Finland - The Stealth Country (July 5 - July 22)

For a brief summary of Finland, listen to the song ‘Finland, Finland, Finland’ by Monty Python, in which the main points are covered.  I could never figure out what they were going for with this song. Are they trying to say Finland is boring? Dull? Unexciting? Because that’s all partially true.  Finland is not known for its’ diverse entertainment options. You will not find enormous amusement parks,  ancient historical monuments, or gastronomic extravaganzas (unless my sis-in-law Johanna is cooking).   What you will find is a beautiful, but quiet, understated country full of quiet (very), understating people.  Everything works: the busses and trains run on time - to the minute, the roads are maintained, the streets are clean enough to eat off, and every square kilometre of forest, field and lake – no matter how remote or uninhabited – looks as if someone is taking care of it.  It’s a country you can completely relax in. This is my fourth visit to Sini’s homeland, and I think I am finally getting the hang of it.

In fact, I love it. In Summer, anyway (Winter is a whole different bucket of ice).

This is in large part due to our family, who spoil us rotten whenever we go there. On our first night in Turku with Saija & Michi, we feast on roast salmon (Oh boy! My favourite!), chilled weisbeer (Oh boy! My favourite!), apple cheesecake (oh boy…).  It doesn’t take much to make me very happy.  It doesn’t take much to make Sini happy either (which says a lot about her choice of husband) and a visit to Ikea the next day is like a visit to home accessories heaven - we will return with armloads of plastic goodies that will no doubt improve our lives but even if they don’t, well, they’re just so cheap…!

Prices at Ikea are in stark contrast to the cost of most of everything else in Finland, which by our standards is viciously expensive. A 340ml coke is around EUR3 (4x more expensive than SA),  the cheapest beer in a pub is EUR8, McDonalds doesn’t do anything under EUR2 and the trains…don’t get me started on the trains.  I can almost forgive trains being so expensive though because cars seem relatively cheap, but then again on the other hand fuel is typically not. The standard of living is very high – I don’t recall seeing a single beggar on the streets, which is a welcome change from the ubiquitous poverty of home. 

One of the things I love about travelling in a country where I don’t understand the language is that it grants me immunity to advertising. I don’t understand what the billboards are screaming. I don’t understand why I should eat the cereal that the television commercial wants me to, or even what word in the sentence is the brand name.  There is a tangible stress release that comes with being in this environment, and I have to wonder how much of our daily pressure can be attributed to being bombarded by requests for attention from all the various advertising mediums we have to deal with all the time. There are, of course, the more pervasive household brand names that can’t be ignored, but some of these are quite amusing to the English speaker. For example, Finns drink ‘Koff’ beer (ahem), buy their weekly groceries from the ‘KKK’ market, and deposit their savings at a bank called ‘Spankki’.  This last brand name is partly my own invention, and is correctly pronounced S-Pankki, but my way sounds cuter, and would also work better for a series of commercials – ‘No Hankki-Pankki at Spankki’ , or ‘Spankki – Because banking should not feel like corporal punishment’, and so on…

S-Pankki is also symptomatic of the common Finnish naming convention for businesses. The ‘S’ stands for something or other, and the word ‘Pankki’ means ‘bank’.  In addition to this there are ‘R-Kioski’, ‘K-Market’, ‘S-Market’ and many others.  This apparent lack of originality seems to be below par for a nation that has more than sixteen different ways of saying ‘snow’.

More spoiling is in store for us as we are wined and dined by the Kervinnen family and friends in Tampere, and after that with Johanna&Kimmo and Roni – Sini’s third sister, brother-in-law and nephew respectively. They have booked a summer cottage on a beautiful lake-shore near Jamsa where we will stay together while travelling to the District Convention in Tampere. I should say right here that Sini and her family are not stereo-typical Finns.  There is a running joke that goes something like: ‘How do you tell if a Finn is an extrovert?’ Answer: ‘He stares at your shoes instead of his own.’  The national character is (as I mentioned before) very quiet and reserved. Sini and her family are not. Not only do they stare at the shoes of others, they also point at them and laugh out loud. When the Juvani sisters come together the clown inside each of them bursts out and doesn’t get back inside the box until we go home. I don’t understand much of the hilarity owing to my aforementioned slim grasp of Finnish, but every time we get together with our Finnish family I feel the motivation to learn – not only to understand the language of my wife’s heart, or to satisfy the built-in South African paranoia that ‘they’re talking about me’, but to understand the other half of my family.  Although I suspect that learning Finnish won’t help in this respect. Families have their own language.

