Cannibals/drowning men, 500 meters (Finland trip part 4 of n)
When I visit a new city, I enjoy taking a walk just after dusk, just after the sunset strikes the buildings and shades them in gold and silver. I enjoy strolling down streets that have names I cannot pronounce, looking at the shop windows and their displays, and seeing stores with names such as “Ninja Hair Styles” and “Boxing Bingo.” I enjoy looking in on the local pubs, the neighborhood spots where some of the regulars have bar stools named after them, at least unofficially. I enjoy walking past the people on the sidewalks, the people who either know that I am a foreigner or who cannot tell, all of whom in any case continue their conversations regardless. I enjoy jaywalking.
I also enjoy looking up at the hotels at this time of day and seeing which rooms have the lights on with the blackout shades drawn. Those rooms temporarily house so many different people, who have such disparate cultural heritage and backgrounds, who will probably never meet each other even though they sleep so close together. I like to look at those lit-up rooms and wonder who is in each one of them.
Tonight, I am one of those travelers who enjoys the solitude and invulnerability in anonymity that a good hotel in a fairly large town affords. Tonight, I drink the Karhu beer from the minibar. Tonight, I watch chariot racing on Finnish television. Tonight, I spend 15 Euros for 24 hours of wireless broadband. But most of all, tonight, I am proud to say that I ate a pizza with moose meat on it.
But first, the drive to and from Ahtari.
Ähtäri, as it is properly spelled, is a town that lies about 80 miles north of Tampere in Finland, assuming you have a helicopter. By road, it’s closer to 90-100 miles away because the roads must wind around and over a whole mess of lakes. Those lakes are absolutely wonderful as blurry scenery, believe me. I drove past hundreds of picturesque houses perched solo on little outcroppings of rock situated in the middle of small lakes, which are “teeming” with fish according to my guidebook. It sounds idyllic.
What they don’t tell you is these lakes are just beginning to thaw out completely, and it’s nearly May. I saw many extremely ambitious-looking swimming areas demarcated with buoys in some of the lakes. Some of the buoys were frozen sideways in the melting ice. It all look to me like an advertisement for a “polar bear” swimming club.
I began snapping digital photos at a furious pace, swerving my five-speed Mazda3 off the road at every opportunity. The road signs were quirky everywhere I looked. One town, the name of which I have forgotten, had four different a’s in it, and each a had an umlaut. Ahtari only has two umlauts, but it does sound a lot like the gaming system “Atari,” and that drew me in once I saw the first road sign for it.
I had reached Ruovesi at about 12 PM, I think. The fact that these villages even have Web sites is about as ambitious as a reproduction of Romeo & Juliet starring William Shatner as Juliet. Which would be horrible. That’s a bit extreme as an analogy, perhaps, but trust me when I say that Ruovesi is really small. I walked through the entire town in about 2 minutes. I was very happy, though, to see the quirkiest road sign of the day: a man’s head floating above three waves. The best part was when I saw this sign for swimming, or possibly drowning, next to a knife and fork. I couldn’t tell whether, in Ruovesi, you could eat a man (or be eaten by the inhabitants of Ruovesi) or drown in one of the many picturesque lakes as Finnish fishermen cast their lines into the water, which is incidentally teeming with fish. Apparently Ruovesi was once voted the “most picturesque village” in Finland. If drug stores and neon lottery signs are the Finnish equivalent of a picturesque village atmosphere, I guess I can see why Ruovesi used to be so popular. I was the only tourist, and I was driving, by far, the newest car in town. I did get some excellent photos of doors, though.
Every 500 feet along Route 66, which is the highway that runs through Ruovesi, you see a sign for some other village even smaller than Ruovesi. The typical name of one of these villages is at least 15 letters long, with umlauts that begin to make the villages sound like crappy metal bands. Perhaps I could venture to say that the collective name for these villages is Aatthhoseenapralahtiaaii. You can add your own umlauts in there. I’d recommend the following: Aätthhoseenaprälahtiääii.
I’m not joking about the prevalence of umlauts, by the way. The road sign that visually indicates a bumpy road ahead also says “Päällyste päättyy” below the picture of two vaguely breast-shaped objects. There is something vaguely sexual about this particular sign, but in a very wholesome and unintended sort of way, sort of like the food at the supermarket that I noticed: a tea named “Tiger’s Fantasy.”
