My best friend

24.9.2016 Marilka

When I was like eight years old or so, on second grade or so, we had this school assignment to write and draw a story about our best friend. I chose to write about my grandma’s dog, a wire haired fox terrier. She was my best friend while growing up, before I had any other real friends. We spent summers together at our summer place with my grandma, playing and asking for snacks and whatnot. I wanted to have my own dog, just like almost every kid wants at some point, but I lived to be almost forty years old before that happened.

My best friend

Now I’ll tell you what I did with my best friend. I tell about some of the days.

My dad’s mother and father have a dog named Delilah, but we call it Della. It isone year older than I. It is a girl dog. We play together most of the summer days. Now I’ll start the real story.

My best friend

One summer morning I woke up eight o’clock because a dog was barking. It was not Della, I knew it. I looked out of the window. The dog that was barking was brown and much bigger than Della. The dog was lost.

My grandmother woke up, too. She gave me some meat so that I could give it to the dog. The dog ate so much , I thought it had been many hours eating nothing.

The dog was light brown. I took the dog to my grandmother’s house. She wrote to the newspaper that a light brown dog is found.

The dog was with us two or three days. Then the dog’s owner came. She thanked us for taking good care of the dog. I was so little that I wanted to play dog. The owner had a little girl.

The dog was nice, but still Della is my best friend. We play so that I trhow a stick and Della gets it and brings it to me.

MOTHER! I WANT A DOG!

Do you know that I’ve always wanted an own dog, but I know I won’t get one.

I was four years old when that happened.

Joka viikko on kirjaviikko

23.9.2016 Marilka

Jotkut jo veti herneitä nekkuun, kun ei sellaista kansainvälistä kirjaviikkoa olekaan, ei ainakaan virallisesti, ei ainakaan Suomen kalentereissa. Pelkästään jo kyseisen meemin jatkamisen voi toki hyvällä mielikuvituksella nähdä tyhmyytenä ja ignoranssina, kun ei postaaja “tiedä”, ettei sellaista ole oikeasti. Jospa joku on sellaisen viikon perustanut? Tai jospa sillä ei ole väliäkään?

Jollain oudolla tasolla kykenen ymmärtämään ajattelun: jos menet höplään pienessä, menet höplään myös isossa ja kiertopäivityksen levittäminen on automaattisesti osoitus hyväuskoisuudesta ja höplään menemisestä. Tai ainakin ignoranssista, kun et välitä, onko jokin oikeasti olemassa vai ei. Fine, minäkin olen joskus tosikko, suotakoon se itse kullekin.

Minulle on yhdentekevää onko kirjaviikkoa olemassa vai ei. Minulle joka viikko on kirjaviikko, vaikka välillä luenkin vähemmän. Välillä voimavarat kuluvat muuhun ja lukeminen tuntuu liian raskaalta. Välillä taas laiminlyön kodin ja perheen, kun en saa kirjaa käsistäni. Välillä luen viihdettä, joka vie mukanaa, välillä vähän vakavampia kirjoja, kuten elämäkertoja ja muuta sellaista non-fictionia.

Minä päätin aloittaa “Viikon sitaatti” -meemin: ota vapaavalintainen kirja hyllystäsi ja avaa satunnaiselle aukeamalle, osoita sormella satunnaista kohtaa ja kirjoita virke fb-statukseesi. Kerro myös kirja, josta sitaatti on.

Voi olla, että olen ainoa, joka sitaatteja ikinä koskaan postaa ja voi olla että kyllästyn itsekin noin ensimmäisen sitaatin jälkeen. Lue: unohdan koko asian elämän tiimellyksessä. Ei sillä väliä; rakastan kirjoja ja minusta nämä satunnaiset sitaatit ovat kiehtovia. Tässä ensimmäinen sitaatti, jonka jo naamakirjaankin kirjoitin:

Aloitan: “Se oli ainoa, joka kiinnosti häntä ja hän tiesi, että hänen levollisuudellaan ja kylmäverisyydellään pääsisi pitkälle,” – Birgit TH.Spare, Vanhan kartanon Diana

***

Same in English, the short version: some people have already got a bug up their ass about this international book week meme, since no such week officially exist.

So I decided to start a new meme: “Quote of the Week”. Pick a random book from your book shelf, open it to a random page, point your finger on a random sentence and type it in your FB status. Also, write the author and the book the quote is from.

I’ll start:

“Among those foolish pursuers of pleasure, they recon all that delight in hunting, in fowling, or gaming: of whose madness they have only heard, for they have no such things among them.” Sir Thomas More, Utopia

I might be the only one ever posting any quotes, or I might forget about this whole thing after the first post. I don’t care. I just love books and I think these random quotes are intriguing!

Dolmades on the way to Iisalmi

14.9.2016 Marilka

At approximately 14:30 today I was about to board a train in Tikkurila. Confused as I frequently am with our beloved VR (Valtion Rautatie, i.e. State Railway) and the ambiguous way of marking the cars, I darted back and forth on the platform as the train arrived, trying to determine the correct car to step into. My ticket was for car one, but as has been the case before, the train had two car number ones! Apparently car number seven was also marked as one since at Kouvola the train split and the latter half continued to Lappeenranta.

Some sort of recollection and maybe even a lucky guess kicked in and I picked the closer one of the car#1’s, asking the train conducter on my way (in plain Finnish), if this car was, in fact, the #1 to Oulu, as I had already figured out that that was the correct one for me. He confirmed and I stepped in and settled into my seat, sipping my tall latte. The conducter stepped in and before the train even left the station, he started checking the tickets.

I offered mine from my phone, the VR app which is a very Finnish app, so I suppose simply the act of having the UI language set to English was reason enough for the said conducter to assume that I am English speaking, despite the fact that I had asked him a question in Finnish only 28 seconds earlier – then again, I guess I can’t assume he remembers every redhead who asks directions from him. So anyhow, while he informed every passanger individually about the coffee, water and cookies offered in this business class car, he effortlessly switched to English when addressing me.

Train travel is just as boring to me as flying. I travel alone, I do not like to sit in the restaurant car, especially since it means leaving all my belongings to the other car (unless I want to drag all my luggage along, which I don’t) and I hate sitting trapped to an uncofortable chair for hours. So I tend to snack. I like to eat in the train. And most commonly I have my own snacks with me – a little bit of candy, some nuts etc. unless the trip takes as long as this one. Five hours in this intimidating green worm. I packed myself some dinner: dolmades and a pulled pork sandwitch.

I’m quite certain that up until my daughter called me and I spoke in Finnish with her, the other passangers in the car shared the assumption od the conducter. I was reading my book about the life and times of Dave Grohl (a bit too much background of the DC punk scene in the book, tends to bore me badly) and eating my dolmades while the normal people went to the restaurant car to get ham on rye (the Finnish rye, Reissumies). Then, I am known (in my own vast mind at least 😉 ) for having strange snacks on travels, like fritatta for example.

In Kouvola we waved goodbye to the latter half, err actually first half, since this car#1 was really, logically, the last car of the train until Kouvola. Did I mention that the car numbering of VR is confusing? I have already learned, though, that it is thorougly Helsinki-centered, as the car#1 is usually the one at the Helsinki end of the train, whether it be the last one (en route out of Helsinki) or the first one (on the return trip). Currently, though this is already topsy-turvy and car#1 is actually the first one while we are north-bound. My head is spinning, but the main thing is, I am in the correct train and still on my way to Iisalmi, not Lappeenranta.

Enough about all this train car confusion and blabbering, adding to the language confusion, or at least just something that strikes me as funny, is this business with these very American mormons who boarded the train in Mikkeli. While addressing me, a definite – if maybe not mainstream – Finn in English, the conducter spoke Finnish to these very obviously American mormons (I have never ever in my 41+ years of life in Finland seen Finnish mormons dressed up in those uniforms). Then again, for a while there, they baffled me by speaking Finnish among each other. Must be part of their training or something. They’re not old enough to have been here for very long.

Two more hours to go. I wish I could just nap.

Utopia

27.8.2016 Marilka

I remember – ever so vaguely – from high school or maybe junior high, the lessons about socialism and communism. I remember Thomas More and his Utopia – which I have never read, but actually am right now putting on my reading list – and Marx and Owen etc. Well, okay, I don’t remember other names for I am bad with names, but you get the picture. What stuck with me most, though, was one of these utopian communities, can’t remember which one the teacher used as the ultimate example, but it left an impression on me. Not really because of the actual philosophy of the society but because it failed, like they all did in the end.

[Utopian socialism according to Wikipedia, with a list of these utopian societies]

My take on human nature is that we are evil, controlling, rotten, selfish, jealous and greedy (money, power, whatnot). Of course that is a very sqewed picture and there is a lot of good in the human population too, but the longer I live, the stronger I feel about the basic rottenness of people. We are not improving by the degeneration, we are degrading. New technology gives new ways to control others, to gain power over others and spread it more widely. On the surface we are humanitarian and out societies (in the Western Wolrd) are good and caring and rich and whatnot. Under the surface the game is the same, always.

Lately, I have been watching the tv series Gilmore Girls from Netflix, maybe diving in a bit too deep and letting it under my skin. At the age of ten or eleven or so, that happened to me with this Australian series Skyways and I vowed then that I wouldn’t let that happen anymore. Well, you know how those things go. Anyway, watching this series that is only a notch above your regular soap opera and reading the news about Burkina Bans and whatnots, and having heated discussions with my highly judgemental husband about burkinas and transgenderisms and all sorts of controversial things, I have come to feel my depression of the world and the utopistic nature of my idealism very keenly again.

My idealism goes in the lines of live and let live. I believe that the world could be a wonderful place if people just let go of their need to control others and instead embrace our difference, meet people as they are instead of trying to streotype them or fit them into some predefined box. Back when we had just started dating, my husband tried to figure out my core personality. I was in a turbulence back then, my core personality was veiled by the flippancy of my core personality deficiency and the shadow personality that had emerged during the horrid years of my marital crisis and divorce. He eventually gave up trying to box me, when he started to know me good enough that that was not necessary anymore.

The point here is simply that I understand the human nature. I understand the need to organize the world and understand it and eliminate the threat of the unknown. For some people it is more important than for others. The more judgemental people – like my husband and my grandma (rest in peace) both of whom I love immensely – have a bigger need to control the environment than the less judgemental, the perceiving people, like myself. Priviledged people tend to be more controlling because they believe they have something to lose if others are allowed to run wild. The non-priviledged couldn’t give a rat’s ass about how the neighbor conducts his or her business, as long as the neighbors don’t interfere with them either.

I think it’s extremely sad that people cannot just live and let live. What is it to you if someone was born a girl but figures out later that they actually are a boy? What is it to you if someone wears a full body swimsuit to the beach if they are happy? And what is it to you if someone doesn’t want to eat meat for ethical reasons or the other way round, enjoys meat? What is it to you if your neighbor wants to dance naked in the living room with a pineapple hat on his head? I just want to live in peace without my neighbors yelling me to stop smoking or shut the dog up or telling me when to grill and when to sit outside and when not to. And I believe in returning that courtesy.

Live and let live, as long as you don’t hurt others. Sure, if my dog barks too much or my music is too loud and disturbes, the neighbor has the right to ask me to do something about it and vice versa. That’s why I’d actually like to live the hell out there, where the nearest neighbor is like a kilometer away. I have no right to do hurtful things – but living my life the way I want to is not being hurful. If I was gay, I am the only one that concerns. If I like to eat in bed and sleep in crumbs I am the only one it concerns. But as soon as my deeds have consequences on other people, we need a consensus od what is ok and what is not.

