The non-zones

Airports. In a way, I love them, they are often connected to new adventures, new places and great expectations. On the other hand, it's a lot of waiting, boredom, goodbyes and existential crisis. Airports are similar non-zones regardless where you are, places that do not have any characteristics except for the characteristics of your own trip and flight experience. You can be at the airport of Bangkok or Cairo without realizing it, it could be London or Helsinki as well. The only trouble you have is with the currency exchange rate.

In the past one month or so I have spent too much time at the airports. It makes traveling annoying and boring. The glory of air traveling has lost its attractiveness. And indeed, the glory was very far on my trip to Luxembourg last Monday. The autumn storm was disrupting ("irregularities" as the flight companies put it) air traffic in Amsterdam so I was ordered to fly through Copenhagen. Why not, the Danish guys are tall and handsome. 

However, the storm had already advanced to Southern Sweden and Denmark. With our second try, we finally managed to land to very windy Copenhagen (people were vomiting at the back of the plane, I was meditating) and the airport was then closed (also trains and metros stopped working). I got in a transit center queue with a Danish sandwich and a beer and calculated that it would take around 20 hours to serve the 800 customers in line in front of me. "Luckily" after 1 hour 40 min, I realized that I had been waiting in a wrong queue and eventually took a number for the correct counter. Only 100 numbers before me (and a tall and handsome Finn!).

Too bad I was overly focused on getting a new flight to Luxembourg (+hotel room) so I wasn't able to go around in the Copenhagen airport which is probably one of the nicest ones in Europe. You find there good shops and many different kinds of cafés or restaurants, unlike in Helsinki-Vantaa airport where you only get one type of vegetarian sandwich in all the cafés of the airport. No wonder my friend told me on Facebook to concentrate on shopping and not on the tall and handsome Danish guys.

Usually I tend to connect airports with lots of emotions. Crying out loud at the counter in Paris-Orly when I had misunderstood the flight schedule (I made it however and got in time to Berlin to see my new boyfriend), buying a 300 EUR Ryanair flight to London when I had foolishly missed my initial flight (and got to see my boyfriend - not the same one - almost in time), leaving my Senegalese tax-free products in Madrid security check (not properly packed liquids) after a lot of negotiations and - on the more positive side - all the proseccos I have enjoyed in order to celebrate a wonderful upcoming adventure. 

Something that I also find thrilling at the airports are other people traveling and expecting great adventures, the feeling of big expectations. It can be contaminating. But then, you also have these usual Brussels bureaucrats, dryly moving from one capital to another.

Airports can also be a place for cultural shocks. When I arrived to the luxurious airport of Bangkok after traveling on budget in Cambodia and Laos, I was disgusted by the boutiques of Louis Vuitton and Prada and the glittering diamonds and golden watches in the shop windows. At the Arlanda airport in Stockholm, on my way from Addis Abebe back to Finland, I was depressed by the Starbucks café (and capitalism): after all the excellent Ethiopian coffee that was roasted before my eyes, I was just uninterested by the Swedish barista asking me if I wanted my cappuccino with a single or double shot, tall/medium/large and made with Guatemalan/Columbian/Costa Rican/Ethiopian /Kenyan /+10 other choices coffee. "Just give me a bloody coffee, will you!" The modern capitalism has given us the illusion of liberty to choose, but to choose what, the coffee beans for my toffee frappuccino latte macchiato. Who cares, and does this illusion of endless choices make anyone happier (I'd say it's the opposite, and what the fuck is "tall cappuccino" in any case)? 

The luxury at the airports can be also nice in certain circumstances. After rough traveling, I love to go to the duty-free shop in my hiking outfit, wearing my last almost-clean clothes and try on the super expensive Sisley hand cream (and wonder who the heck will pay 100 euros for a hand cream), some lipstick and perfume and think that I'm ready for the urban life once again. 

To conclude, here are some of my observations about some airports I've travelled through:

- Entebbe (Uganda): UN flights leaving to South Sudan with peacekeepers on board made my own travels seem quite uninteresting.

- Istanbul: flights all over the world, Muslims wearing their best clothes on the way to Mecca or Medina. Flights to Teheran, Baghdad, Kigali etc. A place to start a real trip!

- Italian airports: last chance to have a cheap and good cappuccino on the way back home.

- Brussels: they have finally ended with the construction work of the train station at the airport, but still, arriving to Brussels still feels like arriving to some backward country in the 1970s, nothing functions. But chocolate is good and last chance to have a cheap Leffe on the way home.

- Amsterdam: the self-flushing toilets are just annoying and uncomfortable.

- JFK: you expect glory and you find concrete. What the heck?? A truly disappointing airport.

-Bujumbura (Burundi): two gates, no screens, and outside some very rusty and old Air Burundi airplanes (to be avoided).

On winter - by B. Jones

Remember when, about four weeks ago, I declared my aim to practice for a half marathon? Well, the snow remains on the ground and it's too cold and dark to run voluntarily if not for a bus. I have tried to minimise my time on the snowy ground in general. And still, I've fallen twice (Italian shoes + lack of practice).

The first time in front of a male friend. He didn't gallop to help me. This lack of gentlemanly behaviour should have signalled me already something more that I grasped at the moment when I tried to get up with my knee hurt. Indeed, this leads me to the conclusion I've reached during the last five months (and my adult life in Finland at large): the Finnish guys just lack all the balanced passion and attention, playful devotion and courage that can inspire me in some guys I've met abroad. Oh yes, on a weekend trip in Paris and a work trip in Brussels I noticed so clearly what I was missing in Finland besides sun. God dammit, how can the French guys be so bloody cute?

The second time in front of an 8 o'clock tram stop busy with people. Left me with a mark on my thigh but less visions about the people in Finland.

Of course, it's pretty outside. But in the back of my mind I hope that the snow will melt during my trip to the Philippines. And yes, this blog is turning into a Bridget Jones Diary...

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).