Finland Finds
The straight flight to Helsinki operates only in the summer months when 90% of the Finnair airbus is filled with tiny Japanese and Chinese travelers, intent on seeing the north as fast as possible. Ladies in sunhats and men in all weather jackets. They are so tidy and small and obedient, standing for ages in a straight line at the boarding gate while others crowd around and during the flight they took out their food bags, slurped noodles and spread sandwiches with chopsticks, drank their bottled water and promptly fell asleep! A delight to travel with.
Business Class had only 4 seats, and there were 3 Arab looking people on them. The only ones who bother to pay twice the price for the short flight.
The thing I like about summer flights is the charm of gliding through exuberant, high and fluffy cumulus clouds. One feels like a bird!
The landing was the smoothest I have ever had, like a feather floating down, never knew it could be done so well! Enough praise about Finnair pilots with lovely names like Esa-Pekka Saarijärvi, quite a mouthful when he introduced himself. As we cruised down, I counted over 50 lakes, big and small, that glittered and dotted the land. Truly, 60.000 lakes is a poor estimate for Finland!
A special kind of butterfly flutters in your innards when going to the country that is really yours, the one that bore you, bred you and indelibly left its mark on you. Memories surface, long forgotten, as buildings and people and stretches of scenes come alive with bygone years. A bus terminal reminds you of those exiting evenings standing in the lamplight in a blizzard, holding mothers hand, waiting for the bus to take you somewhere. It could be anywhere, your eyes dancing with the snowflakes…Helsinki has grown since then, the bus terminal moved underground, but the same old yellow building is still there.
A slow re-stitching of time.
Just one of so many moments that comes to mind as I walked the streets again.
I was treated like a princess by my cousin and my “Finnish sisters”, there they were, welcoming me with champagne and strawberries at the ready, hugs and plans for a very busy 2 weeks. Sleep would be an optional matter, whenever we had time for it! One cant waste summer nights, let the light slip through closed eye-lids; no, eyes open and wide!
Lurre, the dog, jumped about like on crack, and welcomed me as a family member at once. “One is only allowed to come, never leave.” is his philosophy I was told. When I was packing my suitcase to go back, he lay in front of me, eyes unwaveringly focused on it, with such a look of “How can you do this to me, you of all people” I started to feel guilty.
Mornings dawned sunny and bright through the white curtains, and we set off daily, if no party was held here that is, which of course there was and food was prepared amidst laughter and sips of champagne which more than once caused a few problems, like forgetting stuff on the stove and how long things were supposed to set…but it always came out ok in the end and the house filled with happy faces. Brita has gone through a horrid, severe cancer treatment and come out shining, and this was a much more her celebration, I felt, than mine coming there.
Visits to all my “sisters” were made and that meant in the Karelian fashion where they all come from, that a visit lasts at least 7 hours. “One never pops in, goodness no, a pop in is only 3 hours or so!” we told a slightly irate husband who was supposed to pick one of us up. No manners theses Finns, what do they know?
Wonderful food was served, made so lovingly, strawberries floated in bubbly glasses, terraces decked with flowers and servile husbands or sons were put to work for our benefit. They slaved over washing up and potato peeling and refilling of our glasses, as the stories bounced from one to the next and new ones were born. Pipa, one of my sisters, lives in a Golf community, or whatever they are called, and took me for a hair-raising ride in her cart, showing the rolling green vistas, saunas and restaurants at your disposal if willing to pay through your nose. Her life is half on the course, half in her home, unlike Pirkko who entirely empties her heart into her summer plot of veggies and flowers grown like artwork round a tiny hut she emigrates to in spring.
What I noticed was the sure, artistic perception of Finnish design everywhere. From the simple to the expensive it never waivered. From the ascetic timber houses in Turku’s outdoor museum, which is the only one in Scandinavia to have received the famous "La Pomme d'Or" or "The Golden Apple" from FIJET, where houses and streets are exactly as they were 200 years ago, interiors had a harmony as perfect as the ones in rich embassies. So my “sisters” all in their way had made their homes into works of the heart.
Trawling through the Art Exhibition of Helene Schjerfbeck,
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcPmTil_Ie4&feature=related)
one of my favourite Finnish artists at the “Ateneum” in its echoing halls, I felt the same kinship of how important it is to make beauty out of absolutely anything. From sorrow, from love, from a worn piece of clothing. From everything you encounter.
