DUBCAST #72: From Sisimiut to Tivoli: Qajaqs, Rock Shows, and and Coin Hunts

Episode 72 picks up where #71 left off—on the road (and sea) through Greenland and Denmark in July 2025. Highlights include the kayak championships in Sisimiut (with qajaatullamaak winners Ujarneq Tobiassen and Ivinnquaq Olsen), a quiet overnight aboard the Sarfaq Ittuk, and a laid‑back stay at Nuuk’s Seaman’s Home while the city buzzes with new construction. Dubside reconnects with friends old and new, previews forthcoming interviews with filmmaker Inuk Silis Høegh and cultural guide Mikkel Larsen, and drops music and culture gems: the TUSAS Music app, the rising Bolt Lamar streetwear brand, and a packed two‑day “Greenland in Tivoli” showcase featuring DDR (“Sussa!”), Naneruaq, and a duet set from Rasmus Lyberth and Julie Bertelsen. There’s even a coin‑collector detour—from the Apostle Islands U.S. quarter to Denmark’s 2010 kayak 20‑kroner. Plus: a shout‑out to a listener who recognized him in the crowd, and a nudge to check out the new Instagram: @the_dubcast_with_dubside.

LINKS:

Guide to Greenlandic culture: Introduction to how Greenlanders think and act. By Mikkel Larsen

Transcript

Welcome to The Dubcast with Dubside. This is Dubcast #72. You can think of it as the second part of #71. 

I'll tell you about the continuation of my trip to Greenland and Denmark in July of 2025. And I'll be referring to some subjects we've heard before on The Dubcast. Number 67, I talked about Greenland and Tivoli, as well as a band called DDR. And all the way back in #13, I also described Tivoli and a musician named Rasmus Lyberth. So we'll hear some more about them. 

Well, by the time you hear this, maybe I've got some of the details worked out better, but we've added a team member for the Dubcast, guy lives in Florida, and he's set up an Instagram account under the name Dubcast with Dubside. 

I was able to feed some photos to it from Greenland, and I'm not sure by now what the... what's up or what's not on there, but you can take a look. I was tasked once again with going to Greenland and buying a number of auction items for Qajaq USA event auctions to raise money for the subsequent year. And I've got... should have all these things that I got on that Instagram page somewhere. 

Now by the time you get this, some of them may have already been auctioned off at, say, the Minnesota event or the Michigan event, but that's about all I can say about it for now. Well, the competition in Sisimiut ends. That was the 19th or the 20th or somewhere in there, and the winners are for qajaatullamaak that year is Ujarneq Tobiassen in the men's category, and Ivinnquaq Olsen for the women's category. 

So years ago, they would schedule the competition around the ferry. That's the Arctic-Umiak line. The ship is called Sarfaq Ittuk, which makes runs up and down the coast of West Greenland, back and forth, and it takes maybe a week to get all the way from Qaqortoq up to Ilulissat. And so it passes through various towns, and they set the schedule so that it can bring the other teams to the town that the competition is held in. 

They usually have a big event when the ferry comes. All the local people get out, and the kayak group gets out there, and then there's often kayaks to be loaded off of the ferry that people have brought at the last minute for the competition. 

Well, this year, they did not set the competition schedule to make it convenient to use the ferry. If you took the ferry to Sisimiut, you'd get there maybe a week early, and on the way back, you could, right as the competition ended, a day or two later, you could take the ferry back to Nuuk, but getting there didn't work out that way. And I was told later that people are flying more these days. 

I guess there's more flights available, and it reduces the amount of time it takes that you have to take off work to go to the competition, because if you're going from Qaqortoq all the way up to, say, Ilulissat, it's going to take you, I think that's about three days each way, so that would be almost another week plus the competition. You'd have to take off like double the amount of time to attend. 

So I took the ferry back from Sisimiut to Nuuk, and on this ferry, there was not a single other person involved in kayaking. No other team members, nobody. It was all, you know, a bunch of tourists and some Greenlanders, but I was rather shocked not to find any other kayak folks on board. Nevertheless, I had a relaxing voyage overnight, and it arrived in Nuuk at 6 a.m. I thought I had put the word out that I'd be arriving at that time, but getting off the ferry, there was no one there waiting to take me anywhere. 

