Roasterboy's notebook

The following are a few items that wound up in my notebook during our travels through Finland and Iceland.

Why we went

In his book about Red Auerbach, Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend, Bill Russell talks a lot about tribes. He and Red came from different tribes, saw the world filtered through those tribal heritages, and yet came to respect and love each other.
Similarly, my mother was curious about a person's ethnic heritage, occupation, education, hometown, and other bits of background information. These attributes never fully defined a person, but always told something important. She wanted to know these things not out of prejudice, but from a desire to understand.
In 2000, Sandra, my mother, and I took a tour of England and Scotland, the lands of Sandra's heritage. We visited Skye, the place where Sandra's ancestors left in the 19th century. 
My grandparents on both sides emigrated 100 or so years ago. They left a land that was a Russian duchy in the last decade of czarist rule. They brought their language and culture, but little else.
Why did they leave Finland, not to return? Dunno. Maybe they had dreams of better futures for themselves, their children, and grandchildren. Maybe their parents said the wrong thing at the wrong time and they said, "I'm out of here." I can speculate about what they thought they were going from and going to, but, finally, I don't and can't ever know.
And, it's in that spirit, that we went to Finland.

General observations

1. Travel teaches us that we'll make mistakes, get lost, spend too much, or miss something important and we'll still have a good time. 
2. It's hard not to take someone else's trip. Well-meaning people at home and on the road will offer advice on places to go, things to do, foods to eat. We take all suggestions seriously and apply what we can. We are, however, who we are with our habits, comforts, and energy levels. We travel to stretch ourselves, but might only try something as exotic as licorice ice cream.
3. When traveling, you have to remember a few very important details, such as the hotel location and room number and the next train or plane departure time, only to forget them so that you can remember the next bits of important information.
   Meanwhile, there are other things that you want to remember for a long time, but don't know what they are. Is this statue, that view, last night's meal important? Why didn't we get the names of those nice people on the train, that helpful taxi driver?
   I found myself often saying, "I want to remember this."
   What things were those? you might ask.
   You know the answer, don't you?
   

Television

Travelers know that nudity is more common on European television shows. We watched one show, a British show, if I recall correctly, with Finnish subtitles, about the sauna. When Mummu ja Vaari (grandmother and grandfather) go off to sauna, you're see a lot of skin and it was not taut, youthful skin.
Another show, from England's Channel 4, was titled How to Look Good Naked. It was kind of a Queer Eye for the Dove Gal, where a stylist named Gok Wan helps ordinary women look and feel beautiful, even to the point of posing naked for a photo shoot.
We relied on CNN International and the BBC for news. (CNN International is, in my opinion, a much better news source than the domestic CNN.)
When those weren't available or when we couldn't watch the same cellphone video clips from the Iranian protests one more time, we watched Finnish channels. Although modern television technology can make even the simplest station look pretty good, Boston TV stations have much higher production quality than the Helsinki stations. There were few live reports, Doppler radar weather forecasts, or headlines crawling along the bottom of the screen. The news shows were comparable to the talking heads of the 1970s.

Smoking

Smoking is not permitted in any public building, so smokers used every opportunity to smoke outside. On a few occasions, we ate indoors to get away from the smoke.

I couldn't get a sense of how much cigarettes cost in Finland, but expect that, like everything else, they are expensive. European warning labels are much more serious, as we saw at the duty-free shop in the Helsinki airport.

Continental breakfasts

Continental breakfasts, as presented in American hotels, typically include some stale donuts, little boxes of cereal, and maybe a toaster so you can make your own toast. Continental breakfasts on the continent, by comparisons, are massive. You can have eggs, porridge, baby bratwursts, ham, cheese, lettuce, tomato, various yogurts, fruit, a half dozen types of muesli, coffees, juices, many types of breads, rolls, and rye crisps. Breakfast was typically our largest meal of the day. The meal is included in the price of the hotel room.

