huevos con vino

My trip to Finland has been quite engaging.  I came here because I had a symposium to attend and, at which, I presented some research results that I had really wanted to discuss with the academic community.  This work is related to my professional work as well, which was how I was able to afford to come to Finland, and for that I am quite grateful.  I’m not just saying that because gas costs about $850 per gallon, either.

As I sit here and take a bit of a rest in the Hotel Kamp bar and lounge, I realize how lucky I really am.  When I was speaking with one of my colleagues at the symposium, I broke American culture down for her as follows: We love to complain, we live to possess things, and we particularly enjoy sitting in judgment of other people, especially those who do not share the same lifestyle and cultural and religious heritage.  I know I am guilty of these things even though I try to be as sensitive and understanding as I can.  In the US we love to use the word “tolerance” to suggest that we, the morally superior people, should “tolerate” rather than consider and understand other perspectives and attitudes toward life.  I hate that word, tolerance.  I prefer the more accurate words, “ignorance” and “mistrust.”

But enough of that.  I do love it here in Finland.  I am convinced that if Finland and Spain could geographically switch places tomorrow, there would be 200 million people living in the new Finland.  But because this country is as far north as Alaska, there are less than 6 million hardy souls here.  I mean it when I say “hardy” as well: You’ve got to want it in Finland.

For example, today is April 21st.  As I strolled around Helsinki today, my nose and ears froze and fell off my body, landing somewhere between Korkeavuorenkatu and Korskevankarenatu (one of those street names is fake, and one is absolutely real and indicative of all the other street names in Helsinki).  It is about 34 degrees Fahrenheit today, with occasional sleet and a flag-straighteningly stiff breeze from the west.  Or the north.  I can’t tell which way is north.  There’s a bit of a breeze, essentially.  All the appliance stores are having massive sales on their refrigerators and freezers, which here they refer to as “Food Warmers.”

Okay, so I might be kidding a bit, but it definitely takes a certain type of person to live in Finland, let alone be considered Finnish.  You know how, during sporting events, when one person must take the game-deciding shot?  That person is said to have ice water in his or her veins rather than blood.  I think that phrase begins to approximate the lifestyle here in Finland, although I think it is more likely that the Finnish do have blood in their veins, but it is mixed in equal proportion with vodka and bacon fat.  Perhaps this is my problem: I simply need to eat more pork so I can insulate my blood vessels with viscous, heat-retaining   bacon fat.

But I was reflecting on my trip as a whole.  First, I do need to say that Tampere, while probably not a quintessentially Finnish town, is an outstanding place to visit.  Everyone told me to come in the summer, or the winter, to experience Finland at its best.  Apparently when it is 48 degrees and drizzling, Finland isn’t at its best from the perspective of the locals.  I don’t know about that.  I actually enjoyed seeing Tampere at this time of year, partly because the Finnish people I saw and met were simply going about their regular business.  Nobody was away on holiday, nobody was frozen in place or driving snowmobiles down the main streets.  I like the fact that I caught them all, so to speak, in a more natural state.

As a city, Tampere is interesting because it has just enough of everything.  It has just enough bizarre one-way streets to complement the straightforward boulevards.  It has just enough statues of men holding pelts (2 by my count).  It has just enough shops, bars, restaurants, and shopping malls (also 2 by my count).  It has just enough Lenin Museums (1) and restaurants named “Big Tits” (1).  The only thing Tampere has too much of at the moment is hair salons.  I counted at least 18 hair salons and I know I missed many more.  I asked the locals about this phenomenon and received a cryptic answer, something related to wanting to look good all the time.  I think that physical appearance is considered important enough here that people do spend a lot of time and money on their faces, haircuts, etc.  Helsinki in particular is an internationally stylish city.  The dogs here have more style than I do.

