- Mar 13
Updated: Mar 18
We spent February break in Finland so excuse this brief diversion.
Day 1
Very short connection in Helsinki but I noticed that the Finnish tourism board is trying something new: a campaign appealing to Finland’s most illustrious golden daughter, Pamela Anderson.
The flight from Manchester to Helsinki looked like it was mostly people connecting. Boarding the flight to Oulu and looking at row on row of more Finnish people than I've seen in the same place in years was a visually overwhelming experience. We landed in Oulu at 2am. “This reminds me of Bismarck,” said T, who is from Bismarck. I punched the address of the hotel into Uber and felt lucky to only wait 15 minutes. The children got a second wind and had a lot of questions. Where were we going? Where would we have breakfast the next day? When were we going to see E and V, their former babysitters? Who were all the other people we were going to visit? We drove for about 20 minutes, which was longer than I expected. “Does this look right?” said the driver dubiously as we turned at a row of mailboxes down an unlit country road. It did not. When I was typing in the address I clicked the first option that came up, and hadn’t noticed that the number and street were correct but the town was not. Luckily the driver was good natured and also a foreigner, which meant his English was better than his Finnish, so we were able to establish where we belonged. We each shuffled through our payment apps until we found some overlap so I could pay him for this new leg of the journey but by the end I think he would have paid us if it meant he could go home. Arrival at hotel at 3:30.
The hotel recommended breakfast at a buffet slash gas station across the street. After our late night none of us were enthusiastic about being up before the buffet closed, but we were all revived by the Finnish classics of rice pastries, cold cuts, sliced vegetables, yogurt, berries, and very strong coffee. Fellow diners included a contingent of Latvian kickboxers. I’d forgotten my slip-on crampons at home and asked T to get them on his last trip back to Medford. We realized too late that he’d been picturing some kind of feminine hygiene product but I appreciate that he hadn’t let that put him off the search, even if it was unsuccessful. I slipped on the ice in the parking lot so we went to a supermarket to get new ones.
Lunch at my aunt’s house with assorted other relatives, nearly all of whom I can name and understand how they are related to me. I wore national dress (a sweater from the Uniqlo-Marimekko collaboration). A cousin picked us up and when we arrived at my aunt’s house, firefighters were addressing a smoking car in the parking lot of her building. I asked the word for firefighter. My cousin’s husband said palomies and my cousin said it was pelastaja, and then they went back and forth a little bit. MCH explained now they are supposed to use the gender neutral term pelastaja but he will personally still say palomies. Fun fact about Finnish: no gendered pronouns!
There were some interesting family tidbits. For example, Finland was struggling to recover after the war and people didn’t have much, so my grandparents would send these relatives crates containing scarce products like coffee, and clothes my father had outgrown. My father grew to be 6’8” so even as a child his height was startling. My very short grandparents, unwilling to say that he was adopted, would tell people the American milk had extra vitamins that made him shoot up. His old skates were 10 cm too big for his cousins so they were passed down from kid to kid with newspaper stuffing to make them usable, and some of his shirts were cut up and made into multiple garments. I saw a cousin I last met when we were both in our teens. She now has thirteen children between the ages of 20 and 10 weeks. Real Sliding Doors moment about what might have been for me if my grandmother didn’t decide she wanted to go to America where she could wear makeup and watch Gunsmoke. These relatives are all very religious and do not have televisions, but they and their children have smartphones and I did not have the nerve to ask how they square that circle. They are definitely not entirely cut off from popular culture because when my younger son started doing 6-7 the parents all made the same exasperated face we make. My aunts had thoughtfully prepared extensive gluten free dishes for me, and I think I was just being respectful of their efforts when I ate four cream-stuffed Shrove Tuesday buns. We all got hand-knit socks. It was around this point I realized that despite the single digit temperatures outside, it was the first time in months that I had been really warm indoors.
Got home in time to watch Finland play Italy at hockey. “Why are they doing this,” T said after the score reached 7-0. The Italians’ Finnish coach glowered. It ended at 11-0. It was like a joke that starts funny, then you tell it again until it’s not funny, then you tell it again until it’s hilarious.
