Finland - a travel journal *long*

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Hey everyone,

In early March I spent twelve days in southern Finland.  I was invited to speak at two universities there.  In between the lectures, there was plenty of time to travel around.  I've never *not* played any video games for that long a time.  Anyway, this is my journal.  Please comment if you like it!

Chapter 1

Why Finland?  Part of my job requires publishing complex papers on esoteric things that nobody reads.  Well, almost no one as I found out, when a professor contacted me about my work.  The professor wants me to come and present lectures on topics almost too dull to mention to her students and colleagues.  I demur.  Flights to Europe aren’t cheap.  Neither are hotels.  Budgets are growing tighter.  She replies that her university will gladly pay for the flight and accommodation – can you still come?

Doing what I do best, I hesitate.  This time I tell my spouse.  It’s too far.  Where is this Turku, anyway.  I have work to do.  Meow Meow.  My spouse turns me around.  “You want to turn down a free trip.  To Europe.  Are you crazy?  You won’t be teaching all week.  This will look good for you.”  I say yes and am on my way.

The flight is a one-hopper from Newark to Cophenhagen and onto Turku, Finland.  My eight-hour flight begins on a good note.  The Airbus jet is clearly new – sporting an individual seat video screen with multiple movies, games, and television shows.  The seat also provides your own personal mirror, cup holder, and something I can only describe as a thingy catcher.  I play with the cup holder and stuff my pen in the thingy catcher.  My spirits rise again when I realize that the seat to my right is not taken.  Although not as lucky as some who have an entire row to themselves and fall asleep sprawled across four seats, the extra two feet next to me feels like an acre, and I use the space to stretch out and listen an audiobook on my brand new Ipod.  A rock star has been murdered and the detective has no leads. So much for the first three chapters.

Eight hours later I am in Copenhagen airport with three hours to kill before my plane to Turku.  I settle in at a table next to a modern art fountain and a magazine rack filled with adult magazines.  Too tired to wonder whether Copenhagen has cornered the market in porn, I work on my laptop and fight off the growing urge to sleep.

I watch the departure screens.  Minutes tick by as other flights are assigned a gate number.  One hour passes, then two, and the location of the flight to Turku remains a mystery.  Just before I decide to look around for some help the gate appears.  I check the map.  It’s a long walk across multiple terminals.  The airport looks more like a fancy shopping mall than a transportation hub.  I drag my bags past a glistening Prada store and hike through the sleek and modern terminal.

I find my gate, located in a desolate and thankfully quiet corner of the airport.   A group of passengers sit reading magazines.  I lose myself in my laptop and wait for boarding to begin.  I don’t know how many minutes later, I look up from my screen.  Except for a couple fiddling with their laptop, everyone is gone.  There is no attendant.  No gate sign. No one.  I check the now-hated departure screen.  The flight has been moved from gate A3 to D79gazillion.  Where was the notice?  Was it only in another language?  I sprint down the terminal across the airport, pack bouncing on my back with massive bag trailing behind.  I’ve been planted in this airport for three hours and there’s no way I’m going to miss this flight.  I arrive huffing and puffing at the gate with a few minutes to spare.  The couple with the laptop arrives shortly thereafter.  The puddle jumper to Turku, unlike my brief stay in Denmark’s fine airport, is quick and uneventful.  I arrive in Turku at 1:00 pm.  Not having rested for a full day, my body craves sleep.  I receive a warm welcome from my host and we leave the absurdly tiny airport for the Turku city center.  Imperceptibly, I relax.
 
Chapter 2

Where is Turku?  Nestled on the Baltic Sea, Turku by US standards is a smallish college town.  The University of Turku sits on a hill surrounded by modern and coldly institutional low-slung buildings neatly placed in rows along not very busy streets.  A canal cuts the city in two and a busy market square packed with coffee shops, malls, and a theater mark Turku’s vibrant center.  There is no ready comparison. This is not a global tourist destination.  It is a working city, some of us would call it a town, in Europe that does not live solely for tourism.

