Mission Greenland: Day 2

Flashing gang Signs at the American Consulate and Eating Whale Blubber is all in a day's work ... except the sun refuses to set on Greenland.

The flight from Copenhagen to Greenland was pretty straightforward. I rolled my bags into the Kastrup airport. This clean and super-efficient facility is truly an international airport. Listed on the departures were the standard flights to big multicontinental destinations such as Dubai, Delhi, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, but alongside them were regular flights to obscure places like Tashkent, Svalbard, and the Faeroe Islands. One you would not see was Moscow. That said, I had to wait two hours before the big board listed the flight to the capital city, Nuuk. The flight was on Easy Jet airways 737-800, but it was equipped more like a continental USA flight. The entire aircraft was three seats across, with no power plugs and, surprisingly for Europe, no Wi-Fi. Fortunately, that made me read a book I love, “All Blood Runs Red,” the biography of the first black American pilot in World War I, Eugene Bullard. What a ripping yarn.

But there was Wi-Fi on occasion. When we flew over the Faroe Islands, cellular internet would push texts and messages up to me. The same happened when we passed Reykjvik, Iceland. No such luck when we approached the coast of Greenland. The wall of white ice, a thousand miles long and one mile deep, made it apparent where we were over the disputed land.