours to determine that the twice-delayed flight would be cancelled all together.  I guess the Air Greenland gods were determined to keep me in Ilulissat!

So I made my way back to Hotel Arctic, secured a couple more tourist interviews, and then joined some of the Taste of Greenland crew for drinks at Café Ferdinand.  Dinner was quite fun and delicious – we had the Catch of the Day plate – hellefisk with rice, julienne carrots, and wild asparagus in a Massamun curry sauce.

Goodbye Nuuk ~ Hello Ilulissat! (Taste of Greenland)

(From Thursday 21 June 2012)

Greetings from Ilulissat, a town in the Disko Bay area of North Greenland (Qaasuitsup Municipality) and also home to the Kangia Ice Fjord that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site!  In case there is anyone who does not know the premise of this trip, I shall briefly explain it here:

*** *** ***

I am currently a summer intern at Visit Greenland, the Greenland National Tourism Board.  The company has many projects going on this summer – one of which is the Summer Visitor Survey (on which I am working) and another is a television documentary series called Taste of Greenland.  Taste of Greenland follows Chris Coubrough (a New Zealand chef who has found great success in the United Kingdom) as he travels and eats his way through five regions in Greenland!  The Disko Bay area is the fifth and final region to be filmed for the series.  For more information, see here: http://www.greenland.com/en/about-greenland/kultur-sjael/mad-og-drikke.aspx.

This trip was originally planned for the Taste of Greenland project.  Chris Coubrough is here with a film team of five from Ace & Ace out of Copenhagen, Denmark – Esben Hardt, Eskil Hardt, Finn Noer, Yuki Badino, and Adrian Beard.  There is also one representative from Royal Greenland (a Denmark-based seafood provider and sponsor for Taste of Greenland) named Christine, and two Project Managers from Visit Greenland, Anders Stenbakken and Anne Mette Christiansen.  Early in June, it was decided that I should accompany the crew as the tenth member in order to help out the crew whenever necessary and conduct visitor interviews in the meantime.  So here I am!

I should also quickly preface this and the upcoming entries with the fact that getting to meet and travel with the Ace & Ace guys for the next ten days is like a dream come true!  They are actually the ones who produced the Visit Greenland “Be a Pioneer” video that was almost single-handedly responsible for me falling in love with Greenland and wanting to come here!! So it’s a little like meeting an idol!  The video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egsX0sjhqIE or just search “Be a Pioneer”.

*** *** ***

I flew in from Nuuk (via a transfer in Kangerlussuaq) yesterday afternoon on Air Greenland.  For the Nuuk to Kangerlussuaq leg, we flew beneath cloud level the entire time, so I got a great aerial tour of the west coast from 64*N to 67*N.  I half-heartedly expected to get some indicator that we had officially crossed the Arctic Circle – a giant flag, an intercom announcement from the flight attendant, maybe a line drawn in the snow!  Alas, there was nothing… but I could detect a change in the water and ice as we headed further north, and at one point I could actually see the ice sheet in the distance which was very cool!  The color of the water became much lighter blue and almost grey because of the increase in glacial water.

After a very brief layover in Kangerlussuaq, it was back onto the plane for an hour to go the rest of the way to Ilulissat, 69*13’N 51* 06’W.  During this leg we were above the cloud cover most of the time, so there was really not much to see until we got within fifteen minutes of landing.  Here, the water returned to a darker, more saturated blue color and was filled with icebergs of all shapes and sizes as far as the eye could see.  Ilulissat means “icebergs” in Greenlandic, and you can see why this town is named such:

Once on the ground, the first thing I did was accompany Adrian and Christine on a sailing trip in order to film a local fisherman fishing for hellefisk (halibut).  We sailed in one boat while the fisherman went in his own that was specially equipped for letting out fishing lines and gutting and cleaning fish.  It was great to get out right away to see the icebergs!  Although, it was cloudy and rainy, so they were not very brilliant.

As a Royal Greenland employee, Christine had the inside scoop on the halibut market!  The fishermen’s lines can have over 500 hooks on them, making an average catch weigh in around 300 kilos (660 lbs).  With Royal Greenland paying a market price of 30 DKK/kilo (or roughly $2.32/lb), a single fisherman can earn around $1,500 for a haul that takes no more than five hours round trip!  While this sounds like a lot of money for not a lot of work, the “easy” summer season is very well earned after the much harder winter season.  In the wintertime, the fishermen have to go out on the ice with sledge dogs and cut a hole in the ice through which to fish.