Cypriot dances connecting Europe

I had the chance to enjoy the hospitality of the Cyprus EU presidency in Lefkosia (or Nicosia as we usually call the capital of Cyprus) last weekend. It was also my last EU-related business trip, which actually made me a bit nostalgic. I have to say that even after so many goodbyes I’m still not good at it; on the contrary, every goodbye seems to remind me of all the past ones. My somewhat eccentric Romanian colleague told me about a fixed flow of energy coming from us and if we don’t let go of the past, this energy isn’t liberated for new things (maybe it was the sleep deprivation, sun and local wine but this actually sounded important at the moment...). Less metaphysically, I was wondering if we can have an ever-expanding interest in the outside world and thought of which comes first: finding a new focus of interest, which replaces the past, or letting go of the past, which gives place to new darlings.

In any case, I’m not going to write about escapes in the higher spheres of our understanding and the ghosts of the past, a little side step from my original story; that is, my sunny escape to Cyprus, a country that I wouldn’t have probably visited otherwise. The food was excellent and people extremely friendly, but I don’t think the island will appear on the list of my future travel destinations (but I could recommend it to sun worshippers). I have to say that I knew very little about the country beforehand. Even for such a geography-enthusiast as I am, I couldn’t even really locate it on a map. It’s really in the armpit of Turkey and Lebanon, almost 3000 km from Finland, hardly in Europe at all. So, as I already wrote in the post after my trip in Africa, I came back with many ideas richer. And a phone number of a minister's bodyguard - just in case...

Nicosia, the capital, didn’t give me a very positive impression: the buildings are mostly ugly, similar to those we know from news images from Beirut (which is only 250 km away). Around our hotel scarcely-clad girls waiting for male company occupied the bars. We tittered when we entered these places like innocent school kids and tried to find a cool way to retreat from the trap. Even though we were in the centre, it felt like in a suburb of a medium-size city. I didn’t get any good vibes that this is the place to be, it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing; I should say that it was quite a boring city.

Crossing the border to the Turkish occupied side of the city (see photo above) felt like a tourist curiosity, even though during the trip I learnt more about its sombre reality. The history of the occupation (since 1974) and the clash between the Greek and the Turkish sides of the island continues to be a sensitive issue (why did I ask for a Turkish coffee at the bar???). The locals even talked about “Berlin wall in Nicosia”. It felt like the most unnecessary conflict in the world (obviously, I never understand the existence of any conflicts): fighting for an arid piece of land just to show off your power. I don’t know what’s the Turkish way of interpreting the conflict, but this is how I got the story, Turkey is unable to rest its case in its willingness to be a some sort of a super power while the Greek Cypriotes have been expelled to the other side leaving their homes behind. There are actually still UN troops in the country; for me, a UN car was a weird sight in an EU member state. You need a passport or an ID card to cross the border. But there's not much to see on the other side. During the prayer call the streets in the occupied side were completely empty. I felt like walking in Disneyworld’s set of a fake city after closing time (except for those piles of rubbish in the streets and homeless cats everywhere). To put it bluntly, it was as boring as the Greek side of the city.

The landscape of the country is almost a sad sight. Between Nicosia and Larnaca there are burnt hillsides and otherwise it looks like everything else has also been burnt during the last 20 years or so. However, I talked with an English guy who had been cycling around the island and he told me how wonderfully green it had been in the mountains. He lived in Dubai, so I don’t know if I can trust in his perception of a green landscape. It rained heavily during our stay (causing a leakage in my hotel room, that's how prepared they are for a strong shower) and while our host apologized for this unlucky weather, she also reminded us that the island had a huge shortage of fresh water after a dry summer. It basically never rains in the summer and the temperature usually exceeds +35ºC then.

I spent an extra day in Larnaca after our conference. It's a city of around 100 000 inhabitants and with a much nicer feeling, a true beach city. My short stay was a great way to receive a necessary dose of vitamin D for the grey, dark and cold autumn in Finland. It was warm enough to swim, but cool enough to avoid excessive sweating. Therefore, it was perfect time for a person like me who simply gets bored at the beach and hates that sticky salty water/sun lotion/sweat combination. A long morning at the beach was sufficient to get my stomach burnt as I later discovered at the airport. A bit more of that sun lotion could have been a healthy idea after all! All in all, it was truly wonderful to be able to dip into the sea in the end of October when the first snow had already arrived to Helsinki. By the way, it was very solemn to sunbath as the loud speakers on the beach boulevard were playing marching music and later there was a parade to celebrate the Cypriote national day…

In short, while Cyprus is not really a potential future travel destination for me, I enjoyed my time there and, in the context of growing euro-skepticism and intolerance against the bad management of finances in the Mediterranean countries, I have to say that it is wonderful to see people from all the member states to dance together Greek/Cypriot dances, sharing and enjoying their cultural habits and then feeling that something brings us more together than just basic humanity. We are all Europeans and we should be proud of the cultural variety and richness we can share. Europe would be a much poorer place without Cypriot food and Greek dances. And I would be much paler right now.