Oh yes, the supermarket. I reached Ahtari and went shopping at about 1:30 PM. I purchased two things: three juice boxes with incredibly bizarre creatures with skateboards and other youth sport paraphernelia (the brand name was “TRIP”) and a bag of “Turkish Pepper” licorice candies that are medium spicy and “firewood” flavor. These things were fairly cheap. A small bottle of Sprite and some cactus-flavored licorice pastilles cost 3 Euros and 1 Euro, respectively, at one of the few gas stations in Ahtari. That’s really damn expensive. I spent about 600 Euros putting about 2 gallons of gas in the car, too. Hyperbole aside, Finland is fairly expensive, although it’s a bargain here compared to Norway.
On my way back to Tampere, where I had a 5:30 dinner date with a few of the local folks from the symposium I attended, I drove through the town of Virrat. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. My GPS navigation system led me to a deserted intersection and proclaimed, “You have arrived at destination.” This, however, is bullshit. That was on the way to Ahtari. I tried again and got closer, but I was only able to find the entrance to Route 65, which runs close to Virrat. I don’t think I missed too much there since all the festivals begin next week.
How would I know something like this about the town of Virrat, Finland? Good question. The answer is simple: I saw a sign that said Kirstin Gallery and I turned off Route 65 onto a dirt driveway that led toward a lake.
The place pictured at that Web site actually exists. In fact, the house looked exactly like that today, with the same light and the same general amount of foliage (perhaps a bit more sparse today, though). I drove down that winding dirt driveway not knowing why I was doing it, or what I might find. I only assumed that I would either have an interesting adventure at this gallery or, most likely, it would be closed and the residents would boil me alive in authentic Ruovesi style.
Happily, I had an interesting adventure. I pulled up in my rental car and killed the engine. I slammed the door after climbing out of the little hatchback, mostly because I wanted to be sure to signal my arrival at this place. I had driven some distance off Route 65 to get there, so I was committed to the situation by now. Very quickly, the front door to the house opened and a happy, elderly Finnish woman began waving at me and smiling. It was this Finnish woman, actually. Her husband lurked behind her in his house clothes and socks.
I spent an hour in the house with Kirstin and her husband, with whom I did all of the talking since Kirstin knew absolutely no English at all. I would estimate the age of this couple at about 65-70 years old per person. The man was in better shape than me; he had, in fact, been chopping wood all day and was now taking it easy in advance of the evening meal.
After spending a few minutes in the dedicated gallery space within the house, the husband offered me some coffee. I accepted, at which point he offered me some ice cream. I accepted again, and his wife scurried away to prepare everything for us. I glanced at the guestbook and noticed that the last visitor had come, and gone, three weeks earlier. And that was one of two entries for the previous month.
I felt extremely at ease with this elderly couple. Maybe that was because the man was so unselfish about selling his wife’s work (6 greeting cards and postcards) for 5 Euros; he asked if that was too much and I laughed and said, “No, it’s not enough!” He wouldn’t accept any more money, and in the end his wife slipped in an extra print that was worth 5 Euros or more by itself. And that’s on top of the ice cream with peaches and coffee.
Much of my time with the couple was spent in their main living area. They had a large sitting room with space for bookshelves, a couple of desks, a nice and compact yet perfectly designed kitchen, and a massive stone fireplace that seemed to be built for firing ceramics rather than heating a house. The temperature gauge appeared to go up to about 800 degrees Celsius. Seriously. The man simply said, “It is cold here. We turn off the thermostat for the summer now so we use the fireplace.”
Immediately after sitting down, the husband and I shared an immense bowl of ice cream and 2 cups of coffee each, plus a bowl of peach slices. I think we each consumed about a half gallon of vanilla ice cream, which I (luckily) love. We finished it all because, as he said, “If we do not, it goes in the machine!” They had a garbage disposal and a trash compactor in the kitchen. The wife served coffee in fine china with doilies underneath each of the saucers. The sugar came in lumps, served in a silver sugar dish shaped like a small trophy with little handles on either side.
The husband and I talked about how long they had lived in this house (30 years), which for the past 20 years had been their primary residence after they only came to live there in the summer. We talked about their 3 daughters, 1 of whom spent a few years working in Sierra Leone. This elderly couple traveled to Sierra Leone in 2005 with only their backpacks. They had the photos in an album to prove it. There was the old man (as he described himself several times), shirtless, looking extremely buff for a 70-year-old man, embracing a young Sierra Leonean man. The first photo was of their daughter, who was sitting on a camp bed wearing only a towel. The old man grinned and said, “My daughter!”
