.

No, not in Ukraine, unfortunately.

The war I’m referring to is, or should I say was one of my favorite Danish fun facts. Just to give you an idea, I wrote this post during the very first month of my blogging adventure, back when The Cove was meant just to talk about Denmark to give my friends and family a break.

To make a long story short, Hans Island is a ”big” rock somewhere North, in the Kennedy Channel,  between Canada and Greenland. And as you might know already, Denmark owns Greenland to this day (which brings us to another one of my top ten fun facts, when Donald Trump started saying he wanted the U.S. to buy Greenland, and Denmark’s Prime Minister just tweeted back – if my memory is good – ”Sorry, Greenland is not for sale!” LOL But I disgress…).

In June of 2005, apparently (nobody called me to let me know back then, so I solely rely on The Internets here) Canada and Denmark were discussing the border between the two countries.

Everything went well, up to the point when it was time to decide who would get Hans Island.

I’d like to remind you, here, that Hans Island is just 1290 METERS by 1199 METERS ”big”. And as you can see on the above picture, there’s strictly NOTHING on it.

But for some reason, my two favorite countries really really wanted to get the island, while not really really wanting to get into a fight, and the negociations just stalled, and no settlement was signed.

I know some countries that would have geared up with their favorite weapons and threatened the other side that they would reduce Hans Island to pebbles if they couldn’t get it (I won’t drop names here…).

Not Canada. Not Denmark. As a matter of fact, what they decided was to start the world’s most intricate and expensive drinking game. Every time a Canadian army boat would navigate to Hans Island, the crew planted a Canadian flag, and left a whisky bottle on site. Then, when a Danish vessel would sail by, they would take the Canadian flag and the bottle, and replace them by a Dannebrog, and a bottle of akvavit.

And the little game went on for seventeen years! By all means, the friendliest war EVER! How can you not love that??

This morning, Little Bro sent me a TikTok video, saying that the war was over. You probably stopped paying attention at the word ”TikTok”, and I had a similar reaction. How serious could this information be, right?

But I did my research, and it is true!

A couple of days back, members of the Canadian and Danish governments met again to settle the whole Hans Island ”conflict”. They could have flipped a coin, played a five out of seven rock-paper-scissors tournament, or even bet it over during a poker game (Yet another one of my top ten Danish fun facts… When the king of Norway lost the Faroe Islands to the king of Denmark after an inebriated game of poker – I have no proof for that story, I just want to believe it… And you can read more about it here).

I guess that now being in 2022, our leaders didn’t consider using humor to settle the fight for Hans Island. To my complete disappointment.

No. Not complete, because I do like what they actually settled for.

As of yesterday (or maybe two days ago), Denmark and Canada have split Hans Island in two equal parts. Creating the first ever land border between my home country and Vinkingland!!

How exciting is that?

Now I need a boat!