Morning. When we came outside, the taxi driver was having a bio break in the corner of the parking lot. He was very pleasant but I would have liked to see some token hand sanitizer use. I’d just had a quick breakfast of leftovers (no matter your circumstances, a Finnish aunt is going to send you off with leftovers) and looked forward to a cup of coffee at the train station. You want to know the infrastructure implications of being a country the size of Vietnam with about 6% as many people? It means that in a mid-sized town, this is the train station.
But we were in the right place, and the train came on time, and we had booked seats in the children’s car so there was a space for the kids to horse around while I had that coffee and a bowl of salmon soup. We stopped in Tampere to have lunch with two of my former babysitters. We discussed our health and that of various family members. I asked one of them if, when she was changing my diapers, she’d ever imagined she’d one day be giving me tips for working out my plantar fasciitis. She said “No” and made a face like that is quite enough of that missy.
Back on the train for another few hours to Helsinki. Lots of conscripts in the station heading back to their bases after a weekend of leave. Unnerving to realize I am old enough to be their mother. Arrival at AirBnB which was thankfully exactly where we expected it to be!
Monday
Breakfast at Fazer Cafe where we confronted the reality of 25% VAT. In Britain, things feel reasonably priced as long as you ignore conversion to dollars. Here, not so much. Very good nonetheless. We then went to the most labyrinthian supermarket I have ever set foot inside. We got separated almost immediately and made many fruitless (ha) laps searching for each other while also getting the essentials of Karelian rice pies, pulla in various forms, candy, and cheese. I'll give Finnish supermarkets points for being open longer than the ones in the UK, but I think it says something about the commercial culture here that it was the day after Valentine's Day but none of the candy was marked down. There is a knitting section in every Finnish supermarket and at this point I heroically resisted.
After lunch we went to Heureka, the science museum where I had been taken on many a childhood visit, with P and her kids. It was the rare place that was actually better than I remembered it being. That may be because I appreciate it more as the parent of children who like science museums than I did as a child who was personally indifferent to them. T was brave enough to ride a bike fitted with a counterweight across a tightrope. If I was too chicken to do it when I was 9, I was certainly not going to do it now where the stakes included possible trauma to my children in the event of my demise!
Tuesday
Met with H who took us to a hill near her building with sleds she had borrowed from her neighbors. It was crowded with kids from a daycare nearby so an orderly system had formed. The children hurtled themselves downhill until it was time for lunch. H’s baby is five months so I heard all about the realities of the Finnish baby box.
Dinner at the A house. The streets were torn up for installation of new pipes. Hot water that comes from cooling the nearby data center will flow through the pipes and warm homes. At one point all the children, including my four year old, went out to go sledding again. It was dark and I had no idea where they were going but I went with the flow. Please applaud.
Wednesday
No plans in the morning and everyone else wanted to stay at the AirBnB watching Frieren so I went solo to the fancy yarn store and the secondhand store at a recycling center on the outskirts of Helsinki. In all my trips to Finland, I don’t think I had ever gone anywhere by myself up to that point. It’s very safe and public transportation is great, it’s just a function of going to a place where your sole aim is usually to visit people. Prices at the recycling center were a little higher than in British charity shops, and clothing hangers weren’t marked with sizes. In their favor, there was a ton of stuff that was well organized including lots of skis and winterwear. I passed on a fondue pot that haunts me still.
Afternoon at K’s house where, you guessed it, the kids went sledding. After dinner, T and I used K’s sauna. They also have the first bathtub I’ve seen on this trip. In sharp contrast to bath-mad Britain, but wouldn’t you pick a sauna too? It’s a rare a single family home in Finland that doesn’t have one, and most apartment buildings have one with a schedule for resident use. Sauna is probably the number one thing that makes visitors to Finland say “Why can’t I live like this.”.
Thursday
Our token cultural excursion to the Athenaeum art museum. Another moment of culture shock, as this type of museum in England is nearly always free (except for the one part you really want to see). The last time I remember doing anything remotely educational in Finland, it was a modern art museum where some of the pieces included a video of a talking woman projected onto a sack slumped in the corner, a single square of white stone, and several bowls of rice arranged in a line. I was around 11, and I probably wouldn’t get any more out of that today than I did in 1995. This collection was much more accessible.