The streets are clean, the public transportation is ample, and people I have met friendly.  Nearly everyone under forty speaks serviceable English.   Except for ‘kittos’, which means ‘thank you’, my Finnish is non-existent.  Unlike other languages like Spanish, there is no faking it.  Words don’t look like English.  Words don’t sound like English.  In the great tree that is our linguistic world, Finnish left on a different branch long ago.   I rely on the generosity and patience of others, which is found without exception.

Day one begins with a visit to the unpronounceable Uusikaupunki.  Try it.  Can’t pronounce it can you.  Try this – oo-see-cow-poonki, with an emphasis on ‘cow’.  There are three museums in whatever this place is called, two involve the all too common maritime theme while a third is the wonderfully quirky Bonk Museum.  The guidebook paints the Bonk Museum as a testament to weirdness.  An artist makes machines sprawling with pipes and knobs but actually have no serviceable use whatsoever.  The guide says that it ‘crackles with dry, offbeat Finnish humor’.  That’s all I need to know.  The place must have been made just for me.  My host and I are on our way.

The guidebook lists Uusikapunki as seventy kliometers away.  I make a quick calculation, imagining a Finnish interstate connecting the cities, I guess that the forty miles will take less than an hour.  Instead, my professorial companion and I find a straight road confined to slow travel because of very low speed limits.  In the States, a thirty-five mile per hour sign means that you cruise along at, say, forty-five or maybe fifty if you feel lucky.  Except for the all too common slow driver, the roads are quiet here.  Yet my host drives well below the speed limit, slowing and speeding up with no rhyme or reason.  Puttering along in congested places at a painful thirty miles per hour puts my American patience to the test.  Note dear reader that ‘congested’ means the presence of more than three houses within five-hundred years or actual other-street that crosses our path.  This is no interstate.  More on that later.  I hide my impatience.  I wanna see Uusikathingamabober and I want it now.  My discretion is rewarded when I learn the reason why.  And that quirky fact about Finnish driving is the subject of my next post.

Chapter 3
 
Radar.  Sure, you all know about radar.  A state trooper plants himself on the side of the road with his radar gun and the proverbial dozen donuts.  (For the law enforcement minded among you, please don’t be offended.  I know donuts are a police stereotype.  You might have brie cheese next to you or a dog-eared copy of Yachting Week. I leave the details to you, dear reader)  The statie shoots, measures speed, and pulls you over. You plead for your very life and avoid a pricey ticket.  Or not.  In spite of the risks of meeting one of our state's bravest, we drive fast.  Our savior?  There are more of us drivers than officers.  They got the guns but we’ve got the numbers.

None of this apparently applies in Finland.  I have yet to see a police officer, let alone one with bits of brie on his uniform.  All the hard work of catching speeders is replaced by cameras.  Yes, cameras.  Every few miles a silver pole appears on the horizon.  Atop this pole is a square box with two glass openings, one right above the other.  One opening must hold the lens that takes the picture.  The other, I surmise, is the radar.  The radar detects.  If the car exceeds the maddeningly slow limit, the camera shoots.  Your picture is taken and the ticket arrives in the mail.  I gather from my host’s English that some drivers must come to the police station to pay.   Sleep deprivation causes me to miss the exact cost, but I can tell from her expression that a ticket is no small affair here.

The existence of these evil poles sprouting from the ground like so many unwanted weeds does not necessarily doom the Finnish driver to sluggish travel.  Conveniently, preceding each pole by about one-quarter mile is a square yellow sign about the same size as the two-foot-squared boxes.  On each sign is a picture of a camera.  Yes, dear reader, these signs warn travelers that there’s a speed trap ahead.  Even the slowest-to-react among us has plenty of time to move one’s foot from gas to brake before the box has a chance to do its evil work.  Even more convenient is the GPS system on our dashboard, which beeps loudly when we are about to pass a traffic camera.  Finland’s GPS not only offers directions in elegant Finnish, but also helps you escape the long arm of the law.  We accelerate and slow, accelerate and slow, and after ninety minutes of travel turn drive into the quaint village of Uusikapunki.

