I flew from Riga to Tampere, a city in the centre of the southern half of Finland. Tampere airport is about the size of a Virgin Megastore: bigger than a McDonalds but smaller than an Ikea. It was clean and empty. I was coming to Finland to do an artist residency. On the plane from Riga to Tampere I sat next to the nicest lady in the world. Her name was Mervii, she was sixty years old and dressed entirely in purple except for her shoes, which were gold. She had dots drawn on her face with makeup and looked like a happy roly-poly Vali Myers. She told me all kinds of useful things, which made me like her, and then bought me a beer which made me like her even more.
One useful thing she told me was how to pronounce the name of the place we were flying to. No-one I knew had even heard of it so we had no idea and as it turns out we were all saying it wrong. You should say TOM-pe-re, not tam-PEER. Pretend you're Italian and you'll get most Finnish pronunciation right; they even roll their Rs in exactly the same way. (The one place this rule doesn't work is with Cs. Italians pronounce them like the ch in chop. Finns say them like the k in Karma Chameleon. I found this out later when I went to see a play in Helsinki about Cicciolina, the Italian politician who used to make erotic films. All through the entire play they kept saying her name kikkiolina. Which is wrong, but kind of funny.
Another handy hint: if you want to make erotic films and be a politician it's probably better to do it in that order, or at least do one of those things at a time. Some politicians try to make erotic films while they're still politicians and it doesn't work out so well. Politicians are kind of surrogate parents - they get to make all the decisions and spend all the money, after all - and few people want to watch their parents having sex.)
But I digress.
I didn't know who was meeting me but it turned out to be a guy whose head was shaved like mine, which put me at ease. His name was Teemu. We had to drive about half an hour to get to the residency place, near the small town of Hämeenkyrö. It gave me time to see pretty much every kind of inland landscape I'd see for the rest of the month: forest lake field forest lake field forest lake field forest lake field pretty much forever until you get to Lapland, where the trees get smaller. There's a lot of bloody lakes, something like 190,000, and about 180,000 islands. The lakes all point in the direction the local glaciers retreated to at the end of the last ice age, because that's how they were made: gouged out of rock by glacial fingernails. The first time I saw a map of Finland my mind couldn't even register what was going on. Where I was used to seeing slabs of land with roads on them and the occasional river - which in Australia means a line of trees or slightly greener grass across an otherwise barren landscape covered with the skulls of sheep who have died of thirst - the Finnish map was all interpenetrating slivers of water and land, on pretty much every scale. The roads looked like they were leaping from stone to stone across a stream.
I'd been in the car about ten minutes when Teemu said, 'And will you have sauna tonight?' This, too, would set a pattern for the following days. We got to the residency place, ate, and had sauna. I met the other two people who run the residency, Pekka and Inga. They were both lovely. The sauna was small and fired by a furnace which burned wood. Well, I say furnace but they got uneasy when I said the word 'furnace'. The word 'furnace' reminded them of the Holocaust. Whatever it was, it also heated a big urn of water. The way it works is you go in to a kind of changing area and take off your clothes, go into a second room where the urn is, put some water from the urn in a bucket, put a bit of cold in it too if you want and then tip it over your head. Then you go into the actual sauna bit and sweat and chat and throw water on the stones and hit yourself with leaves if you want and drink beer if anyone's remembered to bring any. Then, here anyway, you sit outside in the forest and cool off for a bit and drink more beer and then go back where it's hot and chat and sweat and drink more beer.
A third pattern seems to be emerging here, which is beer. We were drinking Karhu, which means 'bear'. The billboard which advertises Karhu just says 'Karhu', with the bear logo, superimposed over what I first thought was a black background but which turned out to be an eerie, shadowy image of a forest in late twilight. I'll be honest: it freaked me out when I suddenly made out the ghostly trees. Who the fuck advertises beer like that? The answer is: people who spend a decent portion of the year in a shadowy forested landscape, that's who. What the billboard says, beautifully and economically, is 'You're in Finland. So are we. So are bears. So we made you some beer which is kind of like bears. Please, enjoy some delicious beer.'
Later in the trip I would drink all manner of other things. One was sahti, which Pekka would translate as 'spiritual drink'. Strawberry farmers nearby brewed it illegally from weeds. It cost 2 euro a litre. We bought 8 litres of the stuff, in a rectangular plastic container which looked like it had once held agricultural chemicals. Reader: it was awful. Well actually, when we first bought it it was just drinkable and I may perhaps have had quite a bit of it. Two weeks later, though, the container was produced again and the spiritual drink had turned even awfuller. It was like ale someone had left on a plate in a forest for a few days, to lose all the bubbles and get a bit stronger and sourer and have a few bugs drown in it. I managed a sip or two and then realised I had nothing I really wanted to proved by drinking that shit and so I stopped. Later still, in Helsinki, I had tastier weird drinks: terva (shnapps flavoured with pine tar), fisu (vodka infused with Fishermen's Friends) and salmari (the same kind of thing but infused with salty liquorice candy).
Anyway: back in time. The morning after my first sauna I got to have a proper look around. It never gets completely dark here in summer because of the latitude, but it certainly gets darker. Now I could see better. The landscape seemed kind of familiar: all the trees were pines or birches or spruce and all the colours made sense. It didn't seem so different after all. Then I noticed a metal fence at the back of the property. I went and looked at it. Inside the fence was a thin layer of fine gravel.
'What's this?' I asked.
'An ice-skating rink,' they said, which destroyed the sense of easy familiarity I'd been building up over the morning. Around here all the lakes and rivers freeze in winter. When they're in the way cars just take shