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."

Iceland is an island named Island.

We grew up in a time when thermonuclear was imminent. We'd seen pictures of mushroom clouds. We'd hear of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as the operating principle that kept us safe. (As long as the Soviet Union knew that we weren't afraid to destroy the world, they'd not launch an attack. And this is what we'd imagine the world would look like after such a war, a time when, we were told, the living would envy the dead.
We found this apocalyptic landscape on the southwestern tip of Iceland where we spent the last two days of our travels. We went to the Blue Lagoon.
Both a day spa and a hotel (called The Clinic), the Blue Lagoon (in Icelandic, Bláa lónið) provides warm (40C), rich blue water, supersaturated with silica salts.
People come to the waters to relax and to be healed. It's not uncommon for people flying to or from Europe to arrange a stop-over in Iceland. They get off the plane, get on a bus, travel to the Blue Lagoon, spend a few hours and quite a few krónur (Iceland's currency), get back on a bus, return to the airport, and continue their journey.
Let me quote from the Blue Lagoon'sofficial story:

The seawater originates 2000 meter/6562 ft beneath the ground where it is heated by earth’s natural forces. At this depth the temperature is 240°C/464°F and the pressure is 36 times the pressure on the earth’s surface. The geothermal seawater comes into contact with cooling magmatic intrusions and captures the earth’s minerals, resulting in
this unique natural source known for its healing power and actives.
...

The Lava surrounding the Blue Lagoon was formed in 1226 and is called Evil Lava because it is rough and difficult to cross due to its porous surface.

Evil Lava, indeed. The landscape is fierce. Hardy moss and lichens manage to find nutrients in the lava rock and endure the harsh winters. This picture is a view from our room. A nearby geothermal power station produces electricity from the superheated waters. Steam rises in the chilly air. (We were promised a warm day of 18C, but the low clouds hung around most of the time, keeping the temps in the low teens.)
In addition to electricity, the power plant produces steam that runs in large pipes across the lava fields. It's too difficul to dig into the rock to bury the pipes.

The Clinic is a single-story building with 15 rooms, a small dining room, conference rooms, several private rooms for massage and other treatments, and its own pool of the aforementioned blue water. The guest rooms are excellent examples of Nordic simple elegance with the beds, closets, and cupboards made of jatoba wood. (Iceland was deforested in the 17th and 18th centuries, so most wood is imported.) The bathroom and shower included several unfamiliar features, as is typical of European fixtures, but we managed to figure out the essentials. As an added amenity for intimacy, there is a Cat-5 network port in the headboard of the bed.
We arrived in early evening and missed dinner at the Clinic. It was a short and pleasant walk to the main spa. The path curls around several blue pools and between massive piles of lava rock that had been pushed aside by the ambitious developers.
Dinner was very nice. Sandra had arctic char. I had trout. Both looked and tasted like salmon. With dessert and coffee, the meal came to 12,500 ISK. about 100 bucks 'merican. (The Icelandic krónur is worth $0.0078.) After a leisurely stroll back to our digs, we went into the water.
Of course, the first thing that you notice is the warmth, followed quickly by the rich smell of the silica salt. The water is about four feet deep. The bottom of the pool is smoothed lava rock covered with a slippery layer of silica salt that's anywhere from just a coating to several inches. They call it mud, so we'll go with that term. It's very slick and yet will stay on your skin easily. It's not always the kindest material to hair and can stay in your ears for several days if you're foolish enough to put it in there in the first place.
We had the pool to ourselves for an hour. We could float around, feeling the warmth of the water, the chill of the air, the weightlessness. With low clouds, the light was diffuse. There was no sense of time or direction.In the soft sensual bath, we drifted. Troubles floated away. Thoughts became quiet.
We couldn't wait to get out there.
Doesn't make much sense, does it? With all the turbulence back home, why would we want to cut short a serene time in an exotic location. As best as I can figure, we'd had such a good time in Finland, good times with each other, thinking and not thinking about our lives past and future, sketching out several next steps that might refocused us and bring a renewed balance and direction. We have a life of many blessings and were eager to re-engage.
But not quite yet. We'd bought low-cost tickets and we learned from the airline that it would be prohibitively expensive to change our flight.