That is what society is all about. The mutual courtesy rules. It’s just that I believe in a minimal amount of rules and that if everyone lived according to the golden rule of “do as you would be done by” or as my mom taught me: “don’t do as you would not want to be done by”, we could live in harmony. No unnecessary bitching and controlling and bickering and pushing for one’s own interest, for everyone would simply mind their own business and be mindful of others around them.

One of the most misused phrases is “I am not responsible for your feelings”. It is the truth, in it’s core sense, but it does not mean that it’s ok to do whatever and be inconsiderate to others. The only way to determine where the line between the correct and incorrect understanding of this consept goes, is to go by the golden rule. Especially in a relationship but really in all life, in all relationships. Live and let live. Do as you would be done by. Keep your nose in your own business. Stop trying to mold other people to your own ideology.

And here I am, doing exactly that, justifying it by the idea that if everyone just lived like I believe is right, the world would be a better place. Isn’t that the exact thing everyone believes and the exact thing I am critizising here? Trying to push my own ideas to others? I watch Gilmore Girls, and while understanding that it is just a tv soap I can’t stop thinking how stupid those people are with their drama and not talking and mothers and fathers trying to push their offspring to live the way THEY want them to live and stopping to talk to each other when they don’t see eye to eye. The sad thing is, I know this is the reality for so many. My own mother was doing a whole lot of the same too.

Last night we got into a debate with my husband, over the issue of pushing one’s own agenda forcefully on others. The example was homosexuality and the rights of gays. I said that if nobody would have set a rule and try to control people’s sexual tendencies and behavior in the first place, there would be no need to push the issue. Take the ancient world before Christianity. It was a norm, not an issue. My husband said, “but the rule exists, so why can’t they just live and not make noise?” We got into a cycle where I was talking about a utopia, a society that does not exist, where there are no predefined this is rights and that is wrongs and people just live and let live and no one needs to make a fuss over anything. Everyone is equal in their rights. My husband was talking about this society here.

I realize the reality. People are greedy and controlling and even the best efforts in building a society like I dream of have failed, always. I am an idealist and occasionally I feel very depressed because of the understanding of this. Wetlschmertz. World-weariness. Couldn’t we at least try? Let the muslim women swim in their burkinas, it doesn’t make them terrorists. Let the transgender people have their non-offensive pronouns. Let the neighbor have their big grill and BMW. It’s not away from you. Live and let live. Mind your own business.

Some things that look like mushrooms may actually be rocks

26.7.2016 Marilka

We ended up driving about 2000km during our week in Lapland. Instead of exploring the grounds of the UK National Park close to us, we drove up to Nellim one day and visited Purnumukka and Kuttura on our last full day in Vuotso. Nellim is a remote village of less than 200 inhabitants, 40km from Ivalo (so by distance, not that remote, but in all other ways, definately), 7km from the Russian border. A pittoresque little road winds through fells and Lake Inari fjords from Ivalo to Nellim. About 2/3 of it is unpaved gravel road, but it was in a rather good shape.

Nellim has been in the news lately for a couple of reasons. One being the said road. Nellim used to be an important location for Finns in WWII, when a lot of food supplies etc. came to the country from Norway and Sweden through Nellim. Currently there is no proper road anymore between Nellim and Norway, but one has been debated over for 25 years. Also, the people of Nellim have been asking for money to pave the whole road between Ivalo and Nellim. Now, finally in June that money has been granted to the village.

I am sure one of the reasons for this is nothing less than the Wilderness Hotel, which is the second thing putting Nellim on the world map. Apparently Nellim is an excellent place for seeing the northern light in the winter time and since the old school of Nellim was abandoned some years ago and a hotel was built in its place, Nellim has been attracting a whole lot of tourists from all over the world, especially in the winter. Summer time is more or less building time for the Lapland holiday resorts, most of the tourists being Finns hiking in the wilderness or Germans touring the sites in their campers.