But I had reservations at the Seaman's Home, which is the hotels they cater to sailors all over Greenland. They've been there for a long time, and it's kind of a mid-range price, not the expensive hotels, but a step up from a hostel. So the Seaman's Home is within walking distance of the ferry dock, so I walked over to the Seaman's Home, and I had to wait to check in, because 6 a.m., they're not ready for a room yet, so there's more waiting involved there. I was able to check the bag and store it in the foyer there, and then go out and walk around and come back when the room was ready. 

Well, Nuuk is booming with activity, particularly in regards to construction. There are entire sections of the city that weren't even there when I first started going to Nuuk, so things are happening.

And I was trying to tell people they could call me and leave a message at the Seaman's Home for me, since I'm still not walking around with a cell phone, and that didn't quite work out. But one of the days I was there, I wanted to just connect with people, somebody that I knew, so I figured I'll just go for a walk, and I will walk to Christian D. Eusfossen's place. I don't, I couldn't remember exactly which house it was, but I knew where, that's a mile or two towards the airport. 

So I went on that walk, and I got to that area, and I couldn't find him, didn't see anything, but on the way back, a car passed me on the road and slowed down and stopped, and out got Paninnguaq Korneiliussen, who we met very briefly when I described her attendance at the Delmarva Paddlers Retreat two years ago, and I didn't have time to do a full interview with her then, so one of my objectives in Nuuk was to do that full interview. I wasn't expecting to run into her necessarily, but good enough. So I had a connection there, so I arranged to meet her the next day, I think it was, and went to her place and met some of her children, and you'll hear that interview in the future. 

I also had on my list to meet up with a guy named Inuk Silis Høegh, who is a filmmaker and artist, whose father is the noted author of many books, Silis Høegh, and his mother is Aka Høegh, who is a very influential artist in Greenland, and I did get that interview. We went out on his boat, just sat in the harbor, a nice quiet place, and talked to him for half an hour or so while recording it. 

Then in the downtown center of Nuuk, I got to the Bolt Lamar store. I described the Bolt Lamar, these two guys that made this clothing line, and they have done very well. They got their logo all over the place. I think I have a picture on the Instagram about, it's a taxi with Bolt Lamar pasted across the side, and they had, I described on the kayaks, they had their Bolt Lamar logo, and so I didn't get a full interview with one of the guys I was talking to there, but I asked him about, the Bolt Lamar name comes from, they're two of their influential heroes, I guess you could say. 

There's Hussein Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, and Kendrick Lamar, the rapper, and I said, do either of those two guys know about your brand, the name of your brand, and they said no, not that they were aware of it. I said, well, someday they'll find out. It'd be cool to see one of them wearing a Bolt Lamar t-shirt, and the guy said, oh, that would be awesome.

See, in my mind, Bolt Lamar is on that level of public awareness, but that's not how the general public feels, but actual, Kendrick Lamar is a big superstar, and he's got endorsement deals, has a big, huge name, as is Hussein Bolt. These Bolt Lamar guys are just a little Greenland thing, but they're growing, and they're destined for bigger things, I think. 

I stopped into Atlantic Music to see Christian Elsner and hang out with him for a bit, and so let me tell you about the app you can get. Well, you can't get it unless you're in Greenland or Denmark, but it's called TUSAS Music, T-U-S-A-S-S, and it's an app you get. You download it, and then that gives you access to the whole Greenland music catalog, and it costs 61 kroners a month. I'm not too big on these ones. 

You have to pay every month, but I suppose if you're supporting Greenland musicians, and they get a much better return on that than they do on iTunes or Spotify, it'd be a good way to support them, except that we're still in the U.S. We can't get this yet, but for all you Danish listeners to the podcast, yeah, if you haven't got it already, TUSAS Music, and support the Greenland musicians. 