Instead, we enjoyed our breakfast at the breakfast table and then took a bus in to Reykavik.
As we traveled east toward the capital, we saw more plants and, eventually, more houses and people. By the time we reached the city, there were trees.
The bus station was on the outer edge of the city. We walked first to Hallgrimskirkja, a featured church that was undergoing repairs and covered with scaffolding and plastic. It was a five-minute walk to downtown, a busy and energic weave of small streets packed with artist shops, restaurants, and upscale stores selling furs and Rolex watches. We had a nice lunch seated with an unhappy American couple on one side and an unhappy Icelandic couple on the other. These weren't typical. The locals were pleasant, eager to help, and the tourists, mostly young and healthy, seemed either to be on their way to or from backpacking on the glaciers.
We had a nice walk back to the bus station where I learned that I'd goofed and picked up a bus schedule from a different bus company. It would be another three hours before our bus would take us back to the Blue Lagoon. We grumbled for a bit and then found a tour bus that would show us the sights of the city. It's a beautiful city, one that works hard.
On the bus ride back, I overhead a child talking with his parents. It sounded as though they were speaking Finnish.
"Soumalainen?"
I asked. The father nodded. Before he could speak much more, however, I explained that I only spoke a few words of Finnish. We chatted the rest of the way in English.
Back at the clinic, we had a light dinner and another dip in the pool. The clouds briefly lifted from the horizon around 11PM, letting sunshine stream across the Evil Lava.
Our bus would pick us up shortly in the early afternoon on Sunday. I concluded our European dining experience with a lunch of a hot dog, Pringles®, and a Coke®. Icelanders say with some pride that they make good hot dogs. I agree. Hot Dog Annie's doesn't have to worry, but it was a good hot dog.
Our plane's departure was delayed because they were waiting for a tourist group from Denmark; this was the last flight to Boston for the day and I presume that the airline didn't want to have to put the tourists in a hotel unti the next day.
The plane was full. We carefully put our package of Iittala glassware in the overhead bin. We were seated near a family with many children, all of whom were happy, eager to talk with their parents about this thing or that. Meanwhile, the woman behind Sandra was kicking the seatback.
We were about 20 minutes late getting to Boston. The signs said that the city of Boston was glad to have us here, but the customs officials were bored and humorless, mall cops with guns. We knew that we were back in the States when, after we'd wove our way through the rope lines from baggage claim to the final customs station, we had to wait for one official to tell us which line was empty. "OK, you can go to line six now," he said.
Outside the terminal, we watched with amazement as an airport worker gathered up the luggage carts, tied them with bungee cords, and drove this long train back into the building. There was
real talent at work back here in the U. S.of A.

Return to Helsinki

We were met at the Helsinki train station by the taxi driver who'd brought us to the station the week before. We talked about our travels to the north and about his upcoming trip to New York and Washington.
About Helsinki. Not surprisingly, Helsinki is a very white city, whiter even than Holden. Finns are not the stereotypical Nordic types, however, with blond hair and pale-to-pink skin. Brown and even black hair, such as my mother's, is common, as are some oriental features (high cheekbones, skin several shades from pale) as the result of mixing with the Sami people of Lapland.
That said, people of color are noticeable for both their rarity and purity. In the 90s, Finland accepted many refugees from the Somali civil war, with the result that you have African teenagers hanging out, speaking what this ear believes is perfect Finnish.
There are also immigrants from other parts of the world - southern Europe, Turkey, south Asia, and a few from the Pacific Rim. Tourists, too, come from all over. The breakfast buffet included sushi and rice. The dining cars on the trains served a decent curry.
We had an early dinner at a Nepalese restaurant a couple of blocks from our hotel. We had the best nan we've ever had. Our meals, with lamb, rice, and yogurt sauce, were very tasty, although mine was, and this was a surprise to me, too spicy to enjoy full. I'm usually pretty good about being able to take the heat, but I needed help from the yogurt quite often.

