DUBCAST #71: Rolling With It: Dubside’s Return to the Greenland Competition

Dubside is back from Greenland! In this long-anticipated report, he recounts his 2025 journey to the Greenland National Kayaking Championship — a trip filled with unexpected delays, travel detours, and spontaneous moments of generosity and connection. From navigating airline mishaps and expired currency to rolling with an international team and reconnecting with old friends, Dubside paints a vivid portrait of the joys and challenges of Arctic travel.

There’s even a near-miss accident that almost derailed the whole adventure — and a haunting musical performance recorded with natural echo in a mysterious underground monument in Copenhagen.

This episode is a rich blend of storytelling, culture, and sound — with a preview of what’s to come in Episode #72.

Qaannamik unammersuarneq 2025: Iligiikkaarluni kingusaqattaarneq 

Transcript

DUBSIDE:

Welcome to The Dubcast with Dubside. This is Dubcast # 71, and in July of 2025 I did go to Greenland, thanks to your generous donations on the GoFundMe site. I'll tell you about it, but first let's do something a little different. 

Let's start with some Greenlandic music, and this is a remake of a song I originally did in Dubcast #45, by a group called Tiu, it's called Naluaat, and we'll just hear the first verse and chorus. 

[MUSIC]

Well, my international travel arrangements for 2025 included the Greenland competition, and I wanted to go to Copenhagen for the Greenland in Tivoli event that I've described in Dubcast #67, and I didn't have any arrangements like I used to have in Norway and Sweden this time, so it was just Greenland and Copenhagen. 

Now, the new route where you can go on United Airlines straight from New York City to Nuuk didn't work out because United Airlines does not fly from Nuuk to Copenhagen, and since I wanted to make those different stops there, it worked out I had to fly from the U.S. to Copenhagen, get a round trip there, and then a round trip from Copenhagen to Nuuk, etc. 

So my final arrangements, I was flying Delta Airlines from Washington, D.C. to JFK, New York, then change over there to a Delta flight from JFK, New York to Copenhagen, and then I would change to SAS Airlines to go from Copenhagen to Nuuk. I found that SAS Airlines was flying that route now, and they had prices a couple hundred dollars cheaper than Air Greenland did, so I went with SAS, and then once I got to Nuuk to get to Sisimiut, where the competition was held, and Sisimiut does not have an international airport, I flew Air Greenland from that. That's like a one-hour flight from Nuuk to Sisimiut. 

That was the plan, and then on the way back, I would take— instead of flying back to Nuuk— I would take the ferry, which takes, it's an overnight trip, but it's a nice ferry ride. That would get me to Nuuk. I'd be in Nuuk for five or six days (had some things to check on there) and then I would fly to, on SAS, back to Copenhagen, and we'd be there for five nights at a hotel close to downtown, in downtown Copenhagen, close enough to Tivoli, and was able to afford that, thanks to your generous donations, and then at the end of that time, at August 2nd, I would fly back to the U.S., Copenhagen, to New York, JFK, and then JFK back to Washington, D.C. That was the plan. 

Of course, in Greenland, things don't always—things usually do not go to plan. And I'll tell you how it worked out. 

Since SAS and Delta are two different airlines, in Copenhagen, I would have to go out of security, claim my bag, and then check the bag in and back through security again, but I was scheduled to arrive in Copenhagen at about 6 a.m., being an overnight flight, leaving the night before, and I had to, the flight to Nuuk left, I think, about 12, maybe 1 o'clock in the afternoon. So plenty of time to change bags and probably get some food, et cetera. 

So it's rainy in Copenhagen when I arrive. Get there about on schedule, 6 a.m. Go out, check my, claim my bag, which takes, you know, 45 minutes or so to go through all that. And then I figured I'll check my bag into SAS now, then I can walk with just the backpack on, I can walk out, and I know there's a walking down towards that Kastrup Kayak Club outside the airport, about a 5-10 minute walk, and there's a store down there which sells food at far cheaper than anything that I'm going to be buying in the airport. 