A smart person said, ‘fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you.’  I do not blame myself for overestimating the size of the fine city of Turku.  I should know better, however, that a place on a map with substantially smaller print than Turku will be … well … substantially smaller.  This is a small town.  A big village.  A quiet and pretty place.  We have three places to visit.  I save the best for first.  Without further ado (or traffic box) we drive straight to the alluring Bonk Dynamo Centre.  Snow crunches under our feet as we walk to the entrance.  The Bonk and town will be the subject of my next chapter.

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Chapter 4

Time for a lesson in logic.  When a city is big, things in that city tend to be big.  Massive New York City has the massive sights.  Big Boston has the big sights.  Smaller cities sport smaller treasures.  Unlike the lesson in driving, this one applies in Finland.  I know the smart reader can guess what a tiny town means.  And this town fits the bill.

The Bonk Museum is the smallest public building dedicated to anything museum-ish that I have ever seen.  This ain’t no multiple-floor sprawl of displays or even a quaint little maze of exhibits.  The Museum is the size of the seating area of a local McDonalds.  My host tugs on the door handle.  It does not budge. The lights are dim.  I peek through the window at a tantalizing display of mechanical weirdness.  There’s a strange engine-thing, a T-shirt with an abstract print and framed pictures I cannot make out line the walls.  Is that a gas mask?  How does all of this relate to a shipping company that one sold Peruvian anchovies?  I’ll never know because as a sheet of paper tacked to the door clearly states (and my Lonely Planet tour book disappointingly does not), visits to the museum are now by appointment only.

My heart sinks.  We drove ninety minutes to see a gas mask and a single mechanical thing.  There’s more to do in Uusikapunki, and we return to our car hoping for better luck.  We have none of it, the other two museums are also closed.  This time I have no one else to blame because the guidebook, which I misread in my fatigued-addled state on the plane to Copenhagen, now clearly states that these small museums are closed except for summer months.  The six-block by six-block town offers little else to weary tourists.  We accelerate and brake our way back to Turku.  I return to my room, a small guest apartment on campus complete with stove, sink, but no microwave, promising to read the guidebook more closely and check the internet before adventuring again.  I spend the rest of Saturday answering a growing pile of emails and am sound asleep by ten.

Chapter 5 - the continuing saga

Sunday is another day for travel.  This time we prepare.  The internet says the museum is open.  We start the car and away we go into the countryside.

This trip follows a road very similar to the last one.  Yet, there is not a single traffic box.  I don’t know why.  I forget to ask.  Jet lag still has its horrible grip on my consciousness and I fight sleep as we drive through the flat plains.

That’s flat with an emphasis on flat.  Flat open land with dormant agricultural plots sprinkled with the occasional house and barn.  Tall and thin pine trees crowd one another along the quiet road.  There are fewer cars and more speed.  I hold my eyes open to enjoy the view.

After another long drive we arrive at the Finnish Agricultural Museum.  This place takes the visitor through a history of farming for hundreds of years.  The academic in me absorbs the exhausting detail.  I milk a fake cow, sit on a long-defunct tractor, and try my hand at milling grain of some sort.  The museum’s lessons are no t lost on me.  Farm work was long, hard, monotonous and year-round.  My faculty companion sprinkles the visit with tales of her childhood recollecting doing much of the work that we now see captured in history.  My hands soft and callous free.  I’m thankful for that.

Off to the tiny gift stop.  Steering away from the generic nick-nacks that I surmise can be found anywhere, I spot the ultimate gift.  It calls to me.  This is Finland. This is the spirit of the land.  I reach for it before visitors in this virtually empty museum snatch the rest away.