The light evenings passed along the sea, watching the sun guild the round turrets of the Cathedral in Helsinki, sipping a warm red with a raspberry tart at some restaurant by the shore, watching the ferries from Sweden pass by. A tableau with wooden boats and huge cruisers lit by the last rays of the sun.
One week end I took the train to Turku, where I spent two of my most fragile and emotionally dramatic teen age years at a boarding school by the sea, with apple orchards and cliffs and hidden paths all around. We were to have a small reunion with some who had shared the same fate well over 40 years ago.
The train was a delight, with 2 stories and loos with a hand-shower, a charming lady selling coffee and buns from a wagon with friendly talk to boot, and of course running on time to the second. I asked if the train was on time. “Well, what else would it be on?” I got the answer and never asked again.
I stayed with a friend who lodged me in his guest cabin with a sauna, where I could run down to the sea in the mornings and sit, sipping my tea by the sailboat moored there, listening to the rustle of rushes and birds calling. An idyll hard to beat.
On the morning of the reunion a storm was brewing. Spruced to party, we ran in bucketing rain and winds from the car to the old girls dormitory for the party, where the school dining room was and where we all had sat down to eat three times a day all from porridge to newly baked rye bread and home brewed “kalja”, a slightly alcoholic drink I am surprised was served at all, but only on Fridays.
It was such fun meeting people you had not seen since you were 18, and there were unavoidable moments when one had to resort to “I am so sorry, I am Immi but who are you?” After kindly indentifying themselves one could of course see at once who they were! Some had changed not at all it seemed, same hairstyle, laughter, teeth. Oh, yes, I remember those teeth. He is now a dentist. One outspoken lady, she had always been this, told me as she circled me “Well you never had thick hair, did you? And did you not use to shave?” Felt like telling her she never had a huge you know what either! But lovely to see her, never the less. Shame more could not make it, as the food was very good, the conversation riveting, bar a few all too enthusiastic “this is my life” performances, and the highlight was our old English teacher, 95 who came along propelled by her two crutches she despised, and asked to be forgiven that she did not remember what we were all called!
It was a shame the weather was so bad; I would have wanted to roam around the old paths, go down to the cliffs we secretly climbed down to as the “girls dean” was afraid of the dark and never budged from her room after that. We boated on the sea eating bits of bread with butter we had nicked from the kitchen cupboard somebody had left open, and felt as if we owned the world!
Later two of our classmates who now are teachers there, showed us around the classrooms and the renovated boys dorm. Gone were the chalk boards, replaced now by computers, but there lay the same atmosphere of wintry mornings and smelly socks in the air. The gyms high windows still showed the sky, into which I had stared through boring morning worships, when all I could think of was the last algebra test or if some boy had smiled at me or not. Hymns and prayers? Just background to my inner turmoil. And was my bum sticking out? Happy days though.
Hugs and goodbyes and promises of Facebook contact ensued as goodbyes were said. As we drove away, I felt there melted into the mist my youthful years and now I faced my real age again. For a short while I had been a teenager.
The last week was partly spent at my cousin’s summer cabin that lies close to the Russian border. The lake Saimaa is huge with myriads of peninsulas and bays and islands, some skirted with summer cabins and saunas, like “Tuparanta” Brita’s father had built after the war.
From here are memories as cherished and delightful as the strawberries and blueberries we picked as children, strung on grass stems and eaten with reverence; My auntie washing her rugs in the lake almost naked, my uncle smoking his pipe like a gangster on the balcony in the twilight, us sisters jumping into the lake after sauna and trying to talk under water, all of us sleeping in a row on the floor of the attic. I slept this time in the new guest hut, rebuilt from the playhouse it once was, and could see and hear the lake at my feet, its waters gently lapping along the shore, beckoning for a swim.
It’s a little paradise, the water coming from a spring in the forest along a hose one plugs with a stick when not in use, by the wood shed and loo. You fill buckets for the kitchen use from there, otherwise all washing of oneself and clothes are done in the lake. The loo is a little shed with the seat carved years and years ago, now smooth with the use of many bums, and after the job, one sprinkles sawdust over ones product; thus good fertilizer is made! Neat.
When we first came, before setting to with stuff like boiling potatoes, we sat down on the veranda with tiny wild strawberries in bubbly glasses, letting the many hours of driving melt away and synchronise ourselves with this peaceful place. The turn off from reality was as sudden as the tiny, overgrown road we bumped along, flattening the grass, from the main road. We were in our own little heaven.