Our dance moves were maybe not as elaborated as in this video but this was certainly not because of lack of enthusiasm. I guess the locals took it as a compliment when the Austrian guy went to the dance floor to lead the dance. Oh dear, it was truly hilarious (until the moment I felt like throwing up the baklavas with any more dancing), but also quite emotional when the Greek and the Cypriotes did some real folk dancing together.

Hotel: Les Palmiers Hotel in central Larnaca is recommendable hotel with good views of the sea. Through booking.com my single room cost only 35 EUR (incl. breakfast). Otherwise the country wasn’t as cheap as I had imagined. Cappucino at the beach was 3 EUR, but sun bed only 2 EUR!

Reading: Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher.

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.

Arrivederci Firenze

The Economist wrote about PhD programmes a week ago and concluded that doing a PhD is waste of time. It was slightly discouraging to read such an article only a few days before I was finishing my thesis but, at the same time, I could only think that the last 3 and half years have been an excellent period in my life and living in Florence was an amazing experience. If I don't manage to translate my extended studies into economic benefits, at least I have had the opportunity to learn about Italian culture, admire painters from Giotto to Michelangelo, and visit dozens of beautiful Tuscan churches. So, I always have the plan B of becoming a tourist guide in Florence...

Of course, the whole autumn (my last one in Florence) was a huge nostalgic period when I was constantly thinking that I will have to give up my life in Florence that I had just now learnt to fully appreciate. Even those two months when I was the first one at the library at 8h30 when it opened (after a cappuccino and cornetto in San Domenico) and left around nine o'clock in the evening and hardly had the time to explore Florence, I was enjoying my stay.

During my last weekend, I strolled around the city to go through all my favourite spots of the city and walked up to San Miniato. It has the best view of Florence. The church itself is also amazing; so amazing that during one of the Florentine wars, Michelangelo protected the church with mattresses against the enemy's weapons. I sat inside for a while and in the comfortable isolation shed a few tears, out of happiness of having had such great last few months in Italy, beauty of the place and melancholy.

The last weeks in Florence were so busy that suddenly, via Cologne's Christmas market and Brussels, I was back in cold and snowy Finland, complaining about Senegalese tomatoes found in the supermarket and bad coffee found everywhere and drunk excessively. Later it was also snowing in Florence, something I've never seen. People who had stayed there posted images and Facebook comments on the chaos in the city. This video as well:

Mökki Escape

"Pirkkalan kesää", summer in Pirkkala.

Almost every family has a summer cottage in Finland. After the Finno-Russian war even the working class could afford to buy a piece of land and build their own cottages where their children and grandchildren are now enjoying peaceful moments in the summer time. It's a cliché but the Finns really like their own peace. Some people might know their countryside neighbours but the relations remain discreet, we don't want to bother our neighbours and, most importantly, we don't want to be bothered by them. Indeed, somebody rowing closer than 200 metres from our beach is considered as an intruder. My Grandmother bought our summer cottage (=mökki) by the 7th biggest lake of Finland in the 1970s and I have continued spending my summer holidays there since I was born.

Before leaving Finland in August, I wanted to go see my Grandmother's old summer cottage in Pirkkala, 10 km away from my hometown Tampere. It was a house built for her father in the late 1920s and my Grandmother had sold it in the 1970s when she wanted to have a house with own beach instead. I had always heard stories about the house and I had a clear image of it in my mind, I had also seen some old black and white photos of it that make it look like the most idyllic place on earth, just like in the old Finnish films. We took the old route to the summer cottage. We passed by an old industrial area where the first Finnish Coca-Cola company among others had operated. At one point, the road was closed but otherwise I got a pretty good idea of the road my Dad used to bike between Tampere and the summer house.

The grass had grown long and wild but the sauna still looked fantastic.

When we arrived, the first thing I saw was the old sauna and garage. Still in perfect shape even though they hadn't been in use after the property was sold some 40 years ago. The garden was getting pretty wild and I saw my Dad getting a bit nostalgic: "This used to be our badminton yard." Now you could mostly see a place to use scythe, but there was also great charm still very present. The house was exactly as I had imagined, beautiful white wooden house that I would have been ready to buy immediately if they hadn't built a row of houses just 20 metres away on my family's old land, what a shame. It has been there useless and most probably it will be demolished in the near future. My Dad had painted the roof in 1969; it was a punishment for bad behaviour my Mother told me (they had met a year earlier in Germany so also my Mom knew the place), while my Dad said it was for a lack of summer job that he had done it. "A difficult job." But it still looked almost freshly painted.

This is just like my dream house. Look at the beautiful windows! In the attic there should still be hidden an old rifle my Grandoncle had brought with him from the war in the 1940s.

The noise from the new road reached us in the feral garden. The house of an old neighbour had also been left unoccupied recently. It was all somehow very very sad. Even if I didn't have any direct contact with the place, I felt something had been lost.

Old photos from my Grandmother's photo album. In the corner, the house is photographed in 1928.