Iceland review - 2002, Page 46

44 ICELAND REVIEW
employees. The Post is the design and production house for
Greenland’s famous stamps, using local and international artists to
grace the collectible postage that the Danes have been cranking
out for years.
In your wanderings, you’ll find a kind of openness here that
comes as a bit of a surprise when you’re sticking out like a sore
thumb. Local residents feel theirs is the friendlier part of the coun-
try. “I was the child of every adult growing up here,” says Rie
Jurgensen, a Danish native of Tasiilaq who returns every summer
from her studies in Denmark. When she moved to western
Greenland to go to high school, Rie says that she would “say ‘hi’
and people would just look at me”.
The Red House
The Red House is one of Tasiilaq’s central operations. It’s located at
the top of town in a hunter’s neighbourhood, where kids, dogs and
deserted houses share a steep network of dirt roads. One house in
the neighbourhood is now deserted due to ill-intentioned demons
that overran it several years ago. Though Greenland officially prac-
tices Christianity, Inuits’ beliefs still have roots in animism. When a
crew of kommuna (public government) employees were sent to
clean it out, they used gloves and poles to drag clothes and furni-
ture out of its tainted innards. Demonised or no, most of the hous-
es up here are hanging on by less of a thread than in other parts of
town; The Red House sticks out both in its size and its fresh coat of
– you guessed it – red paint.
Guests in these nine rooms are served fin whale and seal ribs in
a dining room where a polar bear skin hangs stretched in a wood-
en frame, a bullet hole in the breast of the fur. During high tourist
season, The Red House both hosts private individuals and services
private tour organisations with food or a night’s stay. If you hang
around long enough, as many of the guests seem to, the cellphone
of Robert Peroni, aforementioned Italian ex-pat who has made
Tasiilaq his home, is constantly ringing in a fit of tourist co-ordina-
tion. One returning guest puts it this way: “When I met Robert
seven years ago, his hair was not grey.”
A girl in Tiniteqilaaq carries a load of dried fish. Virtually every house-
hold in town makes a living from hunting.
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