Winter being the main tourist season, Nellim was rather quiet the day we visited it. There were a few boats in dock (many people haul their boats to Lake Inari for some boating and camping) and some mild car traffic, and the hotel was open despite the construction work being done to expand it by 50%(!) during this summer time. There was an old Lappish man walking down the main road and a couple people at the hotel restaurant terrace, where we too sat for a beer and a sparkly water (beer for Husband, water for me) and a bowl of water for the dogs.

That day there was hot. It was the hottest day of the whole summer so far and we happened to be in the hottest place in all of Finland that day, surprisingly enough. Officially the hottest place was Utsjoki, but the shade temperature on that patio in Nellim read 28C and another one in Ivalo announced the rare temperature of 32C as we drove by on our way back to our cabin.

There is not much to do in Nellim, really. I had seen the picture of their orthodox church in the article where I first read about Nellim, so I knew it was there and wanted to go see it for myself. I would have liked to walk there – it was only a kilometer or so from where we had parked our car – but the day was so hot that we opted for our air conditioned car instead. The church, quite typically, is on a little hill, up a dirt road from the village main habitation. A very pretty log church it was too. I took some pictures, rounding it up and we left.

The next morning was our last day there in Vuotso. We had planned a sauna for the evening and there was packing to do in order to be able to get out of the cabin by noon the next day and so on, so no long drives – at least no really long ones – for that day. In Nellim we had been talking with another couple with a bigger dog in tow there on that hotel terrace, and they had told us about this woman reindeer slaughterer who lives in Purnumukka and has written a couple of books too. Later on I learned that there have been documentaries and articles in magazines and whatnot about her too, but I got really interested in her books – and Purnumukka, especially since it was only about 25km from where we were staying.

So on that Saturday we first drove to Purnumukka, a village of about 20 people, the village of Riitta Lehvonen, the first ever woman to have pursued the profession of a reindeer breeder and slaughterer. A woman who grew up in the city, in Turku, but moved to Lapland straight after highschool to become a wilderness guide at first. She then got married and they decided to swap money to freedom, as she puts it, and they moved to Purnumukka to a house with no running water, to begin with. And she is happy with her life now, after a whole lot of hardships, that I have not yet read about; I have only started the book about her life.

Purnumukka it was then. Tiny, secluded, enticing. Not much there, obviously, apart from the scattered houses, but we did find a nice swamp with a whole lot of cloudberries. And we did see a whole lot of mushrooms that turned out to be rocks. That happened to both of us several times during the week in Lapland. The rocks there are either red with rusty iron ore or dirty yellow like porcinis. A few times I saw a huge one, and now I do mean a boulder more than a rock even, and wondered what the heck it was, as it looked like a mushroom but no way could there be such huge ones. There wasn’t. They were just rocks.

We picked some cloudberries there. I ate them as I picked them, but since Husband doesn’t like them all that well (that might be a crime in Finland, though, not to love cloudberries and admit it), he picked as much as he could fit in his big hand and then gave them to me for a snack. We walked a bit more until we decided to hop back in the car a head out of the village. According to the village info map (yes, even this little place has one) there are some remnants of WWII right there by the road, but we didn’t manage to see them. Not that we looked too hard, only from the car window. Purnumukka was mostly burned down by the retreating Germans in the Lapland War (at the end of WWII), like so many other villages in Lapland.

We drove out of Purnumukka and north a bit and then turned to go to the little village of Kuttura. Nothing really special about Kuttura, in fact I told Husband that we’re probably suffering the 40km of poor dirt road just to see nothing. Somehow the village had spiked my interest, mainly I suppose because it is on the Ivalo River, along (or as I read later on, the starting point of) one of the most beautiful canoe routes in all of Finland. And truly enough, Ivalo River there was beautiful. The old iron bridge crossing it to the actual village was quite nice too. A bit of a blast from the past.