So I figure I got a raincoat, I will check my large suitcase in to SAS first, then I'll go look for some food. At the SAS desk, on the, on the self-serve computer thing, it won't, it won't register my code number. It says, you know, can't go see an agent. 

So I go to the ticket agent, and they say that flight is not going to go as scheduled due to the fact that the weather in Nuuk is bad, so that, that flight has been delayed. 

Well, here we go with the change of plans. So it starts raining harder, so I don't want to walk with my whole suitcase lugging it down the sidewalk to the store. So I have to wait on that and just be hungry. And they tell me at the SAS desk, check back in, in maybe an hour or two. It's like 6 in the morning. 

They say, you know, at 7, 8 o'clock, you got to, we'll find out more about that. So I'm sitting around the airport doing nothing, looking at the rain outside for two hours or so. Then I check back, and then they say there might have more delays. 

You just wait and wait and wait. So finally, they tell me that flight has been rescheduled for two days in the future. And if I want a hotel room, you know, check back in another hour. 

They'll figure that out. So more waiting. Now I'm figuring, I can handle two days in Copenhagen. I mean, the year before, it was three days in Copenhagen. And, you know, being supplied with a nice hotel room and food. And if I got another two nights in that Clarion Hotel right next to the airport that you can walk to without even going outside, that sounds okay to me. 

So sometime later they say, okay, here's the hotel. And they give me these two taxi vouchers to get to the hotel. So apparently it is not the nearby Clarion, it's somewhere else. 

So I go out and find the taxis and get in and hand the guy the voucher thing. He starts driving and he's driving for about half an hour. Has me a little bit concerned. 

We cross all the way through downtown Copenhagen to the other side of the city and we're in an area called Frederiksberg. And I guess that's where SAS has their arrangements, not at the hotel right next to the airport. Now it was a nice hotel, you know, I got 10 stories tall, you know, big lobby and everything, not a cheap hotel. 

So I'm dropped off there. I don't know. It's like 12:30-1:00 o'clock and they say, well, the room service is still, you know, cleaning the rooms and people haven't checked out some of them. 

So I got to wait a couple hours to get a room. So I'm sitting in the lobby with my big fat suitcase and my backpack on doing nothing for one hour, two hours, two and a half hours. Here's some deja vu. 

And by the way, I hadn't really had any full sleep on the plane, so very tired, jet lagged, et cetera, and hungry. I finally get the room and I think I had worked out that I could get some lunchtime meal there because they gave you food vouchers to eat at the hotel. So I'm settled in and things are starting to look a bit better. 

Well, with two days, I was able to entertain myself. I went out, I took my microphone and my recording rig to see if I'd get some interesting ambient recordings. And I'll tell you about that at the end of this episode. 

Well, spending money for this entire excursion, I had 10,000 Danish kroners left over from in the past, saving my Danish money. 10,000 Danish kroners is about $700-$800. 

And the hotel was supposed to feed us. They had the big breakfast spread that everybody at the hotel gets, which is rather nice. But for the other meals, they had just a buffet for the SAS Airlines people, which wasn't all that great. It wasn't like my Dubside breakfast that I've described before in this podcast. 

I made do. But in trying to save money, I made my way around Copenhagen for those two days and went to my familiar places without spending any money, walked instead of taking any public transportation, and only ate at the hotel. So I got to the airport in the two days after that in time for the flight. 

Whenever I go through the Copenhagen airport, I pick up some of this special suntan lotion. The brand is called P-20. You can't get it in the US. 

It's alcohol-based, so it's not the greasy white stuff. And I find it works quite well for me. So I'm getting ready to... I go through security, and I check my bag and everything.

And then the duty-free stuff, all the expensive stuff, I get some of this suntan lotion. So I go to pay for it. And my 10,000 Danish kroners is in 1,000 kroner notes. 