Everything takes longer here, but so it should, as time seems liberally to fill every hollow. For your morning cup of tea you first put your boots on, trot to the kitchen in the cabin, get a cup and then trot to the hose, unplug it and wait for the clear, sweet water to fill the cup. Then you trot back into the kitchen and put the saucepan on, make tea and walk down to the sauna and sit by the quiet lake waiting for morning to come. Since you have got up far too early to catch the light on the lake! Birdsong fills the air and last nights towels are dry, ready for the morning swim after Brita has got up. We don’t swim alone, well brought up from childhood as we both are. The first chill is quite unnerving, but its quite warm, +21, and soon the silky water feels less frigid. Shivering we wrap ourselves in towels and drink more hot tea, the day has begun!
Lappeenranta is not that far away, and we had to visit the market every day to get fresh veggies, fish, berries, bread and to sample the famous “väty”, a hotdog that is nothing like one: the bread is a fluffy kind of deep fried doughnut, not sweet, filled with boiled eggs, salty dill cucumbers, meat in rice, beetroots and ham. Sounds most odd, but with cool beer it’s the best in town. Nowhere in the world is it made but here. For good reasons some might say, but I loved it.
The markets in Finland overflow with fresh peas, strawberries, rye bread, cakes, flowers and choice potatoes picked lovingly from the ground this very morning, and old books and carrots and home grown tomatoes. “Outside, in the sun?” “Never otherwise, lady, never otherwise”. And the baked bread “Stone oven in backyard never cools down these days…”Here people really produce things for the market themselves, a rare thing and utterly wonderful.
Russian tourists come by the busloads, “we have money now, so we come” they tell you, and forage through the shops like locusts carrying the spoil back into busses. Good for business, these babushkas, who now dress in revealing dresses and high heals, sipping coffee at the cafes.
The last evening I was there we were specially invited to the opening of the Espoo Art centre for modern, Nordic art, and thus we stood there with others who either knew, or pretended to know about art, sipping white wine as the artists were introduced and their excellence expounded. Well-known figures I did not know were pointed out to me, as we wandered and inspected the goods. I liked best the Icelandic designer who had made a wedding dress from black and white feathers, a black veil on a bald head and holding a bunch of dark roses. Brita looked at it for a long time and said “Its like going through cancer. You don’t know if you are going to a wedding or a funeral.”
Clouds hung low as we drove early to the airport. Finnair was, as usual bang on time, in fact we lifted off the tarmac a few minutes before schedule and arrived 20min early to Bergen. Soft rain fell. Suomi sounds like soft rain…
Back to Traveldoors
Business Class had only 4 seats, and there were 3 Arab looking people on them. The only ones who bother to pay twice the price for the short flight.
The thing I like about summer flights is the charm of gliding through exuberant, high and fluffy cumulus clouds. One feels like a bird!
The landing was the smoothest I have ever had, like a feather floating down, never knew it could be done so well! Enough praise about Finnair pilots with lovely names like Esa-Pekka Saarijärvi, quite a mouthful when he introduced himself. As we cruised down, I counted over 50 lakes, big and small, that glittered and dotted the land. Truly, 60.000 lakes is a poor estimate for Finland!
A special kind of butterfly flutters in your innards when going to the country that is really yours, the one that bore you, bred you and indelibly left its mark on you. Memories surface, long forgotten, as buildings and people and stretches of scenes come alive with bygone years. A bus terminal reminds you of those exiting evenings standing in the lamplight in a blizzard, holding mothers hand, waiting for the bus to take you somewhere. It could be anywhere, your eyes dancing with the snowflakes…Helsinki has grown since then, the bus terminal moved underground, but the same old yellow building is still there.
A slow re-stitching of time.
Just one of so many moments that comes to mind as I walked the streets again.
I was treated like a princess by my cousin and my “Finnish sisters”, there they were, welcoming me with champagne and strawberries at the ready, hugs and plans for a very busy 2 weeks. Sleep would be an optional matter, whenever we had time for it! One cant waste summer nights, let the light slip through closed eye-lids; no, eyes open and wide!
Lurre, the dog, jumped about like on crack, and welcomed me as a family member at once. “One is only allowed to come, never leave.” is his philosophy I was told. When I was packing my suitcase to go back, he lay in front of me, eyes unwaveringly focused on it, with such a look of “How can you do this to me, you of all people” I started to feel guilty.
