Finding your way around Nuuk

Nuuk is, as you may or may not know, not a very big city. Of course in turn of Greenlandic standards Nuuk is huge. However for those of us who come from abroad Nuuk is and feels very small. And thus it stands to reason that it ought to be an easy city to find your way around in. But as with so many other things here in Greenland that is of course not the case. Nuuk is not one of those cities like for example New York that was basically designed after a chessboard with straight streets and roads all neatly categorised with numbers.

Instead the streets of Nuuk twist and turn in a seemingly random order and are only occasionally blotted down on a city map and are almost never accompanied with proper street signs. Of course it doesn’t help that the city is build on cliffs and ledges creating different, natural levels and distances within the city. For example, I live slightly outside the city centre, about 10mins on the bus, and in a “normal” nice “flat” city, I’m quite sure it would take me no more than 25-30mins to walk to the city centre, however in Nuuk it takes me about an hour because I either have to cross or walk around 2 smaller mountains to get anywhere.

Fortunately for me (and everybody else on foot in Nuuk) what the city might lack in roads it certainly makes up for in staircases. Never have I been to a city so intertwined with an almost incomprehensible network of staircases. They are everywhere and they take you places you never knew existed. To beautiful breathtaking views and dodgy back alleys over flooded with abandoned furniture and general rubble. One small problem is however that this wonderful network is never to be found on the maps. Like the most useful and important streets (the ones that zigzag across the city and gets you from A to B faster than the big main roads), stairs are not to be found on the city maps.

And to make matter worse there are two kinds of stairs. There are the ones that take you places, that is to say to different areas in the city or to one of those al important “vein” streets mentioned above in brackets, and then there are those that takes you to a house. Those are the ones you don’t want to use because you look rather silly if you’ve walked all the way up a crocked staircase only to find yourself in front of a front door to which you have no key and which leads onto a home in which you don’t know who lives. I mean, the door might just suddenly open and a complete stranger might invite you in for a “kaffemik”, a speciality in the Greenlandic home consisting of huge among of very strong coffee combined with even bigger and more overwhelming cakes. Al of which is partaken off while you are being put through a kind of third degree interrogation about your family, your current status, your birthplace and anything else your host might think of asking about – all in Greenlandic of course. This speciality is hugely enjoyed among the Greenlanders themselves and I guess if you speak Greenlandic and actually knew some of the people interrogating you it might also be a fun way to spend a few hours, but when you’re just making your way up the stairs for the purpose of finding a nice view or a street that will take you closer to home a “kaffemik” in a complete stranger’s home is just a bit too much culture. Or at least it is for me.

Unfortunately these two kinds of stairs look completely the same and often the stairs are so long and they bend too much for you to see what is at the other end, making every journey on them slightly advantageous. Sometimes a staircase will split into two staircases halfway up a hill and then you have to make a choice and you can be sure that one of your decisions will most certainly take you to one of those front doors you are so eager to avoid. I very much like the idea of the staircases but I would so wish that the two kinds of staircases were easier to distinguish.