The highlight for me for our day at sea on the way to Greenland was the hands-on cooking class I took. There were only 8 of us in the class. The menu was Crisp Sausage Cakes with Red Wine Prunes, Salmon Coulibiac (salmon and a rice filling in puff pastry) with beurre blanc sauce and broccoli, and Apple Flappen (apple turnovers). I was part of the dessert crew, and our turnovers were beautiful. Although we are not allowed to eat what we make due to food safety rules, we did taste our apple/raisin filling (just to be certain it was cooked) and it was delicious. After the class, we were served the same meal we had cooked, but prepared by the Tourneau chef, in the Pinnacle Grill restaurant along with a couple glasses of wine. I think the cooking classes are one of the best deals on the ship. For $29 you get the class, a bottle of water, an apron, lunch and wine.

I had made the arrangements for a boat tour to the Greenland ice cap with Blue Ice Explorers for our stop in Qaqortoq, Greenland . There were a total of 24 people going on the tour and it was a tender port, so I asked at the front desk if I could make special arrangements for my group to tender in together. They were more than happy to facilitate that and asked that we gather in the Mix bar at 10:00 AM (the scheduled arrival time). Once we had our group together they would give me tender tickets for all of us. So I had to call everyone on the tour and ask them to meet at 9:45 in the Mix. As it turned out, we had an early arrival in Qaqortoq, but having everyone together worked out well. We all took the tender together and although we ended up having to wait almost an hour for our boats, everyone was there and we were able to get on the tour without a hitch. The only issue was that because we were in port early, we had to wait for the operator to arrive. He had scheduled our departure for an hour after our arrival to allow time for tendering. Because he wasn't there when we arrived, I was a little worried, but the manager at the gift shop/visitors' center called him and the boats were on the way . We took advantage of the time to look over the harbor area and check out some of the stone carvings that Qaqortoq is known for. The carvings are the Stone and Man project, 24 carvings done by 18 artists in 1993-94.

Greenland, the largest island in the world (Antarctica and Australia are larger, but are considered continents, not islands), has the second largest land based ice cap in the world, with Antarctica being the largest. The ice cap on Greenland all came from snow, so is fresh water ice, not sea ice, like the Arctic ice cap. It seems odd to say, but it is not "fresh" fresh water ice, but very old fresh water ice, as some of the glacial ice is thought to be thousands of years old. We had beautiful weather -- it was a clear, sunny day, with temperatures predicted to be in the mid-40's.

We had two 12 person boats for our tour and they were very nice -- warm inside and comfortable seats. The water was pretty smooth, and even at fairly high speeds, the ride was amazingly smooth . It was about a 90 minute ride to the Twin Glaciers, part of the Greenland ice cap. On the way there we saw a whale spouting, a couple of eagles and more and more icebergs as we got closer to the glaciers. The icebergs were awesome in every sense of the word. Some were as large as a hotel and the blue of the ice was amazing. They took our boats very close to one of the glaciers -- so close, in fact, that we would have been in trouble had a large iceberg calved. We heard lots of glacial cracking and creaking, saw and heard large amounts of water running from the melting ice and saw a couple small icebergs calve. I even saw one big chunk of ice pop out from under the water at the glacier's edge. They took our small boats through an area filled with ice near the glacier -- but that was only the beginning of our iceberg experiences. We took a different route back and on the way we passed many more icebergs, with our boat captain taking us very close to them. In one spot, they took us right on top of the submerged part of a huge iceberg and then put us so close to the part above the water that we could touch it! They collected melt water and ice from the iceberg so we could have a taste of the ancient water . Some say the glacial water is the Fountain of Youth; others say it works like Viagra. Karl and I both tried it and thought it tasted like water. LOL!

There were more beautiful and amazing sights as we made our way back to Qaqortoq: many more icebergs, a small fishing village, a fjord where our boat captain had a small cabin and a close encounter with a whale (he was no more than maybe 100 feet away). In total, the boat tour lasted for about 4.5 hours and we enjoyed every minute of it!

When we got back to Qaqortoq, we went back into the visitor's center, so I could buy my Christmas ornament (I got a keychain with the Greenland flag), then took a little walk to the town square. The square had lots of local people out enjoying the sunshine, including kids with their hands in the water of the fountain. We took a peek inside the fish market. The only fish for sale was Atlantic char, but they also had fresh and dried seal meat and dried whale. We also checked out the bakery/variety store. The prices were not much higher than at home for the things we recognized. They also had some packaged foods and bakery items that we could not identify.

 After our little walk, we went back to the ship. After dinner in the dining room, we decided to spend another evening in the pool and hot tub. We went to bed early as we planned to be up early for the narrated scenic cruising in Prins Christian Sund beginning at 6:30 AM.