We finally managed to take a trip to St Petersburg in Russia. We were actually able to take the train straight there from Lahti which was great, although we had to get visas organised first. I was stunned by how beautiful the city was. There is smog, but so there is in London for example. For the most part it is a very pretty city. The architecture is simply fantastic. Russia certainly isn't the place it once was. St Petersburg in particular is starting to get quite a European feel to it. There were, and by the looks still will be for some time, elements of the old Russia to be found though. The miles of rusty wrecks and garages and Soviet style estates on the outskirts of the city, and the countless number of ladas, for example, are still plain to see.
All in all it was a great little excursion. I was very impressed.
September is called Syyskuu in Finnish which means "Autumn month". This is the time the trees start to lose their leaves, but before they do so the leaves turn different colours. This phenomenon is what Finnish call Ruska. It has been lovely to watch the leaves turn all sorts of magnificent red and oranges.
Today we went to visit a friend of Mari's in Tampere. Tampere is the second largest city in Finland and has something like 270,000 people. We had a bit of a look around the centre and it seemed quite nice. The pic below is of the (rather Russian looking) Orthodox church in the middle of the city.
This weekend Lahti had a big organic fair. It was held in a big exhibition hall and there was a range of goods on display, from redesigned recycled clothing to pickled preserves. It proved to be quite popular too. The place was packed.
This weekend marked the 100 year celebration for Lahti. Yes, it's a relatively young city. Saturday would have been an organiser's dream as it was a beautiful day and the various parades and activities went well. There were a number of music events at various places around the place; the harbour and the market square being the main ones. There was also, as I've now come to expect, an OAP choir - a must for any event here in Finland. Everyone was in good spirits over the weekend, a real festive atmosphere. It's great to see so many people collectively in a good mood.
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Went to an electronic music festival, Koneisto, in Helsinki this weekend (kone is the Finnish word for machine you see). A range of music, much of which wasn't to my liking, but a few acts were very good and the sound system was great.
We finally took a little cruise on Lahti's main lake, which is rather unimaginatively called vesijärvi (water lake). This lake system connects with another one and stretches over 100 km to the north. You can take boats overnight to the city of Jyvaskyla to the north. We were happy with a 3 hour daytrip on a paddle steamer instead though. It was surprisingly inexpensive and was really nice. There are lots of lovely little properties dotted along the coast and on the little islands along the way. I had to admit to being a little scared when the bride-to-be of a hen's night on board was allowed to take the wheel for a while though. I'm sure we were headed straight into a rock before the captain wrestled it out of her hands. Ha.
I have recently been helping out Mari at the laboratories at her University. We haven't yet been able to sequence a disease-resistant chocolate cake tree, but I think we're getting closer.
I was surprised to learn that the skijumping hills in Lahti are used in the summer. They have a kind of a carpet-like turf that covers the hills, and also have sprinklers to water the hills to provide the necessary slipperyness (is that a word?). One of the hills also has a large swimming pool at the bottom, right about where they land. Of course they don't use this hill in the summer! The pool is open to the public and we have passes to use it for the summer. It has been great to swim in, and very entertaining to see skijumpers fly by as you are swimming along. Crazy! We took a trip to the top of the largest jumping tower one day with some friends too. All I can say is it is high and it is steep. Very steep. I don't know how they do it. There's a great view of the city from up there. You can really see how heavily forested Finland is. Even in this urban, relatively densely populated area, you have to pick the buildings out from the trees, rather than the reverse.
One of the things which I have learnt to appreciate in Finland is the law, or lack of a law I guess, which says that you can pretty much go wherever you want. It is called something like "Every Man's Right" and means that you can go walking in the forest anywhere, so long as you don't damage the place. It's nice to have that freedom to just wander. Lately, we've also been doing some forest expeditions with a purpose - to collect berries. I recall picking berries at special pick-your-own places back home, but nothing quite beats the feeling of delving into the forest, picking containers full of berries and then taking them home to make a pie or two out of them. We mostly picked blueberries, which are ridicuously abundant, but we also found wild strawberries. Delicious.
In early July we went to visit Mari's relatives in Sweden. We drove north around the top of Finland and down into Sweden to our final destination, Karlskoga, to the west of Stockholm and the hometown of Alfred Nobel (that's the Alfred Nobel of the Nobel peace prize - a prize that bears his name rather peculiarly since he invented dynamite and subsequently built a fortune manufacturing arms). Anyways, the journey took us around 18 hours. That's some solid driving! There was some nice scenery on the way so it wasn't all bad. We had a great time in Sweden. Summer was in full swing and there was a lot of swimming in lakes to be done. We visited Orebro, a nice little city with a castle in the middle, one day. We stopped off at an awesome swimming hole on the way back. A large, deep rock basin with high cliffs on the sides and clear refreshing water, it was one of the highlights of the trip. Phenomenal. One day we visited a lively medieval market, where stallholders dressed in medieval costumes sold various food and goods and several activities went on, accompanied by the medieval music of a merry threesome of musicians.
