Pizza Diavola

I have this thing about Greenland. Rather, my friend M has this thing about Greenland–one might even call it an obsession–and I’ve hopped aboard the tiny little bandwagon. It’s somewhere new, somewhere interesting, and other people’s passions are generally interesting to me, particularly travel passions. I can relate to the feeling of wanting so badly to be somewhere that the longing thrums in your veins and you wake up at night wanting and you can’t focus on anything else (vide Rome and me). As a fellow obsessive, I can’t help but empathize. It’s also interesting to see the obsessive behavior from the outside, since I’m usually the fixated person and I’ve never been able to see what it’s like from a third person POV.

Anyway, the landscapes around Qaanaaq (the northenmost palindrome in the world!) are fascinating and I have this dream of going there one day and having coffee while sitting on an iceberg and watching the sun come up over the ocean. I love sunrises and sunsets and wide open skies. I also like traveling alone, removed from my cell phone and work and all the concerns of day to day life. It gives me time to think, time to be inside my head without distractions, time to figure out who I am and be comfortable in my skin. Going to Greenland would probably be the furthest I’m likely to get from cell phones and work, short of going backpacking (there is internet access in Qaanaaq but none in the backcountry of Yosemite).

Via M, Christian Fuhrhop is someone who went to Greenland in 2007 and has some fabulous photos online. Looking at them, I can’t help but want to go, too. I grew up with the vast skies of suburban California; when I’m on the freeway, I can see from one end of the sky to the other and it’s like a giant celestial bowl upturned high above the world. I love the wide open sky and so looking at this, where it looks like you can see forever because the air is so clear, or this makes me think of falling into the sky. Then there’re the long, slow sunrises as the season changes in and out of winter and summer. The landscapes screw with perspective and the snow can resemble sand dunes. Same shapes and windblown looks with different materials in different places.

I want to go.

ETA: GUHH *flail*