Maps, newspapers, and the unwired life

We found Internet access in the business centers of the hotels, but otherwise lived through a disconnected time. Our cellphones aren't the type that work elsewhere in the world.
We relied on maps and printed tour guides. The maps were pretty good, but with a few annoying characteristics. Finnish street names are long and so the print gets quite small on the maps. In addition, in an effort to be helpful, the map makers put numbers on the map to identify items of interest. Those items might be museums, historic buildings, or a paid advertiser's restaurant. Those numbers often obscured the street names.
Finnish-language newspapers were freely available in the hotels. Newspapers in English were harder to locate and often out of date. Also, because of the time difference (Finland is seven hours ahead of the U.S. east coast and 10 ahead of California.), news from the States was typically a day late. All of the European newspapers had been printed and distributed when, for example, news of Michael Jackson's death hit the wires.

Cellphones

People on cell phones are, for the most, annoying in any language, but the Finns didn't seem as loud. I don't know if it was a sense of courtesy, the much-noted Silent Finn, or if the Nokia cellphones are better at giving aural feedback so that you know how loud you are.

Languages

We would have been paahtoleipä (toast) if the Finnish school systems didn't do such a good job teaching languages. Most people are able to speak three languages (Finnish, Swedish, and English) and often more (German, French, or Russian). Menus typically included English translations. Announcements at train stations and airports always included English.
Icelanders' command of English wasn't quite as crisp, but we fared quite well.
The word bacon is pekoni in Finnish and beikoni in Icelandic.
Small bits of Finnish became suddenly familiar to me as we traveled. Words and phrases that I'd spoken for a lifetime, such as kiitoksia (a casual form of "thank you") looked odd when I first saw them in print.

Food

We had good meals, several that were quite good, some that were utilitarian. We had fish often, red meat a few times, and the wonderful array of goodies that came with the breakfast buffets.
One restaurant offered reindeer fawn liver.
Sandra sampled the local beers and found them good. Wines came from Argentina and California, but rarely from Europe.
Finns drink a lot of coffee. (Various studies indicate that they drink the most per capita of any country in the world.)  The coffee is strong and, in my opinion, not very good. I'm kinda fussy about coffee and find that few places on either side of the pond put a lot of care into the selection or preparation of their coffees. (I should note that I grew up on my grandmother's boiled coffee and learned from my father how to reuse coffee grounds for many days in a row. Anything that can be done to coffee, we've done it.)
Friend Jenny spent her junior year of high school in Denmark. One of the first phrases that she learned in Danish was "I'll have what she's having."
In Finland and Iceland, that is too risky. Because of some medication, I have to be very vigilant about certain foods. Most of the time, it was easy to know what not to order. In a couple of instances, however, I couldn't figure out the ingredients and opted to have yogurt instead.

When family members returned from Finland back when I was a kid, they'd invariably bring back Salmiakki, a candy that looks and, at first, tastes like licorice, but then lurches onto your taste buds with a dose of its key ingredient,  ammonium chloride. Finns say that they love it.

Cars

Small cars dominated the scene in both countries. Somewhat surprisingly, Toyota is the top-selling brand in Finland. VW, Ford, Opel (GM), Volvo, Fiat, Nissan, other Japanese, Korean, French, and German nameplates round out the crowd. We saw just a few Range Rovers, one Hummer, a couple of American sedans, and several that I couldn't recognize. Some reports says that the Russian Skoda (now manufactured in the Czech Republic) is popular, but I didn't see any in Finland and just one in Iceland. We saw a few Chinese small trucks and more larger American cars/SUVs, Land Rovers, and other off-road vehicles in Reykjavik.

Other stuff

The error message 404 means that the page that you're looking for can't be found. Most web sites have a simple message, saying that the link is broken and the page is missing, most likely deleted in reorganization of the web site. The Finnish rail company, VR, has a 404 page. It has a picutre of this guy. Dunno why.

Notes from our bus tour of Helsinki:

• Audio tour of Helsinki offered in Finnish (including colloquial Helsinki dialect), Swedish, German, English, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. 
• Tour guide said, "Helsinki has as many as three symphonies." "Many Finnish men say that nothing beats a good sausage."