Ilulissat in winter

It's great to be back in Ilulissat, and its great to see it in winter. Its much quieter than in summer. There are basically no tourists and there aren't nearly as many teenagers cruising up and down "main street". Speaking of tourists, I learned that the number of tourists has increased from about 5,000 per year to 35,000 per year within a span of a few years. That number is expected to double this year. This for a town that has 5,000 inhabitants. As you can imagine, the town is starting to be overrun by tourists, at least in summer. I wish I could've seen it 20 years ago.

As I've written in past entries, Greenland has quite a few social problems that it is trying to overcome - poverty, poor education, and poor health care. There is reason for hope though. Among other things they are opening a university and national art museum in Nuuk, the capital city. This says to me that they are becoming increasingly independent from Denmark. (They have also started a couple of breweries, an important step towards independence!) Hopefully they can do so without selling out to tourism and mining operations.

An interesting note that I learned this week: the Greenlandic word for Greenland is Kalaallit Nunaat, or land of the Greenlanders. Apparently that name didn't exist until after Danish colonization. The word "kalaallit" (or the singular version "kalaaleq") developed a negative connotation during the colonial period, when it was used by Danes to refer to a lower-class of people. This is much like the word "eskimo" in Canada and Alaska, which simply means "raw-meat eater" but has come to have negative connotations as well. Thus the people of Greenland are not particularly comfortable with the name of their own country! Apparently their has been some discussion (I don't know how serious) of changing the country's name to the much more pronounceable Inuit Nunaat, or "land of the people". Poetic, but a little misleading considering that in all of Greenland there are only 50,000 people.