I've got 10 of these 1,000 kroner notes. So I take one of those out and hand it to the guy at the cash register. He looks at it funny. 

He says, “No, we don't take those.” 

I said, “What do you mean?”

 He goes, “Those have been taken out of circulation. They're not good anymore.”

The 500 kroner notes are fine, but the 1,000 ones, those are no longer valid. Well, this left me somewhat dumbfounded. He just told me that my $800 is useless, and I'm about to go to Greenland for three weeks with no money. 

So I'm running around the airport at the assistant, the traveler's aid station, and they tell me that there's one bank in the middle of Copenhagen that will change those obsolete 1,000 kroner notes. But I've got no time to go out of security and find this bank and get back in time for my flight. So things are not looking good. 

I get on the plane. Unlike Delta, SAS on this plane did not have the in-flight entertainment system, so I can't watch any movies. Boring flight. 

This is, I don't know, 5 or 6 hours. Fly in and get to Nuuk, the brand new airport. So now here's a challenge.

I missed the flight from Nuuk to Sisimiut on Air Greenland two days before that. Now, nothing was flying in or out of Nuuk that time because the weather was so bad. So the flight that I missed never actually went. 

So I'm figuring they will just move that over to two days in the future, which is right then, and hook me up with a flight that I paid for, and I'll get to Sisimiut, no problem. After much back and forth and talking to different people and all the runaround, apparently they did not see it that way. They see it as you didn't come to check in for your flight, whether it was flying or not, and therefore your ticket is forfeited. 

And if you want to get to Sisimiut, you have to buy another whole ticket at a cost of $500 or $600. But one of the people said, I think SAS should take care of that since it was their mistake or their delay. And then I had somebody check with SAS. 

A bunch of runarounds. This goes on for several hours sitting in the airport in Nuuk. They had some service representative person or somebody to help people. 

I don't know if they worked for the airport itself or for Air Greenland, but they were back and forth and saying, hold on, I'm waiting to hear back from these people. Half an hour later, they said, well, they haven't called back yet, and on and on and on. Meanwhile, I realized I have no money there. 

I don't even have the money to buy another ticket. It's getting harder and harder to adopt that Greenland mentality of figuring that it'll work out somehow. So as the picture gets clearer, even if I was put on a flight, the small planes that go to Sisimiut are all full. 

The big plane came in internationally, and then there's lots of little flights to go to Sisimiut. And those are all full. So even if they gave me credit, I would not be going that day. 

It would be another day or two after that, the first flight available. And in the end, one of the people there at the airport on their own cell phone actually called Andrew Elizaga in the Seattle area, in Tacoma, Washington, international call. And I explained what was going on. 

So Andrew bought another ticket at a cost of $500 or $600 that I'm going to be paying him back. And I had to pay twice for that flight from Nuuk to Sisimiut. And so my attempt to save money by flying on SAS instead of Air Greenland from Copenhagen to Nuuk apparently did not save me any money because in the end I had to pay double for the Air Greenland flight. 

Meanwhile, the flight I did get did not leave for another two days. But having been to Greenland many, many times, I guess there are people I'm not even aware of sometime who are looking out for me. And I was put in contact with Pavia Tobiasen, who I've mentioned before. 

I met him the first time I went to Greenland, he was involved in kayaking for many years, and he was not active for a while. Then in the last 10 years or so, he's been very active in the Qajaq Nuuk Club.

And his wife is Johanne Tobiasen, who's the president of Qaannat Kattuffiat. And he has two sons, very involved. And so he apparently has taken a job at the Nuuk airport, which has lots of jobs because it's a brand new international airport. So it's hard to pass up good money there. 

So he's working there quite a bit. And from wherever he was working, he came over and he said, okay, you can stay at my place, because the rest of his family was at the competition in Sisimiut, but he was staying there to work to make some good money. So he gives me the key to his house, tells me where it is. 

