We arrived in our hostel cabin Monday afternoon to find we were not alone.  We expected at least some of the other 3 bedrooms to be occupied, but all of them were.  The fridge was stocked, common areas installed with personal items. Welcome to #HostelLife!

The Internet only works reliably when near the hostel’s café, which is closed Mondays. 😭 So I spent the afternoon on the cafe’s deck, swatting mosquitoes and breaking would-be café patrons the bad news. We saw a couple head into our cabin, so Harry ran down to greet them. Moments later, the couple was trying to reach the (closed) reception desk in the café.

They were a delightful Danish couple who had been booked into the hostel by a tour company, and had no idea it involved communal living. They thought they had the entire cabin (8 beds) all to themselves, and Harry must have burst that bubble big time. Better as they were just arriving back for the day, vs. during morning shower time! 🤣

We chatted for a while as they made other arrangements (no easy feat in a city with only one obvious hotel!), and reassured me that it was them, not us! “Have you ever heard of such a thing as staying with strangers?” They offered me a beer, and told me about the purpose of their visit: earlier that day they took a water taxi ride to the site of her helicopter pilot father’s tragic crash when she was 6, 46 years ago. She laid a flower and a lock of her curls over his water grave. By the end of our toasting to her dad, they had a hotel room waiting, and wished we would go stay with them there. Ha, and surrender this view?! We compromised, and gratefully shared their taxi into town, where we enjoyed our first of many meals at Café Esmeralda.

On our first “night” in Nuuk, with the whole cabin to ourselves now, we set up my camera on GorillaPod legs pointing out our cabin window. The sun had already set over the rocky hills around the hostel, out a side window of our cabin, but was still shining on the mountain tops.  Little did I know it would rise 3 hours later straight through the middle of my time lapse!