Spring nostalgia

Considering how much I miss certain places, moments or feelings, you could think I'm talking about Paris in the 60s, having drinks with Jane Birkin and discovering free love. This is not the case, it's just that in the spring time an indiscernible feeling of nostalgia emerges. I miss.

For some reason, I've been missing Boston especially lot lately: reading the Sunday New York Times in my favourite coffee shop with a wholewheat cranberry pecan scone. I don't fully understand why I miss the place, but I guess it has something to do with freedom and the endless number of opportunities that I seemed to have ahead of me at that moment. It's funny how in only two years time, I feel like I have limited my options quite drastically already - or other people have done it for me.

Last week I was in Brussels. I have a love-hate relationship with that city. The arrival is always chaotic and comes with a bitter smell of pee in the metro and train stations. In the centre, I look around and see poverty, homeless people, drug addicts and it feels like somebody could hurt me at any moment. I look down and stop smiling. It's a developing country next to the EU district and my 4-star hotel, maybe that is why the surroundings catch my attention so strongly. But there is something unidentifiably attracting in this city that I've also been missing in Helsinki.

It's not (only) the tasty beers or cute guys in Belga, the bar - together with Campari oranges - that I first discovered and fell in love with in the summer 2003. Those days the bar was full of guys wearing Lacoste T-shirts, then the ultimate brand for hip university students. However, it wasn't the Lacoste T-shirts that I had been missing (you hardly see them any more) but the possibility of meeting strangers and doing things ex tempore.

People in Brussels (just like the PhD researchers in Florence) are temporary residents, coming and going, interested in meeting new people and extending their social networks throughout the city or Europe. In Helsinki, people have the same friends they had in kindergarden, or at least for the last 5 to 10 years. The groups are tight, but it also means that it can be hard to dive in if you're a newcomer. One thing in Helsinki that has surprised me maybe the most is that groups don't mix: you seldom bring a new friend along for a dinner with other friends. Dinners and meetings need to be planned weeks ahead and few acts or invitations are improvised; it makes life a little less exciting.

In Brussels I met with a devoted Finnish scout and we went to a vernissage to which he happened to have an invitation. After a few glasses of champagne and discussions on contemporary art, I had agreed upon going to Burundi to represent the Finnish scouts in an African jamboree.

I miss it already.

My Running History

When a discussion turns to physical activities or sports classes at school, it doesn’t leave anybody quiet. In most cases, looking back on those events doesn’t make you wonder why you haven’t skied during the last 15 years. I still remember very clearly the turning point when I learnt that any kind of athletic activity wasn’t my cup of tea. Every year at school we had a cross-country skiing competition (now I honestly think that all sorts of sports competitions for kids under 10 years old are a product of teachers’ sadistic mind), but the most important one took place when I was 7 years old (that is, my first skiing competition). I used my sisters’ old and miserable skies, called “Lasagne”, and indeed nomen est omen, the skies got stuck in the snow and even when going downhill I needed to push myself forward. I was the last one. I hated sports. I hated sports for the next 12 years that I spent in the Finnish school system.

Almost 20 years later, I thought I could start practising for a marathon (isn’t this a requirement for any successful person in today’s society?). I was living in the posh 16^th arrondissement of Paris and my professor gave a programme to exercise for a half-marathon. I began with 30 minutes. My old sport shoes (yes, I actually had a pair) gave me painful blisters but instead of giving up I used a third of my lousy trainee's salary to get a pair of Asics. I obeyed the programme and increased the running minutes even to 2 hours. I ran in Bois de Boulogne, equally popular for runners as for prostitutes. I didn’t mind the swaying vans or the cars stopping to negotiate a price with the prostitutes, the wood was a beautiful place to run around. I wasn’t yet ready for a half-marathon when the autumn came and I returned to Turku where the cold rain took over my motivation as a runner.

I started running again in Florence with the suitable weather conditions. First I ran around the stadium with many other runners, but when I moved to the centre I started running uphill to Piazzale Michelangelo where I ran through the tourist crowds that come to see the amazingly beautiful view and the copy of Michelangelo’s David. The view was a pleasure for me as well and I have to admit that I liked to show the tourists that what they came to visit from abroad, I saw every day even when doing sports.

Running in Berlin was more like my Bois de Boulogne experience except that prostitutes were replaced by the drug dealers in Hasenheide Park. While observing the prostitutes and drug dealers was interesting in both places, in Berlin hanging around in some of the cool cafés was more interesting than running in general (not that there are no cool cafés in Paris, but in Berlin I could actually afford them as well).

Listening to the same “running music” playlist, I also got to some weird suburbs in Boston. When Rammstein shouted “Du Hast” in Florence, I was somewhere close to the river or running downhill through the woods; when I heard Rammstein in Boston I was following a long stretch of asphalt street that took me past gas stations and ugly apartment blocks. I only went jogging once in Boston.