Canned Bison meat.

Yes, you read right, canned Bison meat.  There’s even a picture of a bison head on it, lest you fail to understand the Finnish Biisoni.  This delicacy, if I can get it through US customs (well gee it is canned you know), will be savored and shared.  Who will share with me my canned Bison meet?  I tick off a few names and resist the urge to by a second can.  This stuff ain’t cheap and there will be more to buy later.

We drive back to Turku.  The urge to sleep is overwhelming.  I’m trapped in an already warm car with direct sunlight beating down on my face.  I’m warm, comfy, and wiped out.  My body still thinks it’s in Connecticut.  My head dips to my chest and I raise it again, eyes wide open.   I promise my brain a short nap when I get home.  I set the alarm for twenty minutes and wake up over two hours later.  It’s 7pm. Tomorrow, Monday, begins the reason why I am here – to speak and lecture on business law. I review my notes and, in spite of my long rest just a few hours ago, I am out like the proverbial light by 11.

Chapter 6

Today is Monday, March 9, 2009.  The sun is out.  A light breeze blows from somewhere.  The temperature remains steady in the low 30s.  No car today.  No more purchases of Bison, excuse me Biisoni, beef.  Today I present a topic on Very Important Things.  (Consulting opportunities are available for a similarly haughty price, inquire within)  My seventy-odd slides are at the ready.  This presentation will be three hours and I slap on the old game face.  We enter the classroom and I stop in my tracks.

There are two students in the class.  Two intelligent-looking twenty something females sit with notebooks and pens ready.  I forgot about this.  A sudden drop in enrollment, you know, these things do happen (they’ve happened to my classes too).  The class which I traveled 5,000 miles to present can fit around my kitchen table.  There were actually supposed to be three, it comes back to me now.  The third student, I learn later, believes his English is too poor and skips the class thus.  I resist the urge to fret.  Flight is paid.  Hotel is paid.  Students seem eager.  I’m in Finland.  Life is still quite good.

Even readers such as you who have stayed with me this far will not stand for a three-hour narrative.  The students were inquisitive and my host pleased.  Applause all around.  Not a bad start to my Finnish lecture circuit.

We break for lunch, a buffet, my favorite anywhere in the world.  By now this Finnish professor and I have a comfortable and friendly rapport.  We are both enthusiastic about geeky research and enjoy asking one another questions about our respective academic lives and sharing complaints about our mutual words.  If she were in the States, we’d probably be friends.  She talks about her three children, all in their 20s.  I try to commiserate with stories about my single child.

After lunch, my gracious host takes me from office to office, introducing me to various law faculty.  Some express genuine interest, halting English or not.   Others extend mild politeness but appear Really Busy, rushing back to their laptops once the brief introductions end.  I return home and catch up on the work that I’ve forgotten about that waits for me back home.  Monday ends quietly.  Well, except for one very interesting thing that happens Monday evening.  I’ll talk about that next chapter.

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Chapter 7

There’s no doubt.  The Finns love their saunas.  One of the many websites on Finnish Saunas tell me there are five million Finns and two million saunas.  That’s one sauna per household.  Think about that – one sauna per household.  What US contraption besides the TV can claim such prevalence in the United States?  These hotboxes from hell were used to cook, rest, store things, and even give birth.  Sauna’s and their accompanying smoke were antiseptic environments.  Who knew.   One does not swear in a sauna as it sullies the place.  Controversial conversation is forbidden.  Sexual romps are utterly forbidden, sorry folks. (I wonder how many forumites stop reading at this point) Today, business deals often end with a trip to the sauna.  You can refuse, but it’s better to accept.  This is the Finnish way.

