Hello everybody. It's been a while but life just got a bit crazy. I'm no longer in Helsinki but before I get to that I'll just mention two places which you must visit.

Pub Sirdie.

This place is wonderful, the best I've seen in Finland. It's website alone is brilliantly nostalgic.  Tiny, toasty, no frills. Just how I like a pub. Go there,

Sandro.

There are two of these in Helsinki. We went to the new one in Punavuori (Tehtaankatu 34 D).
Girlf. reserved a table (recommended) for the brunch, which seems to be a more acceptable way for middle-class people to say All-You-Can-Eat. The food is vegetarian and north-african/middle eastern and I honsetly don't remeber a time I ate so well (and so much). Go there.

So. On with the story.

The reason we went to Sandro was because Girlf. was treating me to a celebration brunch because I'd just been offered a job in Ruka.

Basically we'd been talking about the possibility of working in Lapland so I sent a general enquiry type email to a tourism company Girlf. knew. A few weeks later a reply arrived asking if I could come and work for them the following week. The ever-amazing Girlf. agreed to take on the responsibility for Dog and Cat so I dashed to the train station, sprinted past Bill Murray, ran along the platform and jumped onto the overnight train heading north.

Here's a video of it all.

I've been here almost a week and it's great. Ruka is a ski and tourism centre for (mostly) Spanish tourists who want lots of photos of the real Christmas. My job is to translate the instructions they need to understand in order not to die whilst Ice-Fishing, Snowmobiling, Ice-Karting and riding in reindeer or dog sleds. A lot of the time my job is trying to keep kids happy whilst they're shivering on a frozen lake. It's an amazing place. The monochrome indifference of the landscape is so exciting. Cold winds with cold ice and cold toes. It makes you feel tough and crazed at the same time. How did I get here? What are we doing!

As for the activities. In case you were wondering, here's my round-up.

• Ice-fishing. Surprisingly effective. Often bleak. Cold. 
• Ice Karting. Slidy. Makes me hear bleeps and music of Mario Kart all day. 
• Reindeer sled rides. Nice view of  a Reindeer's arse. Reindeers very good at looking unimpressed by the guests, especially the kids. 
• Dog sled rides. The single most beautiful activity ever. Silent sliding through wintry twilight, leaning into curves, tapping the foot brake and watching dogs ahead bounce along like schools of porpoise. Glorious. 
• Snowmobiling. Noisy, stinky, obnoxious but haring across a frozen lake at 70 kmph is great. 

I'm here until the first week of January and I've already realised that from now on I will need a northern winter for at least one month of every year for the rest of my life.

Here are some photos.

Overnight train. 

Dining car. Vodka Martini please. 

Noisy up the forest!

If I ever live here this will be my first purchase

Leave us alone

Un reined-deer

Happiness is cross-country skiing

Some people really want to fish

Kotiharjun Sauna

Up here in Finland the sauna came first. Presumably, 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age retreated and the Finnish forefathers tried to convince the foremothers that moving into this freezing land was a good idea the foremothers accepted solely on the condition that their new house would have a sauna.

Early Finnish man appeasing early Finnish woman

From that browbeaten beginning was born the modern state of Finland and the genetic love of sauna has been handed down, generation to generation, ever since (those born without the gene soon met a wintry end). 

Nowadays saunas abound, as do the different styles. In the sliding scale of good to bad people seem to prefer smoke saunas (discussed here) and traditional wood burning saunas. Modern electric saunas are seen very much as a means to a sweaty end. 

Though many apartments, and most apartment buildings, have an electric sauna, having a wood sauna in your house is very unusual, especially if you live in the Helsinki metropolis, so sauna aficionados looking for a more traditional sweat visit the public saunas hidden among the dark streets. Perhaps the most famous of them all is Kotiharju.