Now, in Tampere, the same playlist took me to a supermarket, then past a place where we had scout meetings, through a field where they have built some new houses recently, past the hill where I got stuck in the skiing competition, a little pond where I played after school with my friends, to a playground where they have replaced the cool (and probably a bit dangerous) carousel (man-shaped, a bit like giant whirligig) with some boring (and probably safer) basic playground stuff. I had run really fast in the hot afternoon and at home I threw up. I think I will never run a marathon, instead, I think Nordic walking is great if only it was acceptable (or not embarrassing) for young people or in the urban setting (so far, I have only practised it at our summer cottage in the countryside).

Via Karjalanpiirakka to Pecorino (Back to the Roots 2.)

Writing about a visit to a neighbourhood where I stayed during my first days in Boston, I unnecessarily titled my last entry as “Back to the Roots”. As a consequence, with my limited imagination, I am now troubling to describe with a different title my return back to Finland and eventually to Italy. Though I increasingly enjoyed Boston at the end of my stay, I was extremely happy to be onboard in the British Airways flight just the day before their strike begun and despite all the potential ash clouds hindering the air traffic over Europe. Returning back to the real roots...

While the weather forecasts for Florence were full of dark clouds, in mid-May I arrived to Finland that happened to be the warmest place in Europe at the moment. I had a Tampere-euphoria for three days that I spent in my beautiful hometown. The riverbanks offered picnic places for people enjoying the sun and I felt cosy when seeing drunken people in the early afternoon. Ah, Finland, so unpretentious, and the people, oh, so weird hair colours.

I stayed in Finland only for one week, just a perfect time for leaving in a state of premature homesickness and still having strong faith in our Eurovision song (I still think it’s great even though we didn’t make it to the final. However, I am a bit worried: what is happening to the world if you can’t make it to the Eurovision final even with a song by two beautiful blonds!).

My luggage full of summery silk dresses that had been useless in Berlin, I arrived to Florence airport where the casual conversation with an Italian co-passenger already led to an invitation for drinks (Italians, pfff...). How nice to return to a city where you know your way around, while the tourists around you are wondering how “grazie” should be pronounced or stay seated in the bus after arriving to the last stop. Just out of excitement and wonder if my rusty Italian was completely lost, I started short discussions with Italians who mostly responded in English (obviously quite lost that rusty Italian). I finished the academic year with 2/3 of my thesis but most importantly I took my time contemplating the Duomo with never-ending amaze, doing a passegiata around the city verifying that David was still in Piazza della Signoria, suffering a disappointment when a nice alternative café had been transformed into a boring place with no character and a shock when discovering a Ben & Jerry’s shop in the centre of Florence (ironically I noticed the place when eating ice cream in a gelato festival), and finally, feeling pure happiness in San Ambrogio market. How difficult to talk about Harvard and Boston without comparing the life there with our Florentine life that fills all the senses and gives satisfaction in so many levels. I found it hard to describe my life in Harvard not sounding completely unhappy with my stay there. Because that isn’t the case, I'm just so very happy with my life in Florence.

Impressions from Harvard Square

I haven’t even come close to completely cover our trip in Egypt but now that I have already undertaken new adventures in another continent I can no longer reminisce about snorkelling in Dahab, excellent sea food in the backstreets of Alexandria or the first rain in years in Sinai. I have immersed myself once again in the academic life and for two weeks now I’ve been savouring the atmosphere around Harvard Square. While I immediately felt like home in Boston, I have to say that some aspects of American culture and life surprise me as much as Islamic Egypt.

One day, just after my arrival, I started talking to a Romanian-French associate professor who had been living here for years now. I doubted if I could ever live here for a longer period and he assured me how I would find it eventually better than Europe (at the moment, I’m still doubting). At least there is one object to my absolute daily satisfaction rate: paper cups. Now I’m more prepared for this ubiquitous waste and I’m carrying my own thermos mug with me in order to avoid the paper cups in the cafés (however, paper cups being just one example of the ecologically unsustainable life style here).

Another “ex-European”, a German economics professor at Harvard, told me that while he enjoys his life enormously, he also misses the healthier balance between work and leisure in Europe where people actually have time to have a Sunday brunch with friends. I observed this work addiction very soon after arriving here. People carry their take-away coffees around the campus looking busy, eat their lunch during the classes and try to multitask the day through. Are they really more efficient in their work like this, not having a real pause to calm down? I don’t know but if I remember correctly, some economists argue that the productivity is around the same in Europe even if we work much less. Anyways, if our more easy-going work rhythm is not improving our economic growth rates like in the USA, I think it must be correlated with the well-being of people.

So, even though I’m very impressed by the Harvard University and nice and polite people (working for their tips?), I’m still not ready giving up my European identity and pride of being European. I’ll keep you updated on my sentiments of European superiority on the one hand, and my positive observations of the American culture on the other. I’ve already abandoned some of my arrogant prejudices about the Americans, but however, only premised on the non-representative sample around Harvard.