I got to the town of Tampere at about 4 PM local time on Sunday. That’s 6 AM Seattle time, although part of my trick for traveling is to just believe whatever the time is wherever I go. It’s hard to do. Anyway, the trip was about 22 hours long door to door, and that’s not too bad at all.
I’m staying in one of the nicer hotels in Tampere and, as it turns out, it’s a very good place to be if you don’t like automation. Apparently some of the other hotels have no desk staff and you simply get a door code when you check in online or something. But my place is quite good; the lunch buffet features something that is either heavily smoked fish or braised pork in bacon sauce. I can’t tell which one. It’s good with rice, though.
The food. It bears mentioning. A lot of mentioning, and some description. For example, I learned last night that there are places up north where you can get bear pizza. That isn’t a euphemism, either, like a “cow pie.” I’m talking about actual bear meat on regular pizza with tomato sauce and cheese. The strange thing is, once you’ve been here for 24 hours and had a few meals, bear pizza not only sounds like a normal meal…it almost sounds good.
My first evening in Tampere was spent driving around town trying to use my rented GPS navigation system and then trying to park my rented car on the sidewalk. That sort of thing is encouraged in Tampere. Also, since I’m in Finland, I wanted something a little different for dinner. Something Scandinavian. Something that might make you go “Hmm” if you saw it on a menu in the US. So I went to a Viking restaurant.
Harald is something of a Viking chain restaurant, although there are only three around. The place was clearly decorated with children’s birthdays in mind, sort of like a subdued, Finnish version of Chuck E. Cheese but with food served on shields and swords. There are 2-person salads served on shields at Harald, which I assume is the only way Viking parents could convince their Viking children to eat their greens. I didn’t get a salad on a shield so I don’t know if you can get the dressing on a smaller shield on the side. I assume so.
The menu at Harald was quite diverse from a gastronomic perspective. I went for the Roe Deer A La Thanet; allow me to quote the English menu on this one:
“Roasted roe deer fillet, berry-seasoned game sauce, root vegetable rosti, buckthorn-marinated chanterelles, mashed cauliflower, redcurrant zucchini compote.”
It might seem hard to believe, but this meal was actually disgusting and delicious at the same time. That’s very disconcerting for someone who likes food as much as I do, particularly venison and other game meats. Everything about this meal was fine except for the buckthorn. That link goes to Wikipedia, where there is an excellent description of the buckthorn plant, its relation to elves, and its toxicity and use in gunpowder manufacturing. Sounds delicious!
The rest of Sunday night was spent recuperating at the hotel and then sleeping well into Monday. I got up at about 11 AM (after 12 hours of sleep, which I desperately needed) and went down to the hotel restaurant to discover their buffet. After eating at Harald, I was a little concerned about what I might find in the hotel lunch buffet. I was pleased to see a huge tub of green rice, which I enjoy (spinach and greens cooked with rice and spices). I was less pleased to see blanched-looking tomatoes stuffed with cheese plus another tray of what looked like heavily breaded fish fillets. The final tray had the aforementioned pork/fish thing in it, which turned out to be fairly tasty if a little tough. I think it was porkchops. I had never seen porkchops with bacon bits and bacon gravy, though. You’ll go far in Finland if you like bacon.
I wanted to catch up on some reading for the conference, which starts today and which is the real reason I came to Tampere. So, I pulled out my trusty guidebook and found a good coffeeshop called Runo. This place is terrific, and the ambience was only helped by the fact that Monday was just about the nicest possible day in terms of weather. It was 65 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, with a mild breeze every so often. Most of the people at Runo were sitting outside enjoying the sun, but I chose to sit inside at one of the large wooden tables.
Now, one of the best things about Finland is the education system. Finnish people learn Finnish, Swedish, English, and a fourth language, which might be Russian, German, French, or something else. So when you walk into a random coffeeshop in a large city in Finland, chances are you can speak English with everyone in the place. I love that, because Finnish is absurdly difficult for an American who has never heard it spoken before. It sounds like a combination of Martian and Spanish to my ears. It’s a beautiful language and I clearly need to spend more time with it before I can pick anything up with regularity. But when you first get to Finland, the language really stands out as a confusing, enchanting morass of vowels and the letter “r” trilled for a second or two every so often. I do know that “ravintola” means “restaurant,” which is good to know.
Anyway, at Runo I spent a good 3 hours reading. I had a big mug of freshly-brewed black and vanilla tea (the house blend), and I also had a piece of cheesecake. This slice of cheesecake was fluffy, with a solid crust of graham cracker and a layer of fresh pear slices between the crust at the bottom and the cake above it. Incredible stuff. I’d fly back here again just to try this cake. I should point out that on two separate occasions yesterday, two different Finnish people forgot the word “pear” and asked me which fruit looked like an apple but was shaped like this, and then they made the sort of hand motion you’d make if you were describing the curves on Marilyn Monroe. I was completely baffled the first time until another Finnish person remembered that “päärynä” means “pear.” The second time, I was prepared with the right answer. Actually, this is how good the education system is in Finland: Multiple Finnish people knew the English word “pear.” That’s pretty advanced if you ask me.
Walking around Tampere is very interesting. I have noticed two things: There are a lot of people walking here, particularly with dogs, and everyone walks very purposefully. I felt like I was living inside The Sims yesterday at times, in part because everyone else seemed to have some secret destination toward which they were traveling on foot as quickly as possible. Old ladies walked faster than me as I strolled around the city. And I walk fast, too.
The city itself is wonderful. I can see why Finns want to live here. They voted Tampere as the city in which they would most like to live, which is such a European type of poll to take. In the US, it would be the other way round: In which city would you least like to find yourself? Detroit and Baltimore top this poll all the time.
Tampere is a great place to stroll and reflect, particularly when the weather is nice. Apparently there should be an entire meter of snow on the ground at this point in the year. There is no snow anywhere. Now remember, Tampere is at 61.30 N longitude. That is quite a bit farther north than the continental US. By comparison, Edmonton, Canada is at 53.30 N longitude and Moscow, Russia is 55.45 N. So we’re pretty far north here in Tampere. Amazingly, it was warmer here yesterday than in parts of Greece. Go figure.
After spending much of the day reading and walking, I made my way to Plevna for the pre-conference get-together. Plevna is a brewpub located in an old textiles mill of sorts. I was planning to go to Plevna anyway, but then the conference organizers set up this pre-conference meeting so I was quite excited. As soon as I showed up there, I met John, one of my fellow presenters and researchers. John wrote an incredible paper examining the gaming habits of the youth population on one of the islands of the Outer Hebrides. It turns out that John actually moved to the island in question a few years ago, so he was freaking out a little in Tampere because there are so many people. In a typical week, he sees two people, including his girlfriend. The other person is his postman, whom he knows quite well by now.
John and I ordered some beer and quickly met up with several other people from the conference. Olli is a PhD candidate at the University of Tampere and a great guy; he and I ended up hanging out for the rest of the evening as everyone else slowly drifted home or back to their hotel rooms. A.K. is also a PhD student and she moved down to Tampere from Lapland. She also told us about the bear pizza, which we all wanted to go and try after we’d had a few beers, but apparently you need to drive 12 hours north to eat this particular pizza. There is always Thursday….
It’s time to get ready for the first day of the conference, so I will end here by saying that tar ice cream and tar schnapps are actually better than they sound. “Tar” isn’t really tar as we think of it in the US. It’s really tree sap, almost like maple syrup, but with a distinctively burnt flavor and aroma. It’s good stuff. I’m staying away from the Salmiakki, though. As Olli said, “Too much ammonium chloride is bad. But just a little…ahh, perfection!”