So, as I sit here in the Hotel Kamp bar, drinking Italian still water and a Kir Royale with champagne, I am wondering how on earth I will ever afford to come back here.  It was very difficult to leave Tampere.  In fact, I wanted to stay there for another 4-5 months, to be honest.  With my wife, of course.  Actually, I think if my wife (who could not make it for this trip) had come with me to Finland, I would have had a much more difficult time returning to the US.  My professional time with my academic peers at the University of Tampere was incredibly rewarding and worth the corporate expenditure, to be sure.  But it was also the personal time, the time spent drinking tea in the graduate student lounge and discussing our research ideas, or the time spent at bars until 1 AM talking about determining quantitative models for our research ideas…that’s the time I enjoyed here the most.  And as tasty as this Kir Royale might be, I somehow prefer the student lifestyle of scrounging for bags of tea and eating blood sausage in the university cafeteria to the insane luxury of a 4-star hotel.

Of course, I do love marble bathrooms too.  So yes, there is a bit of hypocrisy here.  And I do love fine wine, but I suppose I could give it up for several years if it meant a return to the graduate student lifestyle.  Easier said than done, perhaps.  But I could definitely sell my car and start walking or taking public transit to work, assuming “work” was located in a European city.  Or perhaps Boston.  I love the “T.”

I went to the Design Museum of Helsinki today.  It was fairly interesting, if a bit small.  The top floor had a Formula 1 exhibit that was due to close tomorrow, so I made sure to get in there today.  I enjoyed that exhibit a lot; seeing names such as Fangio (who I got to meet in the early 1980s when I was about 8 years old) and Mansell and Prost and Senna really took me back to my English childhood, which lasted exactly 1 year (1987).  I remember going to school with a little brat named Dave whose father was a Formula 1 driver.  I could never confirm that, actually, but it seemed probable.  One of my other classmates there had a millionaire entrepreneur father who drove a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible and had a car phone.  In 1987.  They spent a month in Australia on holiday just for fun, and they owned racehorses.  It was an interesting place to live.

Anyway, the Design Museum was worth the 7 Euros.  I purchased a few cool gadgets and trinkets for my co-workers, and I also got something else for my wife.  I think I bought her 3 presents on this trip.  I must feel guilty about not being able to bring her along.  I think she actually would have found the Design Museum boring: The Formula 1 exhibit is basically for 7-year-old boys, and the rest of the museum is either about some weird Finnish cartoon strip (the entire 1st floor was given over to this cartoon) or about Finnish carpentry and handicrafts and industrial design.  I liked the latter quite a bit, although that exhibit was really small.

As I finish my Kir Royale, which I love to order in part because of the lovely color and because I love cassis, I realize that it’s time for a coffee.  I’m going to try a cafe latte here at the Hotel Kamp bar; the coffee in Finland has been terrific overall, so it should be very fine here.  And this coffee is exactly as I had hoped: slightly strong, with an excellent toasty quality in part because of the real, whole milk that is included in the drink.  Coffee, to me, feels like an industrial cleanser for my brain.  It scrubs away the debris and makes me want to produce…well, anything really.  On a related note, this bar is about half a block from the venerable Fazer coffee/sweet shop, which was impressive.  Fazer was designed many years ago to look modern, and that’s exactly the sort of place I love to see today.  Prague has a few places like this, as do Berlin and Amsterdam and even London.  But it’s nice to find a city where much of the history is preserved more thoroughly, which is possible in part because World War II failed to destroy Helsinki the way it ravaged parts of London and Berlin. 

The overall aesthetic sensibility of Finland astonishes me.  For example, in the US when you order a cup of coffee at an upscale coffeeshop, the aesthetic is all about comfort and size.  You tend to get, if you are dining in, a mug that could hold an entire pot of coffee.  The mug itself is typically white and ceramic, with a massive handle through which you could fit both of your hands.  I hate this sort of aesthetic: I don’t want to emphasize the consumption of the drink, but the particular qualities that make coffee coffee, so to speak.  In Finland, or at least at the Hotel Kamp bar, you don’t get a big white mug.  You get a tall, thin drinking glass perched inside a stainless steel holster that allows you to grip the coffee drink without burning the living hell out of your hands.  The aesthstics of this holster are all about open space and minimalist design coupled with intelligent functionality.  In other words, they used the smallest amount of material possible, and they chose stainless steel because it looks cool.  Now I can appreciate that sort of design aesthetic.