Now, I got to hang out with Maligiaq a little bit in Sisimiut, but we had made plans to, when I got to Nuuk, he'd have me over for dinner and show me the new place he's living, and he's got a new boat, I think, as well. Well, I misread my own flight schedule, and I was actually getting to Nuuk two days after I told him I would, so he was gone on some other trip he had, so I did not get to meet him again, unfortunately. 

Well, while I stayed there at the Seaman’s Home near the harbor, there was two or three maybe cruise ships that came through, and this is the new Nuuk. You've got tourists all around in the summertime, and these special buses, they're regular public buses, but there's a whole another set of buses, “Greenland Excursions" or something like that, that some tourist group coordinated with the cruise ships run, so it's, Nuuk is changing. 

And the last day I had to leave early in the morning, the flight was what, nine o'clock or so, so I wanted to get to the airport at like six or seven, in case there was a long line there, have some extra time. 

So I started walking. I had figured out to take the regular city bus, which is like 30 kroners. A taxi ride would be at least three times, four times that. 

So I started walking to the bus stop from the Seaman’s Home up the hill, and a car stops, and somebody I know calls out and says, “Hey, where are you going?” So I got a ride to the airport, very nice, and made it on time for the flight without any major issues popping up. 

So with the time change, got there late at night after 10 or 11 p.m., but checked into the hotel there. It's about maybe two blocks from Tivoli, which is two blocks from the train station, so I had to take a train from the airport to the train station in the center of Copenhagen, and then to the hotel. 

Had made prior arrangements for the next day to meet up with Mikkel Larsen. I may have mentioned him before. He taught English in Greenland for about five years, ending maybe 2016 or so, and he’s quite a wealth of information about Greenland culture.

He has actually posted online his Cultural Guide to Greenland, and I'll have Andrew post a link to it in the show notes there, but he extensively talks about how to navigate your way through Greenland culture, and based on his experience and things, quite informative. So we had a good long talk. I recorded him for an interview. You'll hear that as a special guest episode at some point in the future. 

So the Greenland Tivoli event was two days, July 31st and August 1st, and unlike last year, I did not buy a ride ticket. I was trying to save money, and I'd been on the roller coasters and all that, so I took it easy on that, and I found out that admission for without the rides for an adult is 170, 180, something like that, 180 Danish kroners, but they had a rate, maybe they had it last year, I didn't know, but for 200 kroners, you could get a two-day pass just for Greenland in Tivoli. 

So that was what I did. So 200 kroners is what, like $35 or so, and my hotel was close enough so I could run back there to eat some evening meal at four or five o'clock and then get back in time not to miss things. I was back and forth quite a bit in those two days. 

Well, as I mentioned before, the two winners of the kayak competition in Greenland did get to go to Tivoli and do rolling demonstrations in the pond and do a rope demonstration, and they had a special announcement on the main stage where they brought them up and introduced them to the crowd, and it was all in Greenlandic or Danish, so I couldn't catch exactly what they said, but in Greenland, when you get the award for qajaatullamaak, there's maybe 200 people in the room. At the stage in Tivoli, there's probably 500 to 1,000 people watching, so it really feels like you've accomplished something, and I was very happy to see that. So the two people concerned here, Ivinnquaq and Ujarneq, they took turns. 

They only had one kayak available, and it was actually a fiberglass kayak, and so the one did the rolling, and then right after that, the other one did the ropes, and they switched over for the following day. Now, I mentioned how Kayak Copenhagen used to arrange to do that demonstration, and we used to do—I got involved in that years ago—we used to do three per day, and back then, it was a three-day Greenland and Tivoli event, so there was nine different times we would do a rolling demonstration in the pond there, and we couldn't get the rope thing hooked up, but finally, it happened this year. I was glad to see that. 

