In Paamiut today
This morning we woke to the sound of the fog horn again. Today, however, it hadn’t cleared by the time we were going over to shore for our walking tour, sadly. It looks like our run of good luck with the weather might have run out, for now at least.
We were at anchor off Paamiut, Greenland’s seventh largest city and noted that the only tours here were walking tours - because there are no buses or coaches here in this town of just over 1000 people.
Our local guide Karl set off at a brisk pace for the first stop on our tour, the fish factory.
The light fittings looked pretty appropriate!
Not knowing what else we were likely to see, I snapped a picture of the boot room as we passed by. We all stepped through a boot wash before entering the factory itself, though actually, we didn’t see a single fish at all.
This Royal Greenland factory processes and packs halibut, cod, shrimp and caviar but today, there was little going on, whilst we were there, anyway. There was a man foldiing and lining cardboard boxes, however.
I couldn’t resist snapping a picture of this piece of Greenlandish text which is a notice on the factory pin board with advice about breaks and good working practice I believe.. I mean, the length of some of those words!! Taamaaliortoqartanngippat? (my phone translated that to “if you don’t do that”
With no fish to see, we continued through the other open door and back out onto the street. Here some people were loading their conveniently located boat which was moored in the marima.
These houses were all set upon a rock which meant they had no “front garden” of course.
But actually, what I noticed more was the shoal of fish on the wall.
They were swimming towards a plaque which, if my research serves me right, is commemorating the 275th birthday of Paamiut in a poem.
Our walk continued to the traffic island, which seemed odd when there were hardly any vehicles here, not including the child’s cycle abadoned there in the middle.
On through the park then, though there wasn’t much to see on this rather bleak summer’s morning.
I was surprised to see water pipes on the surface here, given the winter temperatures, but Karl said they were well insulated and didn’t present a probem.
The red house is the Priest’s house, he said.
And the yellow building, the hospital.
The blue one next door? It’s a supermarket.
And the blocks of apartments along here were fairly new and many were empty, for Paamuit is one of the smaller places where people are leaving to go and live in Nuuk. The population has been declining here for some years and continues to do so. I’d have quite liked to have had the chance to talk to Karl about this but not only was there little time, I’m not sure his command of English would have made the discussion very easy or meaningful. Never mind. Maybe there’ll be an opportunity in the coming days.
At this point there might have been the hint of mutiny in our midst, had a small gang of locals not appeared, charming the living daylights out of the grumpiest of people in our group.
Mind you, some were not quite so cheerful either.
Still, having my home invaded by this horde of strangers might not be my cup of tea either!
Next, we heard a bit of commotion coming from the top floor of this building as well and everything fell into place when Karl said it’s the secondary school. A bunch of youngsters were waving through the window at us, calling “Hello!”
Perhaps it’s as well we had that little bit of social interchange, because from here our route looked a bit bleak!
Maybe visiting cemeteries is a Greenlandish thing to do? I can recall only a couple of other times when guides have taken us to such places, but for the second time in two days, here we were looking at a cemetery again.
From here, Karl proposed taking the steep slope to the top of the hill, beside the Marine College, from where there would be a grand view. Except that it was still very misty and a few of us would prefer to continue on this path to visit the church and a couple of other older buildings down here. Thankfully he was quite amenable to us taking a different route, he advised us to be careful of cars (we’d passed about half a dozen during the morning) and off we went.
Sadly the church was locked, so we couldn’t see inside. But it was such a landmark around here, we were glad to have seen it.
The church bell was attached to an adjacent building over the road.
Having seen the church, unable to visit the museum for lack of cash (no cards taken anywhere here), we decided we’d seen the best of Paamiut and we’d return home for lunch.
As we waited for the tender and noted the boxes to be taken back to the ship, we guessed that fish would be on the menu later.
Actually, we enjoyed our favourite Zürcher Geschnetzeltes for lunch with a fine view of the fjord we’d just come over in the tender. As we did, we watched a couple of whales in the water far below us.
Wonderful Greenland!
