I didn’t go to Nuuk for the postcard shot. I went there with Team USA Women’s Handball for the NACHC Women’s Championship, a qualifier for the IHF Women’s World Championship, in June 2023. We lost to Greenland on their home court, in front of a crowd that cared a lot more about the result than I did about my camera roll. These are field notes, not a guide: where I actually was, in the order it happened.
Getting there: 1–2 June
We left on 1 June: Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta, Atlanta to New York, an overnight flight to Reykjavík, then Icelandair on to Nuuk, scheduled to land at 9:45 the next morning. Nuuk is remote, full stop, and the route there makes the point before you land.
Nuuk: 2–13 June
The team stayed at Hotel Hans Egede in the centre of Nuuk, with meals at the restaurant on the hotel’s top floor.
3–4 June: training at Godthåbhallen
The first two days were training sessions at Godthåbhallen.
5–11 June: the tournament at Inussivik
The tournament ran from the opening ceremony on 5 June to the closing ceremony on 11 June, with every match at Inussivik. Five teams played it: the USA, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and host Greenland. Greenland won the whole thing and took their first-ever Worlds ticket. Historic for them, not our best week on the scoreboard.
The days after the tournament
We were supposed to leave on the 12th. Our flights out got changed, and a couple of teammates and I came close to being stranded. The upside was an unplanned extra day in the city. On a whim I got on a boat out of the old harbour into Nuuk Fjord, and a humpback surfaced close enough to the boat that everyone went quiet for a second, with icebergs drifting through the same water.
Nuuk itself is a small, working capital — traffic, a mall, teenagers on phones — set against fjord views that make no sense next to that normalcy. The colourful houses along the water earn the hype.
Getting out: 13 June
I flew Nuuk to Keflavík on the evening of 13 June and spent four days in Iceland before a training camp in Hungary. That stop is its own post: Iceland field notes, June 2023.
I did not expect Nuuk to be one of my favourite trips of the year, least of all on the back of a tournament we didn’t win. If your flights out of Greenland change, don’t panic — my best memory of the place came from the day I hadn’t planned.
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