The Kotiharjun Sauna is wonderful from the moment you walk in. It's absolutely not luxurious, this is not a spa. It's more like a working mens' club but based around a sauna rather than skittles and tribute acts. Immediately next to the door is a fridge where you can leave your beers, or you can buy some from the lady in the tiny booth with two dogs sleeping next to her. Then off into the changing room which seems to have been kitted out in Victorian times and untouched ever since. Next there's a shower room with a certain prison feel to it where you can get a special washing from a little lady (very not sexual despite her poorly translated sign (below)) and finally off to the magnificent sauna.

Well done to that translator

The sauna stove itself looks like it formerly served to power ocean going ships. According to the website, the stove has "1500 kg (3300 pounds) of stones and it takes one cubic meter (35 cubic feet) of logs and five to six hours to heat them glowing hot".

The seating is arranged ampitheatre style and overlooking everything is a small balcony where it gets really hot. The rules are that you ask the masters up top if they want more löyly (steam/heat/water) before hoiking a bowlful of water into the furnace entrance above your head.

A photo of a photo from Kotiharjun

Then you sit and enjoy. And chat. Finnish people have a reputation for economy of conversation but there's something about naked proximity that really breaks the ice. You talk in the sauna until you feel dizzy and run to the shower where you chat through to the dressing rooms where people are playing cards and chess and then to the fridge to pick up your now-cold beer before walking out onto the freezing dark street in nothing but a towel, where you continue to chat as the rest of the world walks enviously by on their way home.

A really amazing place.

Suomenliina - Island fortress

On the weekend I had a visitor from Germania so I took off my unemployed-immigrant hat, put on my Official Tour Guide hat and headed out on the town. Of the many very typical things we did, sauna flagellation included, perhaps the nicest was to take the 20 min. ferry over to Suomenliinea, The Island Fortress.

Sauna fun

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE. When you go to Suomenliina you'll need to buy a ticket for the ferry. Make sure you do this with plenty of time to spare because the SINGLE ticket machine inevitably has a huge queue of people unfamiliar with said machine and if you're not careful you'll end up having to make a last minute dash/jump for the boat as it sails away from the quay.

Once on board head to the back of the boat to watch Helsinki sail away (sure as the sun goes round the earth) and get great views of the Cathedral and Giant cruise ships readying for their journey to Sweden.

HISTORY TIME. Suomenliina importance is a result of its geographical position. Perhaps this map will help.

Helpful map

Back in the olden times Finland (the green bit) was part of the Swedish empire. King Ryvita II decided that the island would be a useful place to defend his lovely pink land from the scary Russians to the east under Tzar Nicolas The Bear Wrestler, so he set about building a fortress there. At this time the island was incorrectly know as Sveaborg.

However, the fortress did little to resist the Russians and surrendered during the Russo-Swedish war. Russia, happy with their vacations, decided to stay (and annex the rest of Finland while they were at it) and things would stay like that for the next 110 years. 

In 1918 the Finns decided that it was revolution time (click here now) so they kicked out the Russians from island and mainland and installed a single ticket machine on the docks to ferry tourists to the newly named Suomenliina. Hooray. 

TODAY. The island is really lovely. It's a sort of mix of GOT (the bits in King's Landing) and LOTR*. Old ruins, windy cobbly streets, little tunnels, caves in grassy knolls, huge Russian cannons and everywhere the sea. As well as all that there aren't any cars and the best thing is that you can touch and climb on or pose next to pretty much everything. A brilliant day out. Go there. 

Here are lots of photos. 

*If you put GOT and LOTR together and say them out loud it's a word in Irish.  

Bog life

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After finishing the following article I was accused of being Anglocentric and presuming that everyone understood what a bog was. I cannot apologise enough. Here's a quick explanation for those less-familiar with wetland classification. 

Swamp - Essentially a very slow moving river that looks like a lake with trees in it.
Bog - An ex-lake that became clogged with dead plant matter and now is full of peat. No trees here. 
Marsh - A wetland at the edge of a lake or river characterised by grasses and reeds. 