The other thing that had caught my attention was the story of Urho Kekkonen stopping there at Kuttura on one of his skiing escapades in the 1950′. I love places with stories! Legend has it that Kekkonen had asked the village people if there was something they’d like him to do for them, and they had asked him for a road – back then the only way to the place was via the river or just wilderness. Kekkonen had obliged and according to the legend the road was built loyally following the straight line Kekkonen had drawn on the map. The road is almost like it was drawn with a ruler. Almost.

The road passes vast swampy areas on both sides of the road and I can only imagine how much work it has been to make solid road there, in the swampy lands. Nothing like Louisiana of course, but wet enough. That area is also the gold area of Lapland. There’s plenty of old gold mines and there still are places where gold is actually panned for somewhat actively. At least for the amusement of tourists – and maybe locals themselves too. Along the way down to Kuttura (and back) there is a place, the Gold Kiosk, where there was a gold panning contest going on. A gathering of the super-rednecks of the country, I’d say.

Husband was in need of some smokes so we drove up to Saariselkä for one last time. This time we made a round in the holiday village – I had no idea that the place was so big and so packed with hotels! A couple of reindeer were lazily grazing in the front yard of one and several vacationers (I assume) were lazily slurping beer in front of an Irish pub (Irish pub in Lapland!!) called O’Poro (O’Reindeer in English). I tried to visit a souvenir shop to see if I could find one of those books by Lehvonen, but the place was closed. So we drove to Kuukkeli, where Husband did find one of them for me, the Tyttöteurastaja.

I immeadiately started reading the book, right there in the car on our way back to the cabin and I immediately knew I liked this Lehvonen. She is the same age as Husband, some nine years older than me, and a cool character with lots of empathy, no bullshit kind of an attitude and my kind of sense of humor. Apart from the obvious tending to reindeer and slaughtering them, she takes photographs that are made into postcards and sold in the souvenir shops of Lapland, and she sells condoms called “Aslakin rykimäsukka”, with a picture of mating reindeer on the package. I actually saw them there in Kuukkeli and was snickering because I found the idea so funky, before I knew they were a product of Lehvonen’s (well, made by a Helsink Aslakin+rykimäsukka-5 i company, but sold by her, and the picture is hers).

In the evening we had our sauna, with the sausages again. Sauna in the winter time is wonderful when you get warm for a while in the midst of all the cold. Sauna in the summer time, um, let me rephrase that: sauna on hot summer evenings is a different kind of pleasure, when you have good “löyly” first, then come out to the still warm summer evening, sit there in the evening sun, having a cold drink and maybe taking a dip in the lake, if there is one nearby. There was a lake on the other side of the road from our cabin, but we didn’t venture there for a swim. Mainly because I had scouted it out and discovered all the vegetation one would have to walk through to go for a swim. Eww.

The next morning it was time to pack the car and head back south. We had originally planned to stay overnight at Kempele again, but before we reached Rovaniemi the plan was revised, and I canceled our reservation as we decided to make it all the way home that same day. We had a slightly longer stop there at the Santa Clause land at the Arctic Circle, but that wasn’t really my kind of place. We stopped again at Vaskikello, this time to get swarmed by flying ants (they were all over our car making it difficult to get back inside!) and once at Tähtihovi Heinola just to get out, stretch, pee, and change drivers.

It was midnight when we got home, after 1030km and 13h of driving. It was good to be home again. The trip was good, we enjoyed it, but home is the best place in any case. Our plants had grown like hell during our week away. And the warm weathers followed us from Lapland, and it is finally sunny and hot here in Helsinki too. Last week of vacation is well on its way already. Next Monday it’s back to work again.

[More Lapland pics in Flickr]