Our trip back to Finland saw us take the ferry from Stockholm to Turku. We drove to Stockholm and after navigating through Stockholm's tangled mess of a road system made it to the port. We spent the day in Stockholm before taking the ferry at night. It is a really pretty city. Lovely. The central old town area was full of tourists, as it usually is in other European cities. We found another area not far away that was much quieter and had awesome views over the harbour. We found a gem of a little restaurant high on the cliffs above the harbour, with several levels of outdoor tables all hidden amongst plants and climbers. Spectacularrr. Our ferry trip back to Finland was good. We ate a huge smorgasbord meal then went to join the masses at the duty free shopping stores. It is hectic. So busy. Buy, buy buy! We then played on the poker machines in the casino section for a while, checked out a bar and the nightclub (yeah it's hard to believe all this stuff is on a boat) and then retired to our sleeping cabin. We got up early and took a look at all the little islands on our approach to Finland. There are thousands, as there had been leaving Stockholm. All with little cabins and boats. What a life.
Mid-summer, summer solstice (the shortest day of the year) is celebrated in Finland and is called Juhannus. For most Finns, Juhannus is usually spent at a summer cottage, and includes a bonfire and mind to wild partying. It is often the start of summer vacations and it is a time of year when, finally emerging from the darkness and winter, Finns are in high spirits. In the Nordics, where seasonal changes are so marked, when summer arrives it is trumpeted triumphantly. Heck, the month of June is even called summer-month (kesäkuu).
Juhannus for us meant a trip to the Estonian island of Saaremaa, where a large number of Finns have summer cabins. It was quite a trip to get there, involving trains, ferries, cars, buses and many diversions. We hadn't booked a bus to get us to the final ferry to the island and we weren't getting much help or information from the locals. I think they get sick of Finnish tourists. Still, if all the tourists disappeared the place would collapse. A few detours, a bit of running and much sweat later (it was 30+ degrees) we finally arrived at the family summer cabin of a friend. In the middle of the forest in an ultra-private setting, complete with sauna and just 100m from the beach, it was well worth the effort. As tradition dictates, we almost set the island alight with a massive bonfire down by the shore. A good time was had by all, even our intrepid firefighters i.e. the girls who put out the blaze with a team bucket by bucket o water approach. Superb!
The Finnish celebrate the 1st of May (May Day) as many other countries do. In Finland it is an excuse to get really intoxicated (although evidence would perhaps suggest that they often don't need an excuse). It's called Vappu. It is also a time for students, both present and past, and for tradition. Upon graduating from high school Finnish students receive white hat with tassles, not unlike a sailor's hat. Every parent has a picture of their child in their hat at graduation. On Vappu, these hats are worn by the majority of people, old and young, in public. It meant a lot to graduate for some of these old people, and to see them wear their old yellowed hats proudly in the streets is quite nice. Nowadays, when almost everyone graduates it is a bit more of a non-event for youngsters. But anyway ... the hat wearing is extended to statues on Vappu as well (think university capping week here). University and Polytechnic students find the most eligible statue in town and place a hat on cap on it's head in a little ceremony. There is often then activities between different university groups and departments and general hijinks. Check out the photos of the cap ceremony here in Lahti and subsequent tug-of-war rope pull. I can confirm that the girls beat the boys on this occasion. Of course, I was only watching or it would have been different :-) Vappu also has traditional food and drink items: munkki (Finnish doughnuts) and sima (Finnish mead). These are both great.
Went to Helsinki this weekend and saw a pretty strange but highly entertaining Finnish band, Kuusumun Profeetta. An eight-piece, with guitars, drums, trumpet, saxophone, bass and keyboards, they are an odd bunch with an intense-looking heavy-metal bassist and a quirky singer who would have passed for your school teacher. Their music is hard to describe. The many instruments provide a lot of texture, and there is a real groove to all their numbers but it is probably the variation of the keyboard-playing singer that defines them as a band. Rising from sweetly sung ballads to Iron Maiden-like, almost operatic screams, he seemed almost like the conductor of an orchestra. As his vocals lead so the music followed. Singing in Finnish, although they have released albums in English, they enjoy a cult following over here. The small venue was packed and it was a really enjoyable night.
Went to see the movie Hotel Rwanda this weekend. This is the true story of a man who saved hundreds of people in Rwanda during the attempted genocide there in the mid 90s's by sheltering them in the hotel where he worked. This is Africa's answer to Schindler's list. In fact, the massacre of Tutsis (1 million people were killed) was happening about the same time that Schindler's list was receiving so much praise amidst strong sentiment that such a thing would never happen again. There is a line in the movie spoken by a journalist character which goes something like "If people see this footage, they'll go: 'Oh my God! That's horrible!' and then go on eating their dinner.". This pretty much sums up what the world's reaction was at the time. This movie, perhaps, attempts to right this wrong. Difficult to watch, but so it should be, this is a powerful and moving film.