I have to partake of this national obsession.  How do I find a sauna? I know there must be many of them about, but I don’t know where to begin.  I ask my host, who happily tells me that the very building I live in, a tiny apartment building hosting no more than a dozen visitors has, you guessed it, its very own sauna.  I peek inside.  This isn’t just a room, but a complex.  There’s a outer waiting room with chairs and places.  Next to that is an inner waiting room with a wood bench and three shower stalls.  Across from the stalls is the holy of holies – the sauna.  The whole thing is lined with wood and there is a bowl of water with a ladle inside.  This is just a tour, a scouting mission if you will.  I return to the administration desk in the apartment building and immediately sign up for an hour’s visit.  There’s someone else in the building that has reserved the same time three days in a room.  That only increases my curiosity.  The three Euros, fifty cent price for the hour sojourn into steam is paid for by my host.  Isn’t academia grand? 

Friend me on facebook for *lots* of pictures with explanations and the full sauna experience.

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Chapter 8

Today is Thursday, March 12, 2009.  I am sitting in front of my laptop at 7pm Finland time (1pm in New York) munching on a dinner I didn’t want and a half-liter Coca-Cola I would have never, ever paid this much for in the United States ($2.50 in euros).  My thoughts circle around the mundane.  Does my camera have enough battery life?  (Yes) Why am I eating a pile of sauce-covered kebab meat that I never wanted? (Because it’s tasty even though I am not that hungry)  What’s on TV tonight? (Old American shows like Hill Street Blues with Finnish subtitles).  I think much less about what I will do the next day.

Why?  I’m tired.  This is day eight of my trip to Europe and enthusiasm, while still humming along nicely, is losing the race to fatigue.  As introverts know, of which I am not, making small talk takes effort.  Making small talk with people you have never met and may never meet again is harder.  Making small talk with people you have never met and may never meet again in a language which one person is not fluent is downright exhausting.  Ordering a pizza in Finland, except when the staff screws up the request, may be downright easy.  Try though managing a long conversation about foreign direct investment or intellectual property rights while speaking slowly and communicating a complex idea in words that are clear enough for someone who is competent but not fluent in English to understand.  I pre-think most sentences before I speak them lest I use some incomprehensible slang or speak at my usual New Yorker pace.  I also have to listen harder to my Finnish colleagues.  Words don’t fit here and there and I have to mentally translate on the go what this smart scholar in front of me really wants to say.  I love talking with people.  If you know me at all that’s no surprise.  After eight days of flying, jet lagging, and hard listening, even I need a people break.

A Rick Steves guidebook once said, “Sometimes a traveler needs a vacation from the vacation.”  I’ve hit that traveler’s wall.  I crave fluent English.  Today, a chance encounter with an American student from Wisconsin is an unexpected treat.  I don’t care what we talk about.  I just want to hear some American.   It takes me a moment to drop the halting and cumbersome English I’ve been using for seven days.  I speak freely, openly, quickly, and with lots of slang.  It feels so good.  My tongue wags like a horse free of its reigns.  I miss home.

Time moves quickly during the week.  I meet face after face.  While some names, like Liisa and Toumas, feel familiar.  The rest are a very easy to forget and harder to understand barrage of Nordic names.  At night, I compulsively check email, surf the web, and fail my blogging duties.  The result is that my travels are a stew of memories, disorganized and out of time.  Better late than never, as the saying goes.  I would say ‘back to my journey’, but these talks really are part of my journey.  Unless your idea of travel is only a pool side and fruity drinks, fatigue is part of the traveling life. All of it is my journey, and my story.

You’ve seen the pictures of my sauna experience.  They provide the visuals.  Words of course can fill in the details.  Obviously, the sauna is hot -- incalculably hot and dry.  I can perhaps repeat the word ‘hot’ over and over again to impress how hot the damn thing was.  A desert does not compare.  A summer day in August does not compare, although saunas have no humidity.  Heck, I might say that the place was like a sauna.  That would not work as an analogy because it is a sauna.

I sit in the sauna, leaning forward with forearms on knees.  I am comfortably relaxed with rivulets of sweat running down my arms and chest.  Droplets fall from my forehead onto the wood seat below me.  I try to clear my mind and relax.