Mornings dawned sunny and bright through the white curtains, and we set off daily, if no party was held here that is, which of course there was and food was prepared amidst laughter and sips of champagne which more than once caused a few problems, like forgetting stuff on the stove and how long things were supposed to set…but it always came out ok in the end and the house filled with happy faces. Brita has gone through a horrid, severe cancer treatment and come out shining, and this was a much more her celebration, I felt, than mine coming there.
Visits to all my “sisters” were made and that meant in the Karelian fashion where they all come from, that a visit lasts at least 7 hours. “One never pops in, goodness no, a pop in is only 3 hours or so!” we told a slightly irate husband who was supposed to pick one of us up. No manners theses Finns, what do they know?
Wonderful food was served, made so lovingly, strawberries floated in bubbly glasses, terraces decked with flowers and servile husbands or sons were put to work for our benefit. They slaved over washing up and potato peeling and refilling of our glasses, as the stories bounced from one to the next and new ones were born. Pipa, one of my sisters, lives in a Golf community, or whatever they are called, and took me for a hair-raising ride in her cart, showing the rolling green vistas, saunas and restaurants at your disposal if willing to pay through your nose. Her life is half on the course, half in her home, unlike Pirkko who entirely empties her heart into her summer plot of veggies and flowers grown like artwork round a tiny hut she emigrates to in spring.
What I noticed was the sure, artistic perception of Finnish design everywhere. From the simple to the expensive it never waivered. From the ascetic timber houses in Turku’s outdoor museum, which is the only one in Scandinavia to have received the famous "La Pomme d'Or" or "The Golden Apple" from FIJET, where houses and streets are exactly as they were 200 years ago, interiors had a harmony as perfect as the ones in rich embassies. So my “sisters” all in their way had made their homes into works of the heart.
Trawling through the Art Exhibition of Helene Schjerfbeck,
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcPmTil_Ie4&feature=related)
one of my favourite Finnish artists at the “Ateneum” in its echoing halls, I felt the same kinship of how important it is to make beauty out of absolutely anything. From sorrow, from love, from a worn piece of clothing. From everything you encounter.
The light evenings passed along the sea, watching the sun guild the round turrets of the Cathedral in Helsinki, sipping a warm red with a raspberry tart at some restaurant by the shore, watching the ferries from Sweden pass by. A tableau with wooden boats and huge cruisers lit by the last rays of the sun.
One week end I took the train to Turku, where I spent two of my most fragile and emotionally dramatic teen age years at a boarding school by the sea, with apple orchards and cliffs and hidden paths all around. We were to have a small reunion with some who had shared the same fate well over 40 years ago.
The train was a delight, with 2 stories and loos with a hand-shower, a charming lady selling coffee and buns from a wagon with friendly talk to boot, and of course running on time to the second. I asked if the train was on time. “Well, what else would it be on?” I got the answer and never asked again.
I stayed with a friend who lodged me in his guest cabin with a sauna, where I could run down to the sea in the mornings and sit, sipping my tea by the sailboat moored there, listening to the rustle of rushes and birds calling. An idyll hard to beat.
On the morning of the reunion a storm was brewing. Spruced to party, we ran in bucketing rain and winds from the car to the old girls dormitory for the party, where the school dining room was and where we all had sat down to eat three times a day all from porridge to newly baked rye bread and home brewed “kalja”, a slightly alcoholic drink I am surprised was served at all, but only on Fridays.
It was such fun meeting people you had not seen since you were 18, and there were unavoidable moments when one had to resort to “I am so sorry, I am Immi but who are you?” After kindly indentifying themselves one could of course see at once who they were! Some had changed not at all it seemed, same hairstyle, laughter, teeth. Oh, yes, I remember those teeth. He is now a dentist. One outspoken lady, she had always been this, told me as she circled me “Well you never had thick hair, did you? And did you not use to shave?” Felt like telling her she never had a huge you know what either! But lovely to see her, never the less. Shame more could not make it, as the food was very good, the conversation riveting, bar a few all too enthusiastic “this is my life” performances, and the highlight was our old English teacher, 95 who came along propelled by her two crutches she despised, and asked to be forgiven that she did not remember what we were all called!
It was a shame the weather was so bad; I would have wanted to roam around the old paths, go down to the cliffs we secretly climbed down to as the “girls dean” was afraid of the dark and never budged from her room after that. We boated on the sea eating bits of bread with butter we had nicked from the kitchen cupboard somebody had left open, and felt as if we owned the world!
