Finnish February
*Observations from planes, trains, and ice-breakers
Hello there,
It is July, summer, and mildly warm in England, yet the (almost end) of the academic year has allowed me time to finally write up these sketchy and extremely wintery notes from five months prior. (This is the first of a two-part sketch.)
I have been quieter on here lately, partly because of grief, partly because of exam season, and because I don’t think this is, or should be, a place of content for content’s sake.
Looking back at the archives it seems that this time last year I began this semi-regular segment Five Fine Things, a place in which I inflict my taste on you, and ask that you return the favour (in the comments or via email).
As always thank you so much for reading, sharing, and supporting. I appreciate YOU.
Do enjoy and happy Sunday,
Love,
Emma
x o x o
p.s. for more Travel Sketches see here (opposite end of the spectrum, hot and Greek!).
Amsterdam to Helsinki
We fly London via Amsterdam because it is cheaper, it is also laborious and bad for the environment.
At Amsterdam airport: amaryllis bulbs and clogs for sale, a Heineken bar full of men. On board KLM cheese and rye sandwiches (not for vegans) and outside dirty-white mackerel cloud covering everything below. We travel through a rain cloud. I read Octavia Bright’s brilliant memoir This Ragged Grace and sip weak black tea. The Dutch air steward speaks in an undulating rhythm, an extra beat in each word, says it is ‘fresh and bright in Helsinki’. Below there are countless jagged black islands as we approach the capital, lower and closer I realise the black is not islands but dense pine and fir clusters, and that what I perceive as grey silty water is actually grey-lilac snow covering what would be lakes and fields.
Landing at five PM local time, the sky is a strata of hazy blue, pale yellow, pink, and indigo.
‘I can see SNOW!’ says the child next to me.
The air is physical as we exit the plane - any part of the self not covered tingles, then goes numb within a minute. At the airport bird sounds are piped into the bathrooms and the cafe is Moomin themed. All I can afford at the Marimekko store are some branded pencils.
Later in a Helsinki pub: fairy light covered, stag heads on the walls, a mural of VHS tapes, The Smiths play. Clientele: an edgy bald giant with several face tattoos, some crosses down his neck, he is with two compatriots, one of whom pushes David as he passes. Do not react, I pray internally. Ice hockey on the TV. Stacks of games. We pass.
‘Two pints of Stonewall please.’
‘Big one or small one?’ asks the bar man.
Two women play Jenga intensely, a group out the back play a game we don’t know but which looks like a table-sized game of curling.
A line of pinball machines, themed around: Iron Maiden, James Bond, Queen, and Ancient Egypt. We load a Euro into the Iron Maiden one; play badly. A beanpole man introduces himself first in Finnish, then in English, tells us how to work the machine and that this in fact a three-person game.
‘Would you like to play?’ I ask.
Silver balls fly wildly across the flashing board. Seeming chaos. His fingers push the buttons rapidly, he bashes the side of the machine three times hard, pauses, bashes again. Six extra balls come flying out.
‘It rewards you if you play well,’ he explains.
He wins over and over. His friends - all mid twenties, all with outsider energy - join us, they are in training for a pinball tournament next weekend. Fast-speaking, emphatic, one of them declares: ‘I am mixed race, a quarter Greek, half Georgian but also Finnish’. He talks phone screen in hand showing us his Grandfather’s home town in Greece, ‘Porto Rafti, Porto Rafti, you must go’ he says, shows where his Grandmother lived in Tblisi, that her cooking of potatoes is still in the Soviet-style, talks of his boredom, lack of money, his struggle to find work ‘my foreign last name’ he adds.
A wobbling and enormous late middle-aged man comes over, lurches, stands too close. In Finnish asks the Pinball Wizard why he is ‘so skinny’ - the Wizard translates. Asks us where we are from, his hippocampus fried from drinking his question loops.
He grips David’s hand in an unfriendly handshake says as a statement: ‘London, everything good there’.
‘Yeah, all good there, how about Finland?’
‘Good, good, where you from?’ he slurs. We answer again.
One of the pinball boys says something. A softening.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, very drunk,’ he says and disappears.
We tramp off into the frozen night saying goodbye to our pinball friends. Banks of snow. Ice so heavily gritted that it is non-slip. The sky white. The streets muted.
Helsinki to Oulu
The next morning we arrive at Helsinki main station - an art deco/art nouveau wonder created by Eliel Saarinen. We grab vegan hot dogs and coffee for the journey. The train is double-decker, clean and slick - we have swivel seats on the top deck and turn outwards - after the city it is snow-thick pines and stick-thin birches, Government-issue red and blue painted wooden huts, homes, barns.
The native Sami people have two hundred ways to describe the condition and quality of snow, the practice of snow reading.
Thick icing like the layer before the marzipan on a wedding cake. Rows of soft mattresses where fields divide the land. A flow of clouds. Ripples of white water. Crystals of blue. Glittering. Sometimes it really does just look like that cliche blanket. Trucks and trains loaded with lichen and ice-covered logs pass us.
‘Is the main industry logging?’
‘Telecommunications - remember Nokia! Chemicals, and then yes logging.’
Occasional factories of cold hard machinery, snow ploughs, John Deere tractors, puffs of smoke ascend the pale-blue air. We drink Kahru beer (kahru translates as bear) and eat falafel in the dining cart. Light bounces off the frost. A day-long journey North.
Oulu to Hailuoto
In the city of Oulu we eat wholesome, heavy food in a candle-lit restaurant by the water. At almost eleven PM we board an ice-breaker ferry. An industrial, metal-pungent, yellow boat that will take us across the Baltic. Sea mist rises from the frozen water. Sea-ice can be anywhere between one to two metres frozen solid to, in ridged areas, twenty to thirty metres all the way down. Ice-trucks used to travel across this frozen track until a dreadful accident some years before. Lights from the boat shines and lights the area a few metres around us, beyond that it is Bible-black.
As we move forward boulder and rock sized masses of thick ice crack and break, then surround us. A tinkling, other- worldly noise as ice-shelves and dozens of pebble-sized pieces connect and separate - churning on the surface. Lace breath. Gripping the side of the boat and looking down a sublime blend of panic and wonder descends.