'Inuit in Nunavut and Nunavik are much more humble than in Greenland.'

At first, people gave Victoria Simigaq, 31, strange looks when she wore an amauti to carry her young son, Gabriel, around the streets of Nuuk.

Life's much different on this side of the Davis Strait, compared with Simigaq's home in Kangirsuk, Nunavik. Here, people push their babies in strollers, rather than use the traditional hooded outfit so familiar in Canada's eastern Arctic.

"Is there a baby in there? Can he breathe? Is he going to die? So many stupid questions," quips Simigaq, who has lived in Nuuk for five years.

Inevitably, people would approach Simigaq in her amauti and speak in Greenlandic, which posed a problem.

"I didn't know Greenlandic, and I didn't know Danish, and I needed to know both," she says.

So she spent her first year and a half struggling to learn Greenlandic, which shares many words with Inuttitut, but is also different in important ways.

As Simigaq explains, "I broke the cup" in Inuttitut sounds like "you broke the cup" in Greenlandic. Misunderstandings were frequent at first.

"You really need to keep your ears open. It gets confusing," she says.

The language barrier made finding work difficult after her arrival.

For a while she worked for Ninety North Construction, a Canadian firm that was building homes in Nuuk.

More recently she started teaching English to elementary students. This year, she will teach high school.

The kids are always eager to hear about Nunavut and Nunavik, she says. "They're crazy about syllabics," she says – Greenlandic is written using Roman orthography.

Simigaq first visited Nuuk on vacation. She met Klaus Engelbrechtsen, a Danish teacher, who is now 44. They fell in love.

She returned a few months later, and stayed.

Today, their three-year-old son hobbles around their apartment and speaks Danish, Inuttitut, English and Greenlandic.

Greenlanders are more confident in their culture than Inuit in Canada's Arctic, Simigaq has found. Sometimes, this comes across as snobbery – an attitude she describes as, "Greenland is the best. It's the only cool Inuit country in the world."

"Inuit in Nunavut and Nunavik are much more humble than in Greenland," she says.

But living in Greenland has given Simigaq a broader idea of what being Inuk means.

That's why she wishes more exchanges occurred between Nunavut, Nunavik and Greenland.

"I want to see real exchanges. Not just cultural exchanges, but schools," she says.

But that's difficult with no regular flights across the Davis Strait. And with the recent start-up of a flight from Baltimore and Nuuk, the odds don't look good for reviving an air link between Nuuk and Iqaluit.

Simigaq buys fresh fish and caribou from Nuuk's outdoor market, but misses the simplicity of calling a friend in Kangirsuk and inviting them over to eat boiled fish. Such food sharing isn't common here.

Store-bought food is far better here, but she misses the taste of Kangirsuk's country food: nikkuk, pitsik, and "the one and only Kangirsuk Arctic char. It's the world's best."

What else? "Strawberry Twizzlers," she says.

She doesn't miss the cold winters back home.

"It's cold if it's -18 C," she says of Nuuk. In Kangirsuk, tempertures of -30 C aren't unusual in the winter.

She wishes more friends would visit. "They don't want to come over here anyway. They want to go to Montreal and shop."

Still, she hopes one day others follow her example.

"I want to dare people to do what I did."