A word about the Finnish people.  I am not entirely sure what the general stereotype is regarding the Finnish personality, but I think it would be hard to pin down.  I think you would need to use words such as “generous,” “curious,” “intelligent,” and “purposeful.”  But I think it is tough to say what a Finnish person is like in the abstract.  I think, instead, you need to spend some time in Finland getting to know the people.  And then you’ll see why this is such a conundrum for me. 

For example, what should I make of a middle-aged woman with hair that has 7 different colors in it, but who is wearing a fairly conservative outfit and walking to work?  What should I think about a bar that was started by a couple of successful actors over 10 years ago and who still hang out there most weeknights without being hassled by fans despite their notoreity?  I actually saw one of the actors in question.  Apparently he was famous for playing a role in which he was a comical chef who couldn’t handle knives very well.  This was the same bar where a large Finnish man purchased me a can of “Cock” beer.  That was a strange night.

So yes, I am not sure what to make of this country and its people.  All I know is I have traveled to several parts of the world by now, and I would require absolutely no convincing to make me return to Finland.  Helsinki is a world city to be sure, but I actually prefer Tampere and its 100 hair salons.  One of them was named “Ninja,” which really made me wonder whether you’d lose an ear along with your excess hair.  I believe I prefer Tampere, which many would think was absurd given the rich cultural variety of Helsinki, because it was jarring to come across other US citizens there.  Tampere is not a destination for Americans, certainly not as much as Helsinki might be. 

But that’s not why I like Tampere, and Finland in general.  This country is so much more than a simple escape from the US.  Canada offers that much of a respite from the US.  No, I think I enjoy visiting Finland because I feel at ease here in a way that is challenging to repeat in most other countries.  Even in The Netherlands, which I love, the atmosphere is a little more hectic somehow.  In Finland, and even in Helsinki, and even with so many people purposefully walking their dogs or going shopping at public market stalls or smoking in cafes, the lifestyle here apparently combines a sense of self-awareness with equal parts self-deprecation, hospitality, and motivation to survive in this harsh environment.  As one of my new friends here told me, after I told him how much I appreciated his hospitality, “I don’t know any other way to treat you.”  It had never occurred to him that he could just tell me he was too tired to hang out or show me around town.  He really wanted to do these things, so he did.  No thanks necessary.  And that’s perhaps the best possible stereotype you can assign to a nation of people: warm and hospitable.

…

And now, as I sit here in the Schiphol business class lounge, sipping a pint of gin and eating several slices of cheese simultaneously, I wonder how my 10-hour flight back to Seattle will be.  I can’t wait to watch X-Men 3 over and over again.  I’ll be home soon, and I know I’ll miss Finland, mostly because of the people I met.  I don’t think I’ll miss the weather quite as much.  But at least it didn’t snow!  And I never got trapped in a swamp, nor did I ram any elk with my tiny rental car.  A successful trip all around by those criteria.

As I sit here in my fancy hotel room listening to The Melvins’ album Stoner Witch, I feel the incongruity of my situation quite powerfully.  There is literally nobody who could afford a room in this hotel who would be familiar with the song “Magic Pig Detective,” for example.  I’m pretty sure of that. 

The title of this post is a lyric from the amazing Swedish group The Knife, whose album Deep Cuts is a favorite of the first order, one of those “desert island” picks in my book, I’d say.  I knew this album quite well before I came to Finland and I had previously purchased the MP3s directly from the record label, but I purchased the CD in Tampere for my extensive driving excurions around the countryside.  Deep Cuts is a great album to listen to as you drive through lake country, believe me.  Take a look at the video for “Pass This On” or the video for “We Share Our Mother’s Health” to see what I mean.  I can only understand about 35% of their lyrics.