A couple of hours later, we had sauna at the hotel and then settled in for some Finnish television. One show was a three-hour accordion talent show. An intense girl of nine or so played a creditable version of Take Five.
On Thursday, we were scheduled for an early-afternoon narrated bus tour of the city, giving us time for a leisurely breakfast and a walk to the Olympic Stadium.

Our hotel offered a couple of English-language newspapers, the International Herald Tribune and the Financial Times. At home, I get nearly all of my news online and generally read the newspaper only on Sunday. Here, with time and a hunger for words I could recognize, I savored the experience, particularly the IHT.
The Olympic facilities were a couple kilometers from our hotel. Finland had been given the rights to the 1940 Olympics and had built the stadium and related complex through the 30s. Those Olympics were, um, overcome by events. As a result, the Helsinki hosted the 1952 games.
We took the elevator to the top of the Olympic tower and had a magnificent view of the city and beyond. We were told that, on a clear day, we could see Tallin, the Estonian capital across the Baltic. The day was clear so we believed that we saw it.

The afternoon went quickly. We had our dessert first at a small ice cream stand, under an umbrella because we were told that the seagulls would attack us, toured the city by bus, and had lunch at a nice restaurant on the Esplanade. As I've mentioned, businesses often play American jazz as background music. This nice restaurant, however, wasn't paying close attention to the lyrics, I guess. Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam is not your typical lunchtime tune
After lunch, we went shopping, finding some nifty things at the Iittala and Marimekko stores. We were delighted with our purchases, but we now had to travel with a bag of fragile glasses. It was agreed that Sandra would carry the Iittala bag and I'd tote the other stuff for the rest of the trip.

We were tired. We'd walked a lot, seen a lot, but decided to take one last tour around the big plaza between the train station and our hotel. We saw people enjoying the fine weather with a late-afternoon beer (not to be confused with the mid-morning, lunch-time, mid-afternoon, after-dinner, or late-night beer). Kids were on skateboards. Bicyclists zipped through the crowds of people. It was a fine place to be and also time to get ready to move on.
I picked up a few things at a corner grocery store for our supper. I neglected to get a spoon for our yogurt, so we ate using the coffee stirrers in the room. (In our visit to Iceland, we saw a clever feature, a folding plastic spoon that fits inside of the cover of the yogurt container. I saved a couple of them for future travels.)
The next morning, we walked around a bit, had mid-morning coffee and a Napoleon at Cafe Ekberg. Our taxi-driver friend picked us up again and so we had another chance to talk about his trip. He'd heard that the Statue of Liberty crown was reopening, but we agreed that the crowds would be massive. He'd take a boat ride around Lady Liberty and visit the Empire State Building and the Guggenheim in New York. His plans for Washington were still open.
Finnair flew us to Iceland. With the time difference, the four-and-a-half hour flight only took a half-hour. We landed in Keflavik Airport, got some strange money from the ATM, and took a bus to the strangest place on the planet.

If I can't see you, you don't want to see me.

The train ride from Oulu to Jyväskälä brought us out of the thick forests and into the lakes regions. There are more than 185,000 lakes in Finland, many with cottages and saunas at the water's edge. My father's parents came from two small towns, Kivijärvi and Viitasaari, each about an hour-and-a-half drive north.

Although most of Finland is has relatively flat terrain, there are a few hills. It was easier to put tunnels through the granite hills than to lay tracks and build bridges over the lakes and wetlands. (A fact which may or may not be related - both of my grandfathers worked in granite quarries when they first settled in New England in the early 20th century.) When the train goes through a tunnel, it compresses the air which, then, seeks the easiest places for release - in your ears.
A couple of  notes about 'green Europe':

• We flew on Finnair. With my coffee, I also received a small, plastic-wrapped packet containing sugar, a plastic spoon, and (I am not making this up) a small plastic bag, labels Waste. The Waste bag was inside a small plastic bag of its own. It was a self-generating waste production and disposal system.
  