We parted again, the fellas to have a mom-free gluten feast at a hand-pulled noodle restaurant and me to do some gift shopping. Quick stop at the Marimekko outlet. A few years ago there was an election and someone from the consulate in New York came to Boston to collect ballots. I’m not very up on Finnish politics but we had a Finnish au pair at the time so I took her. Waiting room full of Finns studiously not making eye contact with each other. The ballot box was a cardboard box covered in Marimekko wrapping paper with a slot cut into it, that is how deeply Finns feel about Marimekko. I think it’s…fine? Even at the outlet the prices were higher than I was willing to drop on flowered towels and colorful sack dresses, but I got some remnants. Last stop was a Targetish supermarket for more candy, portable sleds, random winter items, and the like. My mom had asked for blueberry powder and someone at checkout very patiently tried to find it for me but no dice. People are incredibly good natured about speaking English here, to the point where they’d speak it back to my dad when they recognized how old-fashioned and creaky his Finnish was, to his great chagrin.
Dinner at a Chinese buffet with a woman who worked at the study abroad program I went to in Beijing, and now lives here with her Finnish husband and their three kids. I brought them a box of macaroni and cheese and a bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups. I was afraid that would seem tacky but her ten year old son took immediate and enthusiastic ownership of them. The family also lived in the US for a while, so I found her assessment of Finnish parenting through the lens of China/Bay Area norms to be very helpful. I can only be so relaxed about letting a four year old go sledding without an adult at night before I need some confirmation that I’m not losing it.
Friday
Breakfast with R and his husband T at Eckberg. T is an antiques dealer and we oohed and ahhed at pictures of their apartment. Before we left, R told us we should come by and see it later which we accepted with maybe a little more enthusiasm than anticipated. On to the Children’s Town exhibit at the Helsinki Museum where you could see a model school room, a mid-century apartment where I recognized many similar items from my grandparents’ possessions, and a seventeenth century workshop and carriage.
Lunch at the Old Market Hall (Vanha Kaupahalli) by the harbor. It is full of stalls playing the hits for tourists: Salmon soup, fried fish, reindeer meat, and cardamom buns. Everything was very good so as long as you weren’t bothered by the lack of local clientele you could do a lot worse.
Most of the harbor had frozen over to over 30 cms in depth, thick enough to support a truck. We went to a spot where you could get down to the ice and walk (or cross country ski, if that’s your thing) across the surface. It feels very solid and also your brain is constantly saying WHAT ARE YOU DOING. The park facilities on one of the little islands seemed to be closed, so we were curious about the black smoke coming out of a hut. Two red shirtless figures emerged.
Dinner two of the kids’ former babysitters E and V, and their respective families. The children had been asking every day since before we left when we were going to see them. I had made a tactical error in scheduling this meeting during the Finland-Canada hockey game. But while it meant everyone’s attention was somewhat divided, you don’t get a more culturally authentic experience than watching uncles yell at a sporting event.
Last full day! We went to R’s apartment and saw all their wares. Do you ever see photos of beautiful interiors and think “Well it doesn’t look like that all the time,”? Apparently for some people it does look like that all the time.
R was remarkably sanguine about the gallumphing children pawing through all the pottery fragments and waving their elbows around the amphorae. Exciting moment when he brought out the jar of ceremonial daggers. There were three dogs and several tanks of reptiles (I was relieved that the snake remained in seclusion). My children thought it was a wonderland.
Dinner at the RH house where N and I had stayed on our last trip, which meant that N got to show B around like the expert he was. I learned the word for “Fix it!” by watching various toddlers drop things, hand the fragments to their parents, and say “Korja!”. Two of RH’s sons-in-law, E and J, are part of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, which means they speak Swedish to each other and their children, and Finnish to their wives and inlaws. Occasionally RH tries to speak Swedish to her grandchildren, but they adamantly refuse to switch languages with her and insist that she speak only Finnish to them. I asked J what language he thinks in. He said either depending on the situation, and it is so hard to switch your language for a given context that he has friends who are twins who he met in different settings, and he can only speak Finnish to one and Swedish to the other.
Last day. Last grocery run where I succumbed to the supermarket yarn aisle. Ahead of us at the airport was a Norwegian drummer who was going to have to check his cymbals and was not happy about it. A German girl and a Dutch boy made tentative conversation in English in the airport play area. Last bowl of salmon soup. The excitement of the plane being de-iced. Long journey and then finally home, such as it is.