Well, watching this rolling demonstration happening and trying to get some good pictures of it, somebody next to me taps me on the shoulder, and it turns out to be someone who used to do it, roll with me in the pond back years ago when Kayak Copenhagen did it, this woman named Helle Thun, and so I got—it was nice to see her again, and so I was able to connect her with Johanne Tobiasen, which is—she's the president of Qaannat Kattuffiat, and she came there to Tivoli because her son was there, the featured winner of the competition. And so Kayak Copenhagen had sort of fallen by the wayside. It's still an active club, they're members, but the whole Greenland element had sort of fallen away, and now they were just—I think Helle told me that a lot of people with baidarkas would be there. They still have kayaks people built, but they weren't necessarily Greenland kayaks, and so Helle and Johanne started talking to each other and sort of made a reconnection of Kayak Copenhagen to Qaannat Kattuffiat, and Helle said that next year they can supply some real skin-on-frame kayaks to the Tivoli event so they can have real Greenland kayaks. 

And the ropes setup was interesting. They constructed a wooden rope scaffolding sort of platform. We have those in the U.S. We've built Qajaq USA ones, but this one wasn't built with any of that expertise, so it was a little rickety. 

So they had—all around Tivoli you've got these uniformed Tivoli people with a nice Tivoli hat and things. There's some security police type people, there's other ones that are just like, you know, staff people. So they had four of these Tivoli staff people, one standing on each corner of this rope structure to keep it from, you know, flipping over to keep it stable. So that was an interesting touch. 

And there was a good solid crowd of people watching both the rolling and the ropes. And so it got some good exposure for the kayak events in Greenland. 

Well, if I had thousands of listeners in Copenhagen, it stands to reason that dozens of them would be there in Tivoli waiting to see me in person. But I don't have thousands of people listening. 

In relative terms, I'm a nobody. So it was a bit of an ego boost that I needed for one person during the time I was there in Tivoli to come up to me and say, “Excuse me, are you Dubside?" And so it was a Polish woman who lives in Denmark. And I would like to send a big shout out to Magdalena and her partner Gregory.

I gave them each a Dubcast with Dubside guitar pick. I guess I do need to see every so often some tangible evidence that people are listening to The Dubcast. 

Well, over the course of the two days on the music bill, there was that band DDR, who was there last year, I mentioned them. And there was a band called Naneruaq, who Paninnguaq Korneiliussen ikes that band quite a bit. And there's some older guys. So this is, I guess, maybe kind of a reunion kind of a thing. 

So they were appearing on stage. And the feature on the second evening was Rasmus Lyberth, who I mentioned before in episode 13, and singing with Julie Bertelsen. And Julie is one of the other top singers in Greenland. And she is, as I've mentioned, the daughter-in-law of Kenneth Høegh. 

Episode 67, you can hear me talking to the guys in this band DDR on the walkway there in Tivoli, and asking them to play this one song I really like. And I described how they didn't play that song. 

Well, this year, I saw them again, and I asked them again, and they did play that song. And since this is a live recording of it, I will play it for you. And you can hear that opening riff that I tried to represent back in episode 67. 

So here's the real thing. 

[MUSIC]

I realize the quality of that recording does leave something to be desired. All the more reason for you to seek out the studio version of that song. 

The band is called DDR, spelled with capital letters. The song is called Sussa!, spelled S-U-S-S-A, exclamation point. And the album is called Kaar!, spelled K-A-A-R, exclamation point. 

All right, the feature act, the second night, was Julie Bertelsen with Rasmus Lyberth, two of the very finest vocalists that Greenland has. And I was very excited to see them. I talked about in episode 13, the song that Rasmus Lyberth sings, my favorite song of his. 

And I was hoping to hear that again. He did not do that song. They did, they had worked out some material together, the two of them, and it was some very good music. 

The strange thing was that they were scheduled to go on at seven o'clock, even though I thought they would be the highlight of the evening. It turns out that Tivoli has this very popular Friday night rock concert series. And August 1st happened to fall on a Friday. 

And they do not preempt their rock show for Greenland in Tivoli. So they ended the feature Greenland stuff by eight o'clock or so. And I noticed they were walking around that they had the stage set up in, you know, full riot configuration with the crowd control things. 

You can't even get close to the stage, which I wasn't used to that from years before. And the place starts getting really packed with people. Now, normally it is crowded by the end of the show there, but this is more extreme than I'm used to. 