  
• The train toilets (how can I say this delicately?) empty onto the tracks. It's a bit unnerving to look down and see the tracks below. We are very grateful that buses don't have this feature.

Our travel agent had pre-arranged taxi drivers to meet us at the train station. We were embarrassed to discover that the Jyväskälä train station is right across the street from the hotel. We loaded the suitcases into the trunk of the cab. The cab driver made a U-turn. We unloaded the suitcases from the cab.
A couple of notes on taxis in Finland:

• All of the cabs were new, luxury cars such as Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, or Audi. No aging Crown Vics here. We asked one driver why the cars were so new and nice. He said that tax and safety laws made it impractical not to have newer and safer cars, which often meant sturdy sedans such as Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, or Audi.
• A few years ago, four cab drivers were murdered in Helsinki. Since then, most cabs have cameras that record the passengers. 

Jyväskälä is a college town. Even in the summer, the city is full of young and wanna-be-young people.

The sidewalks in Jyväskälä (and in Oulu and Helsinki) designated lanes for bicycles and pedestrians.
When I first saw the sign, I said, "This lane for pedophiles."
The downtown streets are broad and many are for pedestrians and bicycles only. The middle of one street had 100 or more bicycles in and around sets of bike racks; few, if any, of the bicycles were locked.
In our whole time in Finland, we saw just a few police cars and no police officers patrolling the streets. We'd seen news reports about Romanian pickpockets, but never did we feel unsafe.
On our first afternoon, we walked through the city center and up a hill, the Harju ridge, to the University's sports stadium. The paths up the hill were steep in places, winding through old growth pines. From the top, we had a good view of the University and of the nearby business and industrial parks. That afternoon was also our warmest, with temperatures near 25C.
Back in our room, we discovered that we didn't have an English-language news channel. Other hotels had either CNN or BBC. There were channels in English (detective shows and other dramas from the UK and Oprah, Conan O'Brien, Friends, and The Simpsons) with Finnish subtitles. In addition, they had French, German, and Russian channels.
The newspapers carried a few familiar comics.

 

I'll leave the translation as an exercise for the reader.

On Tuesday, we walked to Alvar Aalto Museum, where we saw samples of his furniture, watched a short film (in English) about his life and work, had our coffee break, and bought some nice things in the museum shop.
Afterward, we continued our walk, this time along the short of Lake Jyväsjärvi. We were scheduled to take a cruise on the lake, but opted out because a) even though the sky was clear, the wind had picked up so the waters were choppy and b) I'm a bit superstitious about anything billed as "a three-hour tour."
We wandered the city for the rest of the day and had an early supper at an outdoor restaurant, giving the meal time to settle before we had sauna.
We decided that we'd go without bathing suits this time. Again, there were separate facilities for men and women. Sort of. There were separate changing, shower, and sauna rooms, but, in the back, there was a lounge with hot tubs, comfy chairs, and a TV. Without my glasses, I went through what I expected to be the sauna door. Fortunately for others more than me, no one was in the lounge area. On the way back to my proper place, I noticed that there was a basketful of bathing suits that one could wear to this semi-public place.
The sauna itself was ok. They had music, some kind of French Europop drek that had no business being in this sacred space.
The next morning, the cab driver met us at the hotel, made another U-turn, and delivered us to the train station for our return to Helsinki.

Midsummer weekend in Oulu

We left a quiet Rovaniemi on Saturday and took a short  train ride to an equally quiet Oulu. A city of 137,000, Oulu is a port city in the northwest. Although we could see cargo ships, cranes, and other signs of a working port, the waterfront area near our hotel was a broad expanse of restaurants, shops, and apartments with a large marketplace in the center.

The marketplace is guarded by Toripolliisi, a statue of a policeman.
Did I mention that this was Midsummer? Owners of the shops and restaurants had printed suljettu juhannuksena (closed for Midsummer) on white pieces of paper and placed those signs on the doors. We got very good at spotting the white sheets of paper, sometimes from a half-block away.