Not all is peaceful though.  When I turn my head to the left, I feel a stinging pain on one side of my neck, like a pinprick.  Reacting instinctively, I turn my head the other way.  I am rewarded with the same pain on the other side of my neck.  Did the heat cause my neck to painfully twitch?  Are there mysterious sauna bugs lurking in the wooden seats?  I look down, fearful of what I might see.  All I see is my sweating body, the wood seats, and my gold necklace swinging in the air.

I touch the necklace and pull my fingers away.  The gold necklace has become so warm from the sauna that it is painful to touch if left to dry.  The gold around my neck is covered in my own sweat and thus has no chance to boil.  The gold hanging in the air is quite dry and has plenty of time to grow sizzling hot.  I am wearing a gold frying pan around my neck.  I step outside the sweltering hot box and remove my necklace and glasses, the metal parts of which are also painful to the touch.  Next time I will no longer burn myself with my own jewelry.  That, my friends, is the blistering, burning, sizzling heat of the sauna.  After thirty minutes of relaxation, I dry off and feel wonderfully relaxed.  I promise myself that I will visit a sauna when I return, a small part of me knowing that I will never do so.

Allow me to ladle a memory or two from what has become my Finnish mental soup. Monday night and Wednesday night I listen to lectures given in English on the Finnish popular music and the History of Finland.  Both lectures are given by a balding and bearded man with a warm smile who seems to have suffered a stroke or some other malady.  He walks rigidly behind the lectern and his right arm is unnaturally flexed toward his chest as if he is perpetually bracing from the cold.  The room is populated by undergraduate students.  For an instant, I am impressed by their interest in knowledge for its own sake.  Then I see the notebooks appear, students penning neat headings of the lecture and date.  While the lecture is public, they attend because of a class requirement.  No yearning for knowledge here, at least without a Damoclesian grade hanging over their heads.  After a brief chat with an American student of Finnish origin from Minnesota who is here as an exchange student, the lecture begins.

Students text and whisper, while I shift in the uncomfortably tiny chair for two hours.  The lecture is not a disappointment, but there are few dramatic moments.  The bearded man waxes poetic about a song from the 1940s, plays the song in full, and moves on to the next tune in the next decade.  Wash, rinse and repeat.  The music does not sound uniquely Finnish.  Each song sounds like American music from that time, but with incomprehensible lyrics and a dash of hokey.  Perhaps the music from the 40s and 50s reflect the melancholy of the times.   There is that welcome spark of the folk in the music harkening back to an earlier age.

After 1960, however, the songs just sound like homogenized Americana, and that’s too bad.  The bearded man’s enthusiasm for the music wanes.  It is not hard to tell that modern rock music is not his passion.  I understand why.  The song from the 80s, from a band called Dingo, sounds like Rick Springfield.  The 70s tune could easily be Barbara Streisand.  The song from 2006, which won a supposedly prestigious Eurovision song contest, is “Hard Rock Hallelujah.”  This metal anthem sounds like it was written in 1986.  The crunching guitar is catchy, no doubt, but I’d think that a European-wide award would be bestowed to something more innovative.  Then again, we Americans have Britney and the ever complex “Let it Rock” single, thankfully not written by Ms. Spears.  I cannot dismiss Hard Rock Hallelujah too easily.

The lecture on the history of a Finnish city (Turku), held on Wednesday in an absurdly modern building straight out of Battlestar Galactica.  There is not much to say as it is … a history of the city.  The same kindly gentleman summarizes 800 years of history in just two hours.  The PowerPoint slides have paintings and postcards.  The lecturer describes the buildings and views in each.  This building was built in this time, served this purpose, and burned down on this date.  Again we wash, rinse and repeat.  In short, the city was founded in the impressively early 1200s.  The city survived the middle ages, escaped the Black Plague (like most of Finland), and grew into a government capital and cultural center by the 1700s.  In 1821, a Russian King moved the capital to Helsinki to keep a better eye on his Finns.  The place has not been the same since, and is clearly Finland’s ‘third city’ after Tampere and Helsinki.  That does not stop our lecture from beaming with pride at his chosen subject.  I asked him if he would play Hard Rock Hallelujah.  He emphatically says no, as this is a serious lecture.  He is a native son, and the enthusiasm pervades his talk . 