And then somehow they were also nice enough, they hooked me up with a taxi voucher there, so I didn't have to pay the taxi to go. I get in the taxi, it takes me right to his front door, and I figured out how to unlock his door with the key, and I'm in there, and I'm taken care of. He comes back that evening, I don't know, like 10 o'clock or so, we talk a little bit. 

And I stayed there for two days and did some preliminary stuff in Nuuk before the flight to Sisimiut left. So it worked out. 

And what also worked out is I asked somebody about the 1,000 Danish kroner notes, and they said the bank, the Greenland Bank in the center of Nuuk will change those over. 

So I went in there the next morning after that first night and handed them ten 1,000 kroner notes, and they handed me twenty 500 kroner notes, no problem. So that also worked itself out. 

And before the two days were up, I had gone around Nuuk and stopped in on the guys at Bolt Lamar making the cool t-shirts and hoodies. I went into Atlantic Music to see Christian Elsner, who was there working, and I checked all the gift shops for auction items. 

And so when it came time for the flight, I got to the airport. And I got there, I thought it was enough time, but I was told later the Nuuk airport, they're still working out some of the glitches of a self-checking machines, but then they have a regular guy behind the counter for the baggage drop-off. 

So there were two lines for this baggage drop-off thing. And I got in line, and these lines were moving painfully slow. I mean, how long does it take to just check somebody's bag and push a button to print out a tag and put it in on the conveyor belt, etc.? But these people would be typically there for five, ten minutes talking to the agent there before the next person came on. 

It was rather frustrating. I was afraid I would miss the flight, but that wasn't a problem in the end, but it was certainly nerve-wracking to go through. And so standing in line, I'm looking at two people ahead of me, and there's a woman there with her suitcase. 

And I'm looking at her, and I realize that is unmistakably Alika Hammond, who is a former prime minister of Greenland. And I'm thinking, wow, the former prime minister of Greenland has to wait in a slow line just like the rest of us. Hmm. 

It's a small country. I would hope the current prime minister has some sort of hookup. He doesn't have to wait in line.

Air Greenland is owned by the government of Greenland, so, I don't know, figure that out. 

I wanted to talk to Alika Hammond for a minute, but she doesn't know me, and I felt a little too intimidated to do that, so I let that opportunity pass. Flight to Sisimiut on the Dash 7 propeller plane takes about an hour, no problem. 

And I'm already seeing people I know, some people going to the competition. I think Tanya Olsvig, who I mentioned before, she came to Michigan Training Camp back in 2000…was that ’16, ’15, something like that. She was on the plane, a couple other people, familiar faces. 

So we get to the airport, and I'm prepared for, you know, start walking into town, which is a couple miles, and see if anybody gives me a ride. But no, there are people there looking at me saying, hey, Dubside, and we got a van here, come on, get in. And they had me all taken care of. 

We got in the van with a bunch of other people I knew, and we drove to the school where people were staying, and things were starting to fall into place. 

At the school, there was a classroom designated for the internationals, and the internationals turned out to be three people from Germany and me. And these are people, it was a woman and her son, who was maybe 20 years old, and her son's friend, who was about the same age. 

And I'd met all three of them before at the Stokkøya event in Norway, so they knew me. I get settled in there, you know, it's a mattress and a floor, I'm used to that. And I think our room did not have a refrigerator, but we had a sink.

And so there's bathrooms out in the hallway somewhere, it's a school, you know. And then the showers were at the school gym, which was a different building where we had a separate key to get to that. But these are arrangements that I'm used to dealing with. 

They had the march to the church, a church ceremony, etc. And then the first event is the short distance race. And KNR TV is there in Sisimiut covering the event with their very nice equipment and their van and cameras, etc. 

And I was watching the race, standing on the dock, and somebody comes up behind me and just grabs me like a bear hug from behind. Now, I do hugs, but you got to know me pretty well to just grab me from behind anonymously. So I turn around, and it is Maligiaq. 