With more places closed, we got to walk a lot and see a very nice city. We visited Oulu's oldest church and received an informative tour from a young woman whose English was tinged, for no known reason, with an Australian accent. The church is also an access point for the city-wide wireless network.

In the small park near our hotel, we had ice cream cones. (Licorice ice cream is better than it sounds, but not a lot better.) Black-faced seagulls fussed loudly over the cone scraps that we tossed on the ground.
With most restaurants closed, we opted for the Mexican restaurant in our hotel. Hint: if you want good Mexican or southwest American food, Oulu is probably not your best choice.
On Sunday morning, we took a walk through the city's parks brings us along canals to the waterfront. The observatory at the Oulu Castle provides a wonderful view of the city and harbor.
There was a bit of activity in the marketplace. A four-piece band (trumpet, trombone, bass, guitar) played bluesy swing tunes. We tossed a few spare things into the hat when it came by. Sandra bartered for three small hand-painted plates.
The desk clerk at the hotel had recommended a restaurant on Pikisaari Island, about 1km away across a bridge over a harbor inlet. "It might not be open," she cautioned. Her hunch was correct. Nevertheless, after a bit more rambling, we found a place that was open. As with most restaurants, they had outdoor seating. We had a very good salmon dinner.
Sauna. There are, by most estimates, around two million saunas in a country of five million. Each hotel has saunas, separate facilities for men and women. (We could have rented a private sauna room in the Hotel Santa Claus for 150 things.)
Our Oulu hotel had an electric sauna and showers for washing. We wore bathing suits but weren't surprised when others did not. The heat was good, 80-85C, and dry. After sauna, we were clean, relaxed, and refreshed.
We had good blackout curtains again in our room and so there was enough darkness to sleep well. By Monday morning, the city was coming alive. The city buses, cleverly called Citybussi, made their way through narrow and often cobblestoned streets.
By mid-morning, we were on our train to Jyväskälä. We'd started to accumulate some gifts and other memorabilia, so our suitcases were become heavier. It was becoming a bit of exercise to drag our possessions to and through the train and then lift them up to the racks over the seats. We'd deliberately packed our suitcase half-full at the start of our trip, knowing that we'd fill them before the trip was over. Allowing for space is one thing; handling the extra weight is another.
We passed through Muhos, the town were my mother's family came from.

---

Editor's note: the Finnish alphabet has a couple of characters that don't appear on U.S. English computer keyboards - ä and ö, as well as å, which is a carryover from Swedish. So, typing names such as Jyväskälä on a U.S. keyboard is challenging. We regularly checked email at the hotel business centers and discovered that the layout of Finnish keyboards was vexing for a while.

North to where the darkness stops

On Thursday, 18 June, we arrived at the Helsinki train station with plenty of time to worry about which train to catch. We were scheduled to take the 19:25 (7:25PM in 'merkin time) overnight train to Rovaniemi, some 700 km to the north.
The electronic display showed trains to Rovaniemi scheduled for an hour earlier and an hour later. With that wonderful concoction of panic and confusion that courses through the veins of most travelers, I inquired at the information desk and learned that the 19:25 train, "The Santa Claus Express," bound for Kemijärvi, would indeed stop in Rovaniemi.
While I was collecting this bit of reassurance, Sandra had been talking with a man and woman who were also taking the same train. The man had been, among other things, a tour guide for travel writers and spoke English well and often. His wife was quieter and also less confident of her command of our language. We sat with them in the dining car. They were a bit surprised that I ordered something so ordinary, lihapullat ja perunasose (meatballs with mashed potatoes), but this was comfort food from way back.
After dinner, we went back to our rooms and settled in for a long and pretty much sleepless night through the non-darkness.