These two hours pass more quickly in the more comfortable chairs.  I see the American student again and exchange pleasantries.  Next comes dinner with a group of faculty in the modern city center.

The dinner is filled with pleasant conversation but relatively vacant of tales worth remembering.  Me and five others, four from Finland and one from the UK, chat amiably about the Euro, the European Union, British politics, and the price of gas.  One professor gushes about how cheap the price of gas is in the United States.  When I talk about how we Americans complain about the prices and limited our driving when gas reached its $3.00 peak, she laughs in amazement.  Gas here is 1.10 Euros a liter.  A liter is about one-fourth of a gallon.  I talk about gas mileage and gas taxes.  The table is playfully unsympathetic.  I have just met these people and already I feel like old friends.  Finns, mostly academics, I have met are generally friendly.  I feel a greater connection with these academics, one an administrator and another an instructor in ‘beauty care studies’ (it’s a real field, ask me about it), than I do with some of my colleagues where I am employed.  I chew bites of reindeer, a leaner and healthier meat than cow with a subtle and pleasant flavor, and savor the evening.

There is more to tell, of course.  On Wednesday, I visit the Aboa Ventus – a wonderfully professional and informative museum about the old city.  This museum is the ‘if you have time for only one stop’ place if you improbably find yourself here.  How that museum even exists is a quirky tale in itself.  On Thursday (today), I walk through the peaceful and sadly beautiful Cathedral.  I’ve written enough for now. My stomach is full of what was supposed to be my pizza dinner.  I have some work to do and then off to bed.

For those of you that read this far, a photo of the Aboa Ventus museum.  Those are genuine medieval city walls you are looking at, encased in a modern museum. Fascinating!

[img=http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5255/finlandpicturegroupii06.th.jpg]

Chapter 9

Today is Saturday and it is nearly 9pm.  For a tourist perspective, I tire of the travel and touring.  The time has come to go home and sleep in my oversized American bed, eat American pizza, and drive without fear of snooping cameras.

As the days pass, new memories replace old ones.  The subtleties of my travel, the humorous remark here and the fleeting insight there, are the first to fade.  Wednesday is only three days ago and already I recall the day in big blocks of time rather than hour by hour.  I write to enjoy.  I write to step outside myself and perceive a big picture.  I write just to friggin remember what the hell went on this week.

So where was I?  Oh yeah, the Aboa Ventus, which I visited on Wednesday.  I wish I had a Geiger counter that that was actually a Finnish Coolness counter.  When I get close to coolness, it would make those arrhythmic clicks you hear in the movies.  The closer to coolness, the more clicks.  If one existed, the Aboa Ventus would have pinned the needle.

Picture this.  A bunch of artsy fuddy duddies want to build a modern art museum.  So they buy a spot of land near the river and start digging the foundation.  Bulldozers and shovels reveal that under the long-disturbed soil are a trio of intact brick buildings from the middle ages and a veritable treasure trove of artifacts.  Realizing they have struck the mother lode of Turku history, they stop digging and wonder what to do next.  They can’t lift the buildings out of the ground.  They sure aren’t reckless enough to wreck it.  So they created two museums.   The upper floors became a modern art museum.  The lower floor, the basement really, was turned into a historical exhibition of medieval life in Turku.