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You know that moment when you're in a pub and some loudmouths on the table next to you are arguing about what the defining bio-geographical characteristic of Finland is? They'll probably be harping on about Europe's most densely forested country or The Land of a Thousand Lakes. Well next time that happens have a big swig of your Babycham, get your metaphorical cat out and throw it among the pigeons because what people often overlook about Finland are the bogs. It's all about the bogs.

Last weekend Girlf., Dog and I were lucky enough to join the local branch of the Suomen Luonnonsuojeluliitto (the Finnish National Trust) for a day trip out to Torronsuo, Finland's deepest bog, a title that Dog seemed determined to verify by regularly hopping off the special wooden walkways and sinking down into the mud. It's also a good place for birding although by the time we visited most had already naffed off to warmer bogs, in fact in the distance we could see a cloud of thousands of birds disappearing into the distance. Apparantely I heard a hippiäinen, Finland's smallest bird but he too proved elusive.

Hippiäinen. The sweetest bird ever. 

It's estimated that up to 1/3 of Finland was originally covered by bog though much has now been drained to grow more trees but the boggy impact on Finnish culture is not to be underestimated. Here are some boggy facts.

1. Many intelligent people think that Finland's name in Finnish, Suomi, comes from the Finnish word for bog, Suo. Factastic!
2. Much like the (perhaps apocryphal) fact about Eskimo vocabulary for snow, Finland has an amazing bog vocabulary

• Aapa - A concave bog
• Kermi - The elevated parts of the bog
• Kulju - The lower, wetter parts of the bog
• Rimpi - The eye of Sauron the bog

Finallly. Finland is the home of the great bog sports such as:

Suolentiksen - Bog volleyball, which despite the ingredients (mud, volleyball, Finnish people) is not nearly as sexy as you might think.

  

Suopotkupallo - Bog football, which is essentially the same as playing on any school field in the UK between October and March as Brian Glover wonderfully demostrates here

 

Finally, Suojuoksu - Bog running which is not at all demonstrated by this clip but I just really liked it.

There were also rumours that in winter the snowed-over bogs make for great cross-country skiing. Please, please Accuweather, God of snow, let that happen.

Next week, mushrooms.

Photo time. Forests and Mushrooms.

Good morning Skivers. The month of Syyskuu, autumn moon, has vamoosed and Lokakuu, mud moon, is nigh. Those trees that aren't always green are turning gold and red and the others are full of squirrels dashing around frantically with nuts in their mouths.

We too have been out in the forests trying to add to our larder, mostly without success. However, just as we tell kids that winning isn't everything and climbing a mountain isn't really about getting to the summit, foraging isn't really about finding things you can eat. Despite our empty baskets we've been lucky enough to visit two amazing places near Helsinki: Talosaari and Sipoonkorppi. Though mushroom were thin on the ground the forests themselves were amazing.

Talosaari is more woodland than forest but still with moments suddenly dark and spookily quiet and underfoot springing like a sponge cake. There we met some Ray Mears wannabes who showed us lots of other green things you can fill your basket with when the mushrooms aren't biting and we made a nice salad of dandelion, ladies mantle and ground elder. Dog also learned that you can eat berries.

Lovely people in Talosaari

Lady's mantle

Ground Elder

Dog eating blueberries

Sipoonkorppi is perhaps even more spectacular, the forest trail runs through night-dark steep-sided gorges down and up almost vertical wooden staircase and over single plank bridges.

 Spooky forest

 Spooky trees

After years of the heights and expanses of the Andes, the intensity of the Finnish forests is really exciting. Visibility is less than 50 metres and words are hushed, everything seems both living and rotting, millions of tiny organisms turning everything into squishy floor and millions of other organisms bursting roots and leaves. Great stuff.

Can't wait to see a bear. 

These trials of Cat, Dog and Mine.

I've now been in Finland for almost nine weeks. Though I'm still looking for work the immigration processes seem to be going quite well. Last week I got the thumbs up from the police so now I'm just waiting for the Registry Office to accept me as a permanent resident.