And I'm looking, and these are not Greenlandic people. They're all like Danish folks. And so they were going to have the featured rock show at nine o'clock or something like that for another two hours.

And the Greenlanders can hang out for that, but it's not really going to feature Greenlandic stuff. And so I look at the program, and the featured act is called TV2. I recall that name, TV2. 

I bought years, probably 10 years before that, there was a, in the store, it said TV2, and it said something about Greenland, Greenland Greatest, something or other. And it had Christian and Frederick Elsner on it. So I, you know, I bought it. Okay. And I figured this is, this is a video with the Nanook brothers are in it somehow. So I get it home. 

It's not a video at all. It's an audio recording. There's a band named TV2, and they did a concert in Nuuk. This is back in 2010 or 15 or something. And this is a recording of that. And so they had some special featured people. 

They had the guys from Nuuk on one song, and they had Nina on another song, and somebody else, a couple of Greenland performers. But listening to the CD, it's all pretty much in Danish. There's some English, but they're not really singing in Greenlandic. 

The guy, the headline guy is just saying qujanaq between the songs. So I didn't really pay that much attention to it. But I suppose in Denmark, TV2 is a big deal. 

Now, if you look up TV2, you have to get it straightened out between, there are plenty of TV channels using that designation, but you have to look up TV2 Band, Danish pop rock band. And listening to my CD now, yeah, I mean, they do some catchy stuff. It's not bad. It's just not what I'm interested in. It's not in Greenlandic. 

So when Julie and Rasmus finished performing, I just went home. I wanted to have their sound in my head, not the sound of TV2. But I imagine it was a well-attended show and people had a good time and went home at 10:30, 11 o'clock with a nice evening. But I went to bed early because I had to get up early the next day to catch the plane back to the U.S. 

And I'll give you the short version of the return trip. 

The flight to New York was fine. The little flight from New York back to Washington, D.C. had a four or five hour delay and I ended up having to get some food in the airport and paying too much money for that. So they gave me change. I was using my U.S. dollars at that point. And they gave me a quarter. And it is my favorite U.S. quarter because it has a guitar on it.

And this is the Tennessee State quarter. It also has a fiddle and a trumpet on it. And since we're talking about interesting coins, there is a coin with a kayak on it, U.S. currency. 

And this is the quarter, 25-cent piece commemorative of the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin. And to save you from looking at your change for the next year waiting for this quarter to turn up in your hand, you can go online and see a picture of it. Just type in U.S. quarter Apostle Islands or U.S. quarter Tennessee and you can see what those look like. 

Now there is another commemorative coin that you might be interested in. And this is a 20-kroner coin. And in Denmark and Greenland, the 20-kroner coin, that's what, like three dollars or so. 

And in 2010, they put out a special commemorative edition. And it has a kayak, a nice Greenland kayak, and there's an umiak in the background. And that coin is, I think you can get it on eBay for like seven bucks or so.

But whenever I'm in Greenland or in Denmark, I'm always checking my 20-kroner coins. I found one one time, but I've never seen one again. 

Now when Greenland gets full independence, they will have the right to coin their own money. And imagine what kind of commemorative things will be on Greenland money. Probably some great seal hunters of the past. 

So how about before I go, I give you just a piece of the actual band Naneruaq doing a song, Sila Perseqaaq [blizzard], which I attempted to do on my own in episode 58. But here's the real thing live at Tivoli. 

[MUSIC]

All right, the band is called Naneruaq, and the song is called Sila Perseqaaq [blizzard], from a CD entitled Aqqusineq, which was done in 1985. So 40 years later, there's still some version of the band able to perform live.

And you can hear how the audience there in Tivoli is singing along. The band was very well received. Coming up in episode #73 will be some topic which I haven't really decided on yet.

But I've got such a backlog of special guest interviews recorded but not yet aired, which we will get to spaced out every two weeks or sooner on The Dubcast with Dubside.

I would like to thank once again all the people that donated to the GoFundMe effort to make it possible for me to go to Greenland and to Copenhagen and stay at a decent hotel and bring you these stories, interviews and recordings. Thank you.