In the museum, I walk down below ground level.  The temperature drops perceptibly and the stairway opens up into a cavernous room filled with the remnants of three brick foundations and a small chapel.  Encircling the foundations are interpretive stores about what life was like at the time (not easy, highly stratified, dirty, and dangerous).  Almost one half of children did not make it past ten years old.  Take a good look at the children you love and consider *that* statistic for a minute.  Disease was common place and the Church and merchants ruled with an iron fist.  To the inhabitants of the time, life was no pit of despair but simply the Way Things Were.  Imagine what people living in the year 2700 would think of our quality of life now.

I enjoyed the museum immensely.  Information about medieval life is everywhere, told through the eyes of a fictional child living at the time.  Museum curators even provide a five-minute computerized video of what the buildings would have looked like in great detail.  Few exhibits are left unexplained.  English translations are ample.  Artifacts of bones, toys, work implements are sealed in well-lit glass cases.  I climb up to steps into the warm entrance almost two hours later with a clear picture of Turku and its history.

My imaginary Coolness counter clicking away, I trot up the steps to the modern art museum.  After that experience, I’m brimming with enthusiasm.  After that wonderful sojourn down Middle Ages Lane, my trip upstairs to Modern Art Boulevard has got to match.

Or maybe not.  The upstairs museum is painted antiseptic white with precisely hung drawings and other works.  Painfully bright spotlights illuminate drawings that are not just terribly exciting.  The artist has some seriously mad skillz no doubt, but I examine the words and remain cold.  I feel no spark of mental interest or call to challenge the work.  I don’t mentally dismiss the work as some chicken scratch as no doubt a modern art hater would.  I just don’t get jazzed.  I step slowly through the square rooms, leaning forward to examine each creation out of some sense of obligation rather than real interest.

The artwork eventually improves.  One artist spends eight hours writing meaningless words on a small movie-screen size canvas with a marker and one arm tied behind his back.  There’s a time lapse video playing on endless loop so you may enjoy the painful exercise.  The work is a jumble of black letters on a canvas of brown.  The artist offers an explanation, but the words are so abstract that I can’t feel what the artist does in the work.  I would probably need to study his collective works (there are more in the museum) for some time more, but there are other things to do, and a perfunctory walk through the rest of the exhibit sends me toward the exit and out into the cold.  Next stop is a history of Turku lecture, which I described earlier.   After that I go home, eat dinner, and go to bed. 

Chapter 10

Today is still Saturday but I now write about Thursday.  Stealing from the Bangles, that’s not my fun day.  I teach for two hours in the morning, have lunch at the now all too familiar college cafeteria and meet with faculty in a similar discipline.  The professors are intelligent and friendly and express genuine interest in my work, and I in theirs.  Enough of that though, let’s get back to the sights.

Thursday afternoon means a visit to the Turku Cathedral.  I’ve left this visit out of my itinerary because it was so nearby that I wanted to ‘use’ it for when I only had a brief period of time alone.  By now, I’m just tiring of long walks and long drives, so I visit the Cathedral because it’s easier than anything else.

The Cathedral was built in the 1300s and rebuilt as fire, wars, and Russian bombing gouged the structure through the centuries.  The Cathedral is large and beautiful, with a number of ornate marble figures of names I can’t recognize.  Apparently medieval and renaissance Turku priests and nobles failed to realize all the English-speaking people that would be visiting their Cathedral hundreds of years after they bit the dust.  I walk the dark and empty halls while signs politely tell me to respect this holy place and be quiet.  In an adjoining room, loud church-going Turku-ians talk and laugh with gusto.  Their chatter echoes off the vaulted ceilings, creating a chamber of unpleasant noise.  Quiet indeed.

I take pictures of the scenes of Christ with his apostles and the beautiful marble.  I’m respectfully impressed.  I say respectfully because a previous visit to Rome has spoiled me to churches.   I’m wandering now.  I’m sitting in Finland and thinking about Italy.  There are good Italian stories to tell, like the time I smashed to bits a crystal candle while visiting the Pope’s private chapel, but for another time.  Back to this wonderful and wintry place, and soon will come my final entries.