I was originally set to fly out of Helsinki tomorrow at 6:15 AM, which would have left me with a 6 hour layover in Amsterdam prior to the once-daily flight to Seattle.  Clearly that is unacceptable, so after a bit of scheming I switched to an 8:15 Finnair flight to Amsterdam for no additional charge whatsoever.  So, since I can now wake up at 5 AM rather than 3 AM, I decided to go out for dinner tonight rather than eat at the hotel again.  Thanks to the remarkably intelligent and powerful eat.fi Web site, I can tell where I am at my hotel based on the restaurants here. 

This site is awesome.  First of all, I was able to locate myself on the map quickly and easily.  Next, I narrowed the viewable list of restaurants on the map to those that serve dinner and that will be open tonight at about 7:30 PM.  Finally, I developed a list of a few possible places to eat, all with links to their respective Web sites and actual customer comments regarding food quality, service, and value.  This site is incredibly good, definitely worth a look for the information design alone.

I settled on a Lebanese restaurant named Farouge.  The Web site trumpets the “Lebanese Culinary Art” of Farouge, and the reviews I read were quite good.  The menu looks darn good too, with appetizers such as frogs’ legs sauteed in garlic and lemon butter.  Wow.  I like frogs’ legs, but they aren’t easy to find in the US unless they are battered and fried way too much, or else they’re part of the menu at a French restaurant where you need to leave a $500 deposit just to walk in the front door.

The woman who answered the phone at Farouge sounded quite nice, and she spoke English very well.  The earliest reservation time for 1 person was 8:30 PM, which suits me perfectly.  So at about 8:15 I’m going to head out to find this place, which should only be a 10-minute walk from my hotel.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: I saw a champagne saber for sale today.  Only 150 Euros.  It looked really cool, though.  I wish I had that kind of money.  There’s a wonderful, visual, 6-step process for using the saber to effect the opening of a bottle of champagne.  This process is called “sabrage.”  I’d hate to have to practice it too often as it could get really messy and expensive.  But damn, it looks cool when you get it right.  Or close to right.

…

Time has passed, and I am back from Farouge.  I had the following for dinner:

• Appetizer: “Kibbe Naiyah” - Lebanese-style lamb tartare with raw white onions, mint, olive oil, pepper, garlic mousse, and flatbread
• Main course: “Kharouf Mishwi” - Lambchops in “dark” garlic sauce with garlic potatoes
• Dessert: “Halawat Al-Jibn” - Cheese pastries seasoned with rose water, pistachio sauce, and raspberry coulis
• Wine: 2003 Chateau Musar Hochar Pere et Fils Rose (small glass)

Yes, that’s accurate.  Raw lamb.  It was good!  I think after about half of it, though, I was ready for the cooked lamb.  The garlic mousse was incredibly potent and the combination of that mousse, the oil, and the pepper made for a spicy appetizer.  I liked it, but as I said the portion was probably meant for two people.

As for the main course, the brown gravy in which the lambchops and potatoes sat was unbelievably good.  Seriously, it seemed so simple: lamb fat drippings from the pan mixed with minced garlic and probably reduced with something else to make it a little more of a gravy.  But wow, that was good gravy.  Really good gravy.  The potatoes and lamb were excellent too.

The dessert was sort of like a cross between canoli and cheesecake, but nothing was crunchy.  Hard to explain, very easy to eat extremely fast.

And I just posted about the wine, so there’s that.  It was good but not great.

The real treat at Farouge was the spectacle of the service.  When you enter Farouge, which is located next to a McDonald’s, the woman who seems to run the entire place greets you with smiles.  I left my coat downstairs and was led up to my table, which was essentially situated in the center of the back of the restaurant, back next to the bar and facing part of a booth-style seat that ran along the entire wall of the place.  Basically, I was on display in this seat, but after the first eight seconds nobody noticed me.  I had nothing to do or read, and nobody to talk to, so I observed everyone else for two hours.