And it was very good to see him again. And he has been hired by KNR to do live commentary of the competition. And if you go on the KNR TV channel, they have a YouTube channel, you can see some of that coverage and you can hear his voice. It's all in Greenlandic, but he is covering it very well. 

So in the days to follow, there was the individual rolling competition. And I had brought zero gear with me, no, no paddle, no kayak, no dry suit, no wetsuit. I wasn't planning on getting in the water necessarily. And I figured I might, somebody might ask me to do one race or something. I can use my street clothes for that.

And so for the individual rolling, I think it was one of the Greenlanders said, yeah, we got some stuff. We can hook you up with a kayak and a tuiliq, et cetera. But that particular day, it had gotten rather rainy and windy and cold.

And then early on, they had asked me for some assistance with the judging, which I'm happy to do. So I got in the booth. I think it was Uyana Tobiasen and I, we started judging some of the individual rolling competition. 

And at one point, the wind really picked up. We had to take a little pause like the, those banners they put up. It says, you know, “Qajaq Sisimiut” or something. We’d get blown over flat on the ground. And they were using a PA system consisting of, it's a, one of these battery powered speakers, a pretty, a pretty nice one. It's a JBL Partybox 310. I looked it up later, weighs 38.4 pounds. It's, you know, it may be 2 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft kind of thing. And they use one of those steel containers, little small steel containers, which are like, you know, they're maybe 4 ft x 8 ft x 6 ft tall, or something like that. 

And they had put this JBL speaker on top of the container there to point it out that, you know, for the sound, so people could hear what was being said. Well, the wind kicked up so strongly and blew over the banners and things. We all sort of took cover for a minute or paused the competition. 

And suddenly that speaker weighing 38.4 pounds blew off the top of the container and fell right in front of the container in an area where I had been walking, where when it fell, I was about maybe 24 inches away from. And I am very lucky that I did not get hit by that speaker. Otherwise, I'd be probably recovering from a concussion and some serious bruises. But lucky for me, that didn't happen. The speaker survived just fine. They put it back up and kept on using it. 

So two days later, it's time for the team rolling. And by that time, the sun had come out, had gotten a lot calmer and warmer. And I was amenable to doing some team rolling. 

So they had the East Greenland crew. You've heard Max, the guy from East Greenland, as a special guest in the podcast. He was there with his four East Greenland kids.

And one of the Germans, the two youngers were Joshua and Jonas. And I think it was Joshua. One of them wanted to do the role and the other one, he was a little under the weather. So he opted out of that. So we decided to make an international team of Max and Jonas and me. And I was able to borrow, they had a dry suit. 

And for a kayak, I asked, I've mentioned before, Ari Christian Jusufsson, Christian D. Jusufsson, nicknamed Ari. And he was there. He's been involved off and on for various years, but he was quite involved this time. 

And he had a kayak that the best new kayak team was, he was on that team. And that team consisted of Uyarnak Tobiasen, the son of Pavia Tobiasen and Yohane Tobiasen, and Uyarnak's younger brother, Sini Tobiasen. And those two guys being on the Nuuk team, I guess it made the most of the pool in Nuuk to practice with. 

And in individual rolling, Uyarnak got 275 points, which is a very good score. His younger brother apparently had practiced exclusively for rolling like the whole year. And he set a new Greenlandic record of 312 points in rolling. 

I was very impressed with that. And so Ari did, I forget what his score was. Anyway, the three of them had made some sort of arrangement with the guys at Bolt Lamar, and they had the Bolt Lamar logo on the bottom of their kayaks, which is a great way to promote a brand name during rolling because everybody's looking at the kayak as it turns over. 

So Ari let me borrow his Bolt Lamar kayak, which I used for the team rolling competition. And I found it to be a very good rolling kayak. I was knocking out forward hand rolls in the skin-on-frame, which is pretty good. 

So I told Ari that next year, if I do individual rolling, I want to borrow his kayak. He said that was no problem.

