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.

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.