Take Her, She’s Yours for the Night

It feels great to be back home in my own office at the gonomad cafe. With my luxuriously large double monitors, my reliable fastinternet connection, and the fast paced energy of the cafe out front. Kent is off on another voyage, this time to Sydney and Tahiti, soon the old guy will be the bronzed warrior, having spent too much time in the Bondi Island sun. We look forward to his dispatches.

One of our interns Daryl stopped by, with a copy of the UMass Daily Collegian. Inside on page three was a fullpage article about the cafe, with our logo stretching across the page 14 inches long. Wow! Nice job, great coverage!

So tmorrow we’ll hang that up on the cafe wall. While I was in Greenland, there was plenty of time to snuggle next to your fellow travelers and get to know them. That’s what a cold climate does to people, brings them closer, to keep out the chill. I met a woman in Greenland who said that up there people had a different view of sex. That they would let a husband invite his friend to enjoy his wife for the night. ‘Go ahead, she’s yours,” he would say.

The normal course up here is for the girls to get pregnant at 15 or so. They rarely marry, the custom is to have kids then and merge later. Another tradition is for the first born to be a gift for the granparents to raise. Since they no doubt, the idea goes, miss having children around, you pass along son #1 to grandpa to raise.

We learned all this in a bar in Illulissat, the furthest north and the coldest of the places we visited in Greenland. A warm bar where beers were $9 and the snow slants sideways out the window.