• There was the table of 4 young Finnish women who looked a little too made-up and drank way more than they ate; they seemed to be part of some sort of dispute with regard to their food.  But I don’t speak Finnish.
• There was the middle-aged Finnish couple next to the 4 young women; the wife kept staring at the younger women with some apparent disdain that seemed to center around the confusion over their main courses.
• There were a bunch of other blond people to my right.
• To my left, eventually, there was a table of 7 Finnish people who didn’t really stand out in any way.
• Behind me sat 4 people, one of whom was a mid-30s Finnish woman who looked like an extra in an Olivia Newton-John video; she would have been playing “Sexy Motorcyclist #2″ in her skintight white leather bodysuit.  Somehow she carried off this outfit well.

And then there was the waitstaff:

• The smiling younger man who kept crouching behind the bar so he could sneeze without anyone seeing him.
• The friendly but gruff slightly older man who seemed to be in charge upstairs.
• The hard-working and aloof Finnish girl who was typically tasked with carrying massive trays covered with dishes upstairs.
• A smattering of other staff who only seemed to appear once or twice and who probably worked the tables downstairs.

In the end, they accidentally charged me for three desserts and two cups of coffee, whereas I only had one dessert and I definitely didn’t drink any coffee since I need to wake up in 6 hours or so.  I pointed out the error and they freaked out a little.  But that was their nature: They thrived on freaking out over some minor situation, and when nothing was really happening they invented a situation over which they could argue and then quickly resolve.   It was like watching employees in a factory where they simultaneously assemble and test firecrackers.  Very amusing.

I eventually paid the correct amount of money for my meal (55 Euros rather than 82 Euros) and managed to get back onto the street with a minimum of drama.  I strolled back to my hotel room, where I realized that I had already packed pretty much everything, and I cancelled my room service breakfast request.  I did this by removing the menu from my door as nobody had picked it up yet.  I seriously need to get up extremely early to catch my flight, but at least I bought myself 2 more hours earlier today.  That was a major relief.

I think I’m ready to go home.  I’ll write my final travelog post on Finland tomorrow; I have mixed feelings about leaving, but I miss my wife and want to go home at this point.  At the same time, I miss my new comrades in Tampere.  Ahh well, it’s a small world, right?  Perhaps someday soon I will, once again, eat moose pizza and discuss politics.

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.

I love this sign in my hotel bathroom.  It’s not “if” you go for a sauna, but “when.”  It’s only a matter of time.  I actually did go for a sauna yesterday and it was really wonderful.  I had the entire top floor of the hotel to myself, in fact!  Very nice. 

A word on breakfast.  Every morning here at the Holiday Inn, I stroll downstairs and help myself to the well-apportioned breakfast buffet.  I usually have tiny bratwurst sausages, or beef meatballs, or black sausage as my primary meat.  Sometimes I get all of the above.  I always make sure to get 2-3 silver dollar pancakes of potato, which are really like giant, flattened tater tots.  Delicious with meat.  Today I tried the “scrambled” eggs, which are just poached eggs separated after cooking.  Not bad.  The breads are all baked daily and they are all incredibly good, as in “I’d walk to that bakery every morning” good.  And just this morning I found the fresh-squeezed orange juice.  Until today, I had been drinking pineapple juice, which is known as “ananas” juice.  Easy to confuse with “bananas” when you speak English all the time.

Speaking of “ananas,” the night before my presentation I made a bet with one of my fellow seminar attendees.  I bet her $10 that she wouldn’t be able to include the word “ananas” in her presentation.  She accepted the bet, but then another attendee suggested a terrific twist: I could win back 5 Euros if, when this girl did say “ananas” during her presentation, I stood up and vocally objected to her use of the word “ananas” in such a professional setting.  I laughed and said she’d never do it, but then she came up with a clever way to include the word (basically by comparing “apples to pineapples” during her presentation).  We shook on it.

Later that night, I realized I needed to preempt her use of this analogy.  So I decided to use it myself, but first I taught myself the Finnish word for apple (”omena”).  I had memorized “ananas” from previous Europe trips; pineapple gets translated as “ananas” in other languages as well.

