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.
Thanks for sharing. You're an excellent writer.
ReplyDelete