Welcome to Finland. I am your guide

Cat and Dog are also settling in well. Cat has discovered shrews and has been eager to present his new friends to me. Girlf. is not nearly as happy as Cat as he drops another (usually) dead gift at our feet. He looks so sweet, like a kid that's just made a rubbish breakfast for mother's day. Being a nature loving vegetarian I of course have to put aside any feelings of parental pride and get back to feeling guilty for having brought this little ecological disaster into Finland. We seem to have found a solution now though, I've pimped my cat with little bells and he's only allowed out during the day; so far, zero-kills.

Dog is more interested in the dozens of dopey rabbits all over the island although the only thing she's managed to catch are the ticks from the long grass where the disappearing rabbits hide. Is it possible that the rabbits and ticks are working together? Anyway, her jollies have meant more father-dog grooming time hauling the ticks off with my special tick lasso.

So there you are. In case you were wondering, having pets is mostly disgusting.

My own trials come in the form of mind-boggling Finnish lessons. I'm just about to finish (this is getting confusing) the level 1 course so I thought I'm just about ready to give some feedback.

Finnish is a bit of an oddity language wise. Most European languages have the same root, and therefore have a lot of similarities, but Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian and a bunch of minority languages spoken only in rural Russia have taken a separate path. This lovely picture demonstrates these connections.

The main complications seem to be twofold. Firstly, word endings. A basic word like house can have several forms depending on if you want to say more than one house, or to the house, or at the house or from the house. If you want to say the house has two bedrooms then that's yet another form. All these tricks, and the inevitable exceptions, have to be wrestled whilst trying to pronounce the crazy vowels. No doubt this diagram will help.

But perhaps the most difficult is the vocabulary. Because of Britain's long history of immigration our vocabulary isn't a million miles from that of the Spanish or French or German. The inconsiderate Finnish forefathers however didn't bother to visit back when it was all the rage and now, 1000 years later, I find myself with endless lists of completely alien vocabulary to memorise. The problem is that you can't just hit and hope like you can with Spanish; you either know the word or you don't and that means learning them. All of them. 

Some friends have a one-and-a-half year old child and my goal is to be able to always speak better Finnish than him. If that's still the case in two years time I think I'll have done well. 

Autumn month

Syyskuu, September, translates literally as Autumn moon. The Finnish months are great. January is Oak Moon, May is Planting Time Moon and October is Mud Moon.

Anyway. Autumn Moon has arrived and with it the rain, longer nights and today I could even see my breath in the air. Goodbye summer. I heard an expression the other day, In Finland the summer may be short but at least it doesn't rain so much.

To welcome the changing of the guard we went for a smoke sauna on Sunday. This alliterative delight sounds a bit Bob Marley but it's not. The idea is that before the sauna is prepared you light a big smoky fire in the hut and impregnate the walls with...smoke. Then you clean out the embers and prepare your normal sauna, lots of hot rocks* etc. Apparently its not carcinogenic; The only health warning I saw was a sign telling you not to jump off the jetty into the lake between sauna sessions (we did anyway - rebellious high five!). Anyway, it was lovely. In winter the lake freezes over and you can go to avanto where the swim is now via a hole in the ice. If you're in the area, here's the link. Also, go soon because smoke saunas are also known for burning down. Who'd have thought.

Jetty for jumping

As we were leaving the sauna a Lara Croft style security guard came and asked us if we'd seen the Russians. It seems they'd snuck in without paying (sauna addiction is a serious matter). We had seen them but they'd long scarpered (back in the USSR) and were now spending the roubles they'd saved on hooky vodka.

I think more surprising was not that people would take advantage but that advantage taking isn't more common. Finland seems to work almost entirely on a trust system. None of the houses where I live have fences around the gardens (as Dog and Cat have discovered to their gamboling delight), you don't see security guards in shops, bicycles are often left unlocked and I haven't heard a car alarm since I arrived. Yesterday they needed to fit a ventilation fan in my apartment and the builders just let themselves in with a key they got from God knows who.

It's a brave new world people. Perhaps there's hope for us all yet.

That'll do for now. Next time I'll tell you about Cat and Dog's latest adventures.

*I said not like Bob Marley.