Johanna is a fantastic chef, a fact which - when combined with a special on fresh whole salmon at the local market - leads to feats of culinary amazingness.  This is the Finnish summer. The days are long and warm and bright, it doesn’t rain much, and everywhere the forests and fields are greener than the Emerald City.

After the District Convention we head on to Sini’s home town of Laukaa, about 30kms north of Jyvaskylla in central Finland. Here we spend the last few days of our vacation being pampered by Hannu&Lea, our Finnish parents. The summer market season has begun and Hannu has a fruit and vegetable stand in the local town square from which he sells fresh strawberries, cherries, potatoes, carrots, garlic chives etc. He runs this stand for three months of the year and has become very popular amongst the locals, who love fresh produce, especially if it is grown locally. The strawberries have come late this year due to a protracted winter, so Hannu has been forced to sell Swedish strawberries…the horror!  He is honest and labels the cartons as such so that locals know what they are buying and why it’s slightly cheaper.  He does manage to find a strawberry farm that has fresh strawberries – but it is almost 400kms away.  This does not present a problem and he drives through the night to return with the van loaded. When a local market radio station (yes – a radio station dedicated to the open market) announces that there are no Finnish strawberries in central Finland, he has the satisfaction of phoning in to the show to say ‘There are in Laukaa!’

Laukaa - Sini's hometown...

...where she is very well known.

Sini's home.

It’s too soon to go home.  But that’s usually a good sign. We’re well rested, somewhat bloated, have sworn off beer for the next few months, and have luggage full of carefully packed contraband, including a whole frozen salmon, and a few packages of Ruispalat – the delicious Finnish dark bread – which gives us a lingering taste of Finland for a few weeks after we get home. Ahead of us is a long journey, starting at the tiny (and deserted at 5am, the janitor had to let us in) Jyvaskyla airport, change plane in Tallinn, Estonia, onward to Saint Petersburg for a 7 hour wait at the airport to pick up our Jo’burg connection, via Dubai. What a marathon.  But the salmon survives.

Barcelona June 3 - June 11: Paella, Estrella, and Pata Negra

It's often repeated that the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. On touching down in Barcelona from an unseasonably freezing Finland, we found this statement to be an exaggeration. The rain was clearly not limited to the plain and was demonstrating it's freedom of movement around the entire Iberian peninsula by torrenting down in buckets here at the coast. This is a little bit disturbing for us, because this part of our trip is supposed to be purely holiday. We've been here before (in 2007) so we've seen most of the sites and are looking forward to spending most of our time doing as little as possible, preferably on the beach. This is in large part thanks to Tiina & Jari, Sini's sister and brother-in-law, who live here and have booked a house in Casteldefels, a pirates' spitting distance of the warm Mediterranean sea.

Fortunately, the rain needed only this day to make it's point, and promptly moved on to another parade somewhere else (probably on the 'plain'), giving us a beautiful week of mostly sunshine and great beach weather.  Which we will capitalise on.

Casteldefels is a 20 minute taxi ride from the airport (which is called El Prat - we guess because of all the British tourists that come through here), but takes us a bit longer because none of us have the correct address. We all have different parts of it, and unfortunately because our group (which includes Hannu & Lea and Saija & Michi) is split across two taxis, we wind up on opposite sides of the town. Also, we have no means of contacting each other due to cell network issues. We manage to contact Tiina, who fortunately speaks Catalan (more on that in a moment) well, and by means of an extended game of broken telephones is able to coordinate the taxi drivers well enough to get us to where we need to be, where she is waiting for us.  And the relaxing can now begin.

Another reason that the rain does not obey Spanish rain rules is possibly because Barcelona does not consider itself part of Spain. Here, they believe themselves to be independent Catalonia, and underscore this belief by having all of their signs printed in both Catalan and Spanish, but with the Spanish appearing *slightly* though noticeably smaller, and always beneath the Catalan. So, while many other countries deign to have English appear alongside the local language at least on important signs like 'Emergency Exit' or 'Danger: High Voltage' or 'Certain Death This Way', that is not the case here. The exception is a hand-painted message we saw on the roof of an anarchists' house visible from the Gaudi gardens, which appeared only in English: 'If it's called tourist season, how come we can't shoot them?'

