Other people's normals: Greenland

Watching Bruce Parry's Arctic has brought back my time in Greenland. I was there for a pretty daft reason: looking for traces of Vikings. But I got distracted by the rest of Greenland's story.

Greenland is well over a thousand miles away so it is surprising that it was ever part of Europe. But colonial history means it's still - just - part of Denmark. Culturally, the connection is ever-present. The weather forecast for Denmark keeps coming on. If you go to a supermarket you find almost the same range that's on the shelves over here, every item imported.  You can go to the smoothie bar and have a burrito and they both taste like they would here.

But it is far away too. Wandering through Nuuk, the capital, you can feel your distance. Greenlandic is a language full of throaty consonants where sentences are made backwards. There is bright sunshine, and no trees, and plants barely grow at all. No cows live in this country, so there's no milk except UHT. In the market, you can buy seal.

Greenlanders  have always fished, and sealed, and whaled, and used every part of those animals for food and clothes, fuel and tents and boats. It all worked fine, in Greenlandic memory, until the Europeans came over in the seventeenth century and hunted all the whales.
I talked to Finn Lynge, who is Greenland's former - and only ever -  Member of the European Parliament, about whales and whaling. Finn's main task as MEP, in the seventies, was to draw Greenland out of Europe. Shared European fishing waters had brought back European boats - this time after the cod. For the record, Finn achieved his goal: Greenland is no longer part of the European Union.

Finn approved of my coming to Greenland.  As he said, if you travel, you get a glimpse of what is normal in other places. Greenland has taken on a lot of Western habits - from running water to smoothie bars. A lot of it is good. Greenland's link to Europe is still strong. The problem is, there are assumptions that come with the package, about what is acceptable behaviour. Whaling and sealing in particular are not.

It's that wrestling with the Western world and the modern world that Bruce Parry's show is capturing so well for me. Traditions like sealing and whaling are threatened by laws and, sometimes more profoundly, by economics.  But - for example -  is  transporting a battery-farmed chicken across the Atlantic better than hunting a non-endangered species of seal?

Europe past and present is full of unsustainable behaviour. From Greenland, we look deeply disconnected from the realities of life and death.  From Greenland it seems bizarre, sentimental rather than logical, that we are  so bound up with these two species. Finn emphasised again and again to me that Greenland does not want to hunt unsustainably. But they do want to hunt. They do not see anything wrong in hunting. It is as much part of their tradition as their language.

My glimpse of what's normal? I will always remember the lady in the tanning factory. Showing us sealskins, she stroked one and said 'so cute!'

Something dead, cute? It wouldn't have happened back home.

Viking Voyage: time to tell the story

A while back, I took it into my head to follow Erik the Red, Viking explorer, from Norway to Iceland and finally to Greenland, the country he discovered and colonised in about the year 1000.

My journey was beset with danger - though perhaps not as much as his was. I was travelling on my own across hundreds of miles of land and water, but I wasn't doing it in a wooden boat and I managed to avoid storms with 20m waves (a good thing as I was very seasick in one with just 5m waves.)

But I got back safe, and wrote a book about it... and there are lots of bits and pieces of stories that didn't make the book, so I thought I'd start to share some of them online.

Enjoy - and please do tell your friends

Alexandra