Both sets of my grandparents emigrated from Finland in the early 20th century. They brought Finnish culture with them and also left it behind. My mother's mother (Äiti) returned a couple of times, the others not at all. My mother went to the old country with her mother in 1938 and, separately, my parents visited in later years.
My grandparents left a country that was a duchy of czarist Russia; we visited a nation driven by Nokia and Marimekko.
I grew up learning bits of colloquial Finnish that helped me with pronunciation, but, basically, I had the vocabulary of a five-year-old. (More about the Finnish language in another note.) Fortunately, English is spoken often and well in Finland. On several occasions, when we'd enter a restaurant and greet the server, they'd hand us an English-language menu. Most public signs and train announcements would be in Finnish, Swedish (the country's other official language), and English.
Over the next few days, as I sort through my notes, clippings, and pictures, I'll have a number of posts about various topics. (That sound you hear is your brain groaning at the thought of a series of blog entries filled with someone else's holiday pictures. Don't worry. I'll be respectful of your bandwidth, electronic and mental.)
In the middle of the night (Eastern European Summer Time), news broke about Michael Jackson's death. As we were packing to leave, we watched all of the stations - Finnish, English, French, and German - had gone with wall-to-wall coverage. We left it on a Finnish station that was reading text messages from viewers.
This is not my grandmother's Finland.
1 comment:
So, not only US TV has resorted to reading SMS, Twitter etc for "news". Funny how they mourn the death of "old media" after having done away with so many of the reporters who would do the work. Now we are reduced to CNN reading tweets on air, gee, that's terriffic reporting, 140 characters at a time.
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