Sitges has become a favourite place of mine. It's 15 minutes by train from Casteldefels - maybe 45 minutes from Barcelona central station - south along the coast. We spent a day here last time, but that was mid-winter and now it's June, and although the day has started misty and slightly overcast, the beach is packed in certain anticipation of the sun, which fortunately doesn't wait very long to show up. The streets are narrow and cobbled, the stone walls are aged -sometimes whitewashed - and the elderly Church of St Bartolomeu presides. It feels Mediterranean. While the rest of the family departs shortly after lunch, I decided to stay on for the rest of the afternoon to take photographs and wander aimlessly around.

There is nothing better for a man than to eat, drink, and see good for all his hard work...and then eat and drink some more. And then, dessert. Barcelona gets this. For me, food provides the strongest definition of a culture, and in Barcelona we have sampled seafood paella, paella negra (paella blackened with squid ink), varieties of jamón (smoked ham) and cuts of beef and herbed pork, spitted rabbit, gazpacho and...usually washed down with Estrella Damm - the local default beer (above average, rich taste, slightly darker than a standard lager - good), or a shared bottle of Pata Negra or sangria. During the week, most restaurants run a two plate special, which includes two plates of your choice, a dessert and a beer, for around an average of EUR10. For Europe, these are good prices.  I like very much the common practice here of buying an entire leg of smoked ham, then using a thin cheese slicer to 'shave' slices off every day. Every block in the city has a butchery and a bakery (or two), and there's something about nipping out to pick up a loaf of freshly baked bread every morning that appeals to me. 

The days spent on the beach are perfect.  The sun is not too strong, it’s not too warm, and not too crowded. The tourist season only hits next month and the Spaniards have not kicked themselves into holiday gear yet.  We also get to practice our Chinese. I never get tired of the look on a Chinese persons’ face when these lǎowài ( lit.‘always foreigner’, sometimes used pejoratively) greet them in their own language and start chatting. Usually there are a few seconds of puzzled silence as they try to work out what we’ve said in English (or in this case, Spanish). We then repeat ourselves slowly and the light dawns, and the verbal floodgates open, at which point we have to politely ask them to slow down.  On the beach in Casteldefels, Chinese ladies walk up and down offering massages for EUR5. We take them up on it a few times, and while they are very good, I wish they had gotten all the sand off their hands first. Or maybe the offer includes exfoliation.

In a break from the beach and blissful vegetativeness, Sini and I spend a day in the city centre, cruising La Rambla and the side-streets, the labyrinthine Barri Gòtic - the gothic quarter of the old city, absorbing the ancient stone facades and pretending it’s a thousand years ago. Barcelona has a strong retro thing going on, and there are lots of shops selling 70’s and 80’s clothing and memorabilia. Actually Barcelona seems decidedly and deliberately anti-fashion, or on the opposite end – trend-setting.  In either case, looking weird is celebrated.

My mission on this day is to try to find a particular kind of guitar – reminiscent of a trez guitar but more akin to a guitarlele. It has a smaller body than a classical guitar but a full size fretboard, and a distinctively crisp sound. I manage to find this obscure instrument in a shop on one of the many side-streets off La Rambla, but the price immediately cues the shattering sound of a breaking dream. Sometimes we forget this is Europe.  ‘Europe sucks’, we grumble.  I’m still sulking when we stumble upon a shop that stocks all the great Islay Scotch whiskies at the best prices I have seen anywhere in the world. This makes up for everything!  We forgive Europe and stock up on Laphraoig and Lagavulen.  If you’re a fan of the peaty and smokey, and you happen to be in Spain, try Lafuente. They appear to have shops in most of the major cities.  This place also puts the final nail in the duty-free coffin – I’ll be posting a rant here about what a con that is sometime soon.

We meet up with the rest of the family at Tiina and Jari’s apartment for drinks and a short nap, and then head out to Monjuic to observe the ‘Musical Fountains’.  Framed by a spectacular sunset, the view of the city from the top of the stairs of the Palau Nacional alone makes it worth being there, but the fountains are also fun.  They perform choreographed water-ballet and acrobatics in a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of colours. The only weak point in this display is the cheesy 80s music that accompanies it. To me, it seems like it needs something dramatic and powerful like Strauss’ ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ (theme from the movie 2001) or the 1812 overture. ‘Moonlight Shadow’ and ‘We Built This City’ just don’t cut it, and even the fountains agree and refuse to dance in time.  I know I wasn’t the only one to think this, as I overheard a woman with a broad southern accent complain, ‘Why don’t they do music by a Spanish guy, like George ‘Bee-zet’ or some guy?’

The rain returns from the plain just as we leave Barcelona. It will catch up with us in Finland. But we’re tanned, rested, have gained about 5kgs each, and don’t care.