The next morning, I was the first to present.  I got about 90% through my presentation when I suddenly said, “Yes, this sort of analysis is challenging because, if done incorrectly, you will end up comparing apples to oranges or, as you might say here in Finland, ‘omena to ananas.’” 

It was a devastating comment. 

The people who were in on the bet began laughing very hard because I had managed to say “ananas” completely unannounced right before my betting partner needed to say it in her own presentation.  In particular, the woman against whom I was betting raised her fists in the air and shook them at me vigorously.  This reaction, which made no sense to everyone sitting around her, prompted a lot of attention in her direction.  The other 40-50 people in the audience simply laughed because I made up a Finnish colloquialism and managed to say two Finnish words, which is harder than it seems.  It was fantastic.

But then it was the woman’s turn to uphold her end of the bet.  In making my comment about analysis methodologies, I had inadvertently opened the door for her to say “ananas” in her own presentation.  Which she did.  Again, everybody else laughed, but those of us who knew about the bet couldn’t believe how deftly she managed to win.  It was a wonderful joke all around, in part because only a few people knew about it, and that made it funnier for us by far.

This all occurred on Wednesday morning.  The conference wound down that day and we went out drinking for about 8 hours.  Actually, it was exactly 8 hours.  It was “an entire workday of drinking and chatting,” as one person put it.  I was so energized after we left at 1 AM, I couldn’t get to sleep until about 3 AM.  But that was Wednesday…and, amazingly, Thursday is coming to a close.  I have a lot to share from Thursday, involving moose and a town named Ahtari.  I can only assume you pronounce that as “Atari,” like the old video game system.  It’s all in my next blog entry, coming soon! 

And don’t forget to bring your towel when you go for a sauna.

My plane is here.  It’s a Boeing 737.  I can see it from where I’m sitting, at gate C18 all the way at one end of the Schiphol octopus.  After spending so much time in Seattle, and after traveling to India on my last big trip, it’s going to be weird to see so many blonde-haired, blue-eyed people in one place.  Although I have blonde hair and blue eyes, and a beard these days, I don’t think I look Scandinavian in the least.  We’ll see.  I couldn’t even begin to understand the Finnish language.

My flight from Seattle to Amsterdam was noteworthy only in terms of how routine it was.  To be honest, I don’t even remember being at the Seattle airport now.  Ten hours later and that seems like a week ago.

I got to Amsterdam and began walking.  I walked to my favorite business class lounge, which is located in the E wing of Schiphol.  The helpful woman at the counter directed me to the C concourse, which meant a trip through passport control.  That process was very un-Dutch in its chaotic queue style.  There was a mass of Americans, Italians, Kenyans, and hundreds of other nationalities, and all of us were pressed together in this ameoba-shaped line.  We all had to pass through a table where two women were handing out plastic bags.  I didn’t need one.

After an incredibly cursory passport check (having a US passport almost assures a lack of attention because it’s so hard to get a US passport), I made it through security again.  I had a thorough patdown from a muscular Dutch man, which was fairly amusing since all I had on me was a wallet and my passport and boarding pass.  And lip balm.  He didn’t want to touch that.

There are a few flights from Minneapolis to Amsterdam.  I find this funny because I can spot the Minnesota tourists and business people from several hundred yards away.  The Minnesotans and the Texans really tend to wear college clothing the most.  I spotted two Golden Gophers and a University of Houston alum.  Way to represent!

I considered buying a Dutch soccer jersey, but I’ve got two already.  I’m waiting to get a Finnish jersey.  I played goalie (or keeper, if you prefer) and Finland has a history of turning out great goalies.  Perhaps I can finally find a store where I can buy a Van der Sar jersey!  They scoffed at the idea in Amsterdam three years ago.

It’s about time to board, so I’ll just say that I’m glad I made it to Amsterdam okay.  The business class section was full of Boeing employees who were very jovial with one another in that insincere American way.  Then again, when you score a business class seat, it’s like complaining about the fan noise when you’re front row center court at a Knicks game.