Later two of our classmates who now are teachers there, showed us around the classrooms and the renovated boys dorm. Gone were the chalk boards, replaced now by computers, but there lay the same atmosphere of wintry mornings and smelly socks in the air. The gyms high windows still showed the sky, into which I had stared through boring morning worships, when all I could think of was the last algebra test or if some boy had smiled at me or not. Hymns and prayers? Just background to my inner turmoil. And was my bum sticking out? Happy days though.
Hugs and goodbyes and promises of Facebook contact ensued as goodbyes were said. As we drove away, I felt there melted into the mist my youthful years and now I faced my real age again. For a short while I had been a teenager.
The last week was partly spent at my cousin’s summer cabin that lies close to the Russian border. The lake Saimaa is huge with myriads of peninsulas and bays and islands, some skirted with summer cabins and saunas, like “Tuparanta” Brita’s father had built after the war.
From here are memories as cherished and delightful as the strawberries and blueberries we picked as children, strung on grass stems and eaten with reverence; My auntie washing her rugs in the lake almost naked, my uncle smoking his pipe like a gangster on the balcony in the twilight, us sisters jumping into the lake after sauna and trying to talk under water, all of us sleeping in a row on the floor of the attic. I slept this time in the new guest hut, rebuilt from the playhouse it once was, and could see and hear the lake at my feet, its waters gently lapping along the shore, beckoning for a swim.
It’s a little paradise, the water coming from a spring in the forest along a hose one plugs with a stick when not in use, by the wood shed and loo. You fill buckets for the kitchen use from there, otherwise all washing of oneself and clothes are done in the lake. The loo is a little shed with the seat carved years and years ago, now smooth with the use of many bums, and after the job, one sprinkles sawdust over ones product; thus good fertilizer is made! Neat.
When we first came, before setting to with stuff like boiling potatoes, we sat down on the veranda with tiny wild strawberries in bubbly glasses, letting the many hours of driving melt away and synchronise ourselves with this peaceful place. The turn off from reality was as sudden as the tiny, overgrown road we bumped along, flattening the grass, from the main road. We were in our own little heaven.
Everything takes longer here, but so it should, as time seems liberally to fill every hollow. For your morning cup of tea you first put your boots on, trot to the kitchen in the cabin, get a cup and then trot to the hose, unplug it and wait for the clear, sweet water to fill the cup. Then you trot back into the kitchen and put the saucepan on, make tea and walk down to the sauna and sit by the quiet lake waiting for morning to come. Since you have got up far too early to catch the light on the lake! Birdsong fills the air and last nights towels are dry, ready for the morning swim after Brita has got up. We don’t swim alone, well brought up from childhood as we both are. The first chill is quite unnerving, but its quite warm, +21, and soon the silky water feels less frigid. Shivering we wrap ourselves in towels and drink more hot tea, the day has begun!
Lappeenranta is not that far away, and we had to visit the market every day to get fresh veggies, fish, berries, bread and to sample the famous “väty”, a hotdog that is nothing like one: the bread is a fluffy kind of deep fried doughnut, not sweet, filled with boiled eggs, salty dill cucumbers, meat in rice, beetroots and ham. Sounds most odd, but with cool beer it’s the best in town. Nowhere in the world is it made but here. For good reasons some might say, but I loved it.
The markets in Finland overflow with fresh peas, strawberries, rye bread, cakes, flowers and choice potatoes picked lovingly from the ground this very morning, and old books and carrots and home grown tomatoes. “Outside, in the sun?” “Never otherwise, lady, never otherwise”. And the baked bread “Stone oven in backyard never cools down these days…”Here people really produce things for the market themselves, a rare thing and utterly wonderful.
Russian tourists come by the busloads, “we have money now, so we come” they tell you, and forage through the shops like locusts carrying the spoil back into busses. Good for business, these babushkas, who now dress in revealing dresses and high heals, sipping coffee at the cafes.
The last evening I was there we were specially invited to the opening of the Espoo Art centre for modern, Nordic art, and thus we stood there with others who either knew, or pretended to know about art, sipping white wine as the artists were introduced and their excellence expounded. Well-known figures I did not know were pointed out to me, as we wandered and inspected the goods. I liked best the Icelandic designer who had made a wedding dress from black and white feathers, a black veil on a bald head and holding a bunch of dark roses. Brita looked at it for a long time and said “Its like going through cancer. You don’t know if you are going to a wedding or a funeral.”
Clouds hung low as we drove early to the airport. Finnair was, as usual bang on time, in fact we lifted off the tarmac a few minutes before schedule and arrived 20min early to Bergen. Soft rain fell. Suomi sounds like soft rain…
Back to Traveldoors