His English was quite limited; he was learning it at evening classes because, as he said, they taught German as the foreign language when he was younger. He also said he was learning English to prevent “dementia,” which prompted a hearty laugh from him and another cup of coffee poured by his wife. She spent much of the visit tidying up the other room in the house, partly for cultural reasons (we were having a man-to-man chat) and partly for language reasons.
They proudly showed me some local brochures that announced their seasonal gallery opening, and another photo of the old man participating in a town ceremony of some sort. He laughed at that photo for several seconds because he wore a funny hat.
After we finished the ice cream and coffee, I asked to be excused as I needed to get back to Tampere. They understood, and were satisfied with the duration and content of my visit. The social experience had been completed successfully for us all, and we were all quite happy that I had happened to come careening down their little driveway.
The rest of the drive was quick. I never drink coffee, so I was practically driving the Mazda3 Flintstones style (you know, with the feet sticking out and running at a blur, that sort of thing). I stopped occasionally to take pictures of lakes and houses, some of which turned out incredibly well. But mostly I was hurrying back to the Holiday Inn so I could use my bathroom before heading out to my 5:30 dinner date.
I walked over to the University of Tampere and met the only other American who was left after the conference. With three Finnish students of the university, we went to Ristorante Napoli for pizza and wine. I ordered the best (22 Euros) wine on the menu, a 2004 Bodegas Osborne Solaz (80% Tempranillo and 20% Cabernet Sauvignon). The wine was dry at first, but it opened up into exactly the pizza wine I hoped it would be: nice and rich, with some fruit and oak and spice.
On this night, though, the wine would take a back seat to the pizza. Napoli has over 100 pizzas, with combinations that would make Americans cringe:
- chicken, canned peaches, and blue cheese
- blood sausage, tomato slices, and sweetened lingonberry preserves
- white asparagus, onions, and beef
Actually, that’s a list of what three of us ordered. The other American got the chicken/peach/blue cheese pizza, and she really liked it. She did live in England during high school, though. I got a pizza with moose, boar, and deer meat plus bacon, red onions, cheese, tomato sauce, and fresh minced garlic. I added the garlic myself; they had a note on the English menu that said, “Garlic is available free of charge.”
So yeah, I had a moose meat pizza tonight. And it was delicious. And, that moose meat did come with boar and deer, which both seem oddly boring to me after all the truly exotic game meats I have eaten here. The bacon on top was sort of like a garnish, much like you would add lettuce to a hamburber in the US, except they put about 4 huge pieces of delicious, slightly crunchy back bacon on this particular pizza. The Finns know how to cook bacon. They should educate the Canadians and the British in this regard.
Eventually it was time to go. I’m going to meet the 3 Finnish students for lunch tomorrow, right after I check out of the Holiday Inn and investigate the Lenin Museum here in town. Apparently you can see a couch on which Lenin slept when he lived in Tampere. I plan to take a few photos and buy some Soviet propaganda reproduction posters for my office. And then, after the museum and the lunch, I will either head straight to Helsinki or I will head to Sysmä, which is a town that has, according to two Finns who live north of the Arctic Circle, a very scenic road between it and Tampere. Sysmä is also directly east of Tampere, but there are at least 16,500 lakes in between the two cities (and it’s a 5-6 hour drive), so I may just go right for the throat and get to Helsinki with plenty of time to explore before all the shops close. Then again, it’s hard to pass up such a good chance for more interesting road signs and other experiences of the road. I’m always up for more ice cream with elderly artists and world travelers.
It will also be hard to leave Tampere tomorrow. This city is wonderful, with a terrific cozy feeling about it that makes me a little sad to turn out that hotel room light and begin the trip back to Seattle. I could feel it today, standing in the parking lot of the Ahtari supermarket. It is that familiar feeling, if you travel a lot, whereby you mentally stretch yourself as you would stretch a massive rubber band from your house to the furthest point of your journey. I reached the end of my elasticity today in that parking lot; from here on out, the rubber band slowly contracts. But along the way, there is always the possibility of another moose meat pizza.