We'd heard so much about trains in Europe, mostly good stuff. My father, who'd hopped onto freight trains and rode inside and on top of box cars across the U.S. during the Depression, would have thought our travel was regal. Our cabin had two bunks, a Buck-Rogers, Transformer-type bathroom that converted, with a gentle tug of the wall, into a shower stall, and even straps for skis. The Finns idea of an express train is that you only stop every 30 minutes. Oh, and the other part of the regal travel were the royal drunkards in the corridor and the cabins nearby.
We arrived in Rovaniemi only slightly more rested than we'd been on the flight from across the pond. A nice taxi driver brought us the short distance to our hotel, the Santa Claus Hotel.
If you really want to disappoint a child, bring them to the Santa Claus Hotel. Aside from the name and the proximity to the Arctic Circl, there's absolutely nothing in the hotel about Santa Claus - not a picture or a figurine or even a hat. They have a fine restaurant that serves a great breakfast buffet and plays American jazz standards, but no Santa.
After a bit of breakfast and a brief nap, it was time for our safari. Remember that safari is a Swahili word for journey and doesn't require jungles, tigers, or pith helmets. Instead, we boarded a long, open boat and headed up river for adventure.
There were a 11 of us in the boat - A husband and wife from Brazil, a husband and wife from Dehli, India, a 30-something daughter and her mother from New Delhi, a newlywed (we think) couple from New Zealand, Sandra and me, and the taciturn Finnish driver.

Our safari took us to a craft shop where a Lapp artist and her husband created delightfully designed items from wood, leather, and reindeer antlers. What was even more remarkable is that she didn't try to sell us anything. Several people likely would have bought several pieces, but she was too enthusiastic in her talk about her work that we didn't have time for shopping.
Another boat ride took us further up river where a Lapp gnome in a four-cornered hat talked excitedly about life in the north, reindeer, and lots more. We dined on what our friendly gnome told us was the neighbor's reindeer.
Back into the boat, back to town, onto a bus, and to Santa's office. Again, this is probably not a good place to take a kid whom you like. It's strange and has a lot of over-the-top drek in the gift shop. (Motto: if you can't find it here, you probably have good taste.")
On the bus, we received certificates that proved that we'd crossed the Arctic Circle. We arrived back in Rovaniemi at 5:30.
We'd been told that, in celebration of Midsummer, people would be lighting bonfires at 6PM. Across the river, a crowd gathered near a small community center.  At the river's edge, people had built a tall (4m) cone-shaped pyre. The scene felt like an Arctic Burning Man Festival.We could hear speeches and accordion music, leading up to the raising of the Finnish flag. Everyone cheered. Then, everyone left.
We stood on our side of the river for 20 minutes or so, but they were really gone. (We later learned that the fires wouldn't be lit until midnight.)
The travel brochures will tell you that Juhannus, St. John's Day, is a major holiday for Finland. They don't tell you, or if they do, you don't believe them, how much the country shuts down. Only one restaurant out of five was open. All shops in town were closed as they had been since Friday afternoon; many would stay shut until Tuesday.
(Not only does the country shut down for Midsummer holiday, the major newspaper in the country, Hesinkin Sanomat, decides that July is such a slow news time that it stops publishing its international edition for the month.)
After a good bit of wandering, we did find a nice place for supper and then a walk back to the hotel.
There were low clouds the whole time, so we didn't see the midnight sun. We also didn't see it because we couldn't stay up that late. We fell asleep at 11PM, got up the next morning, had breakfast, packed, and made our way to the train station for our trip south to Oulu.
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Editor's note: Finns, at least the ones who raised me, are generally not happy unless they're complaining. As with the language and other characteristics of the Finland, it's difficult for me not to lapse back into that grumbling pattern.
We had a wonderful time. The people were warm, eager to share their country and customs with us, eager to learn about us, our lives and our travels. Our hotel accommodations were comfortable and pleasing.
It was also important for us to have some enforced quiet time to think about the many blessings and several challenges that we have at home. We enjoyed that quiet. We enjoyed walking a lot, seeing different things, learning about history that is still vivid to so many. The German army burned all but five houses in Rovaniemi during the war. We saw those old houses, but didn't understand, until we heard the history, how precious they were.
Precious, too, are the traditions of Midsummer and sauna and sisu and their strange, strange language. It was wonderful to among a people who cared about life and about history.