If you look around on the YouTube KNR channel, you can find the team rolling, Iligiikkaarluni kingusaqattaarneq.


It's somewhere towards the end of that one hour segment. You can see our team rolling and you can hear Maligiaq talking about us and talking about me though. I have no idea what he said because it was all in Greenlandic. 

Well, I won't give you every last little detail of the competition, but towards the end, there was a special announcement made. They had arrangements to have the two people who won the competition, the individual highest scores for the Qajaq Man of the Year and the Woman of the Year, they would get their expenses paid to travel to Copenhagen and do a rolling demonstration during the Greenland in Tivoli event in the pond, like I used to do years ago with Qajaq Copenhagen. And they would also do a ropes demonstration in Tivoli, which we had tried for years to get that arranged. So somehow somebody had worked that out. So I was very excited about that because I already had my tickets arranged and I was telling, hey, whoever wins that, I'll be there. I'll be right there in Copenhagen to watch.

And without even the final relay race happening, it became quite clear that Uyarnak Tobiasen had the highest score, was pretty much a shoe-in to get the Katerslemmek award. And the woman who won was Ivinguak Olsson, the sister of Inutiak Olsson and daughter of what's her name, Angarslak, who she came to HRGF one year. And the father is, his nickname is Akkalu, I think.

Tell you all about Tivoli in Dubcast #72. And after I left Sisimiut I went to Nuuk. I'll tell you about that in a future podcast. 

But suffice it to say that the 2025 competition went quite well. And now let me return to my excursion to the park near the hotel in Copenhagen. Came across a gated entrance to some underground chamber. 

And apparently they have a statue sort of put in a covered over area. So it's all dark. There's a little light on the top where it shines in. 

I have pictures of it. I'll have Andrew put up on the links here. But it's a statue underground, some sort of monument thing like that. 

And you can stand at the gate. It's locked up. You can sort of see the shadow of the— a little bit faintly—of the statue that's in there.

And there's plaques. They're all in Danish. I'm not sure exactly what it's about.

Standing there, there's this amazing reverberating echo. When you say or any sound that comes in, it bounces around in the circular chamber in there and then comes back out this wonderful echo. Now I can give you an idea what that sounds like, but actually you have already heard this reverb sound because the song I did at the beginning of this Dubcast is a recording of me standing in front of that locked gate with microphones in there to record the reverb coming off. 

I'm listening to the instrumental track in headphones. And then when I do the mix, I bring that track in the mix and mix in my voice with this echo chamber thing. So this is not no digitally generated echo, but actual live open sound. 

All right. So now that you know what's behind the technical aspects of recordings there, I will play you the last verse and chorus of that same song. And you can enjoy the natural reverb of a live chamber. 

And it also means you hear some little bird sounds in there too, because you can't get rid of that sound when you're recording outside. 

[MUSIC]

Okay. Song originally done by a group called Tiu (T-I-U) from an album called Qalipaatit inugaannut.

It translates to colors, colors or something. I'm a little lost in the second word there. That CD is available at atlanticmusic.gl, although I realize now nobody buys CDs anymore, except for maybe me. 

You can do a digital download from the Atlantic Music site. And I would imagine that this CD is available on Spotify or iTunes somewhere. Look up the group Tiu (T-I-U) from Greenland. 

And the woman who sings the vocals can sing that song a whole lot better than I can. So do yourself a favor and listen to the original version. And in Greenland, I found out more about the music app that allows you to get the entire Greenlandic catalog, but it is still only available if you're in Denmark or Greenland.

And maybe at some point they'll get the U.S. or foreign version of that app going. We'll wait and see. 

Well, I took the ferry from Sisimiut to Nuuk, and I'll tell you about the six days I spent in Nuuk, and then the five days I spent in Copenhagen, and what I saw at Greenland and Tivoli, etc.

All that coming up in episode #72 on The Dubcast with Dubside.