But when Santa Claus looks like this, you have to yourself, "Mitkä olivat ne ajattelua?"

Where there was no darkness

[Tuesday 16 June-Wednesday, 17 June]
We flew out of Boston's Logan Airport at 9:30PM. Two or three hours later, somewhere over Greenland, I think, the sun came up. We didn't encounter darkness again until our ride home from Logan on Sunday, 28 June.
Particularly on cloudy days, this perpetual light is disorienting. Not only don't you know what time it is, you also don't know what direction you're facing. Throw in eight hours of air travel in coach and a seven-hour time difference and you have a couple of travelers expecting Dick Cheney to show up and administer advanced interrogation techniques.
Instead, we stood in Helsinki's Vantaa airport, waiting for a taxi driver who was supposed to meet us. Our trip through Customs was simple. There were two lines, one if we had anything to declare, the other if we had nothing to declare. We followed a steady stream of non-declarers out the door.
While waiting, we watched experienced travelers change SIM cards in their phones. Others just started making calls. This is the land of Nokia, the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, so it's with no small amount of pride that Finns use their cell phones a lot. Texting seemed to be less common than in the States, but, given the challenges of the Finnish language, it's understandable. (More about language in other notes.)
I have often said that my wife really had to love me to grab a name such as mine. I went through the same school system for 12 years and still the principal mispronounced my name at graduation. So, it was a giddy delight to hear the name pronounced correctly at every turn. The Finnish pronunciation is Huck-a-rye-nen, with the accent on the first syllable and with a rolled r. Hence, my father's nickname (and mine through high school) was Huck. My uncle, who moved to St. Louis after the war, was known as Hakk.
We enjoyed the cab rides. We learned from one that his house had a geothermal system, giving him free heat for just 30€/month. We had the same driver on three other occasions in Helsinki and learned of his plans to visit Washington and New York this week. He had been scheduled to travel to New York in 2001, in September, but those travel plans had been, as it's said, overcome by events.
Finland uses the Euro. The currency is very sensible. The paper bills are in different sizes for each denomination so that you can tell without looking how much paper money you have. There are coins for 2€, 1€, and smaller. Because we were constantly trying to the conversion math in our heads (1€ = ~$1.47 while we were there), we'd get tired and just call them things. ("How much should we tip the driver?" "Five things seems about right."
We arrived at our hotel in downtown Helsinki at about 4PM, which was like 9AM, without sleep. We'd be staying in Helsinki until Thursday evening, when we'd be taking an overnight train ride to Rovaniemi.

Even though the hotel staff had no trouble with our name, the welcome screen on the TV thought that the name was too long.(Also note that the names of the languages are in English. If I only spoke Russian, I wouldn't know what the word Russian is; I'd only know Русский.)
Helsinki is just a bit smaller than Boston, with a metropolitan area over 1 million people. A short walk from the hotel is a large shopping and business complex, including restaurants with outdoor dining, department stores, little shops, the train and bus stations, and a whole lot of stuff going on. We needed something to eat and wandered about, uncertain of what we'd find or even what we were looking at. We were also very weary and finally just picked a quiet place in a mall. It was called Memphis Erottaja (It sounds a lot sexier than it is. The name means The Memphis Difference.). They served burgers and other American fare. We had dessert at a Ben and Jerry's kiosk in the mall and then went back to the hotel for the night.
The room was nice, a simple Nordic design, with comfortable bedding and good black-out curtains to block the ever-present light. The bathroom and shower fixtures were a bit strange to those used to American Standard, but we figured out how to do what we needed to do. Sleep came quickly and we didn't get up until the next morning.

Nothing's so far away as where you come from

My wife and I just returned from a 12-day trip to Finland and Iceland. The trip took us to Helsinki, Oulu, Jyväskylä, back to Helsinki, and then a two-day visit to Grindavík and Reykavik in Iceland. We had a terrific time. We learned about customs and cultures of these strange and wondeful lands and learned or re-learned several important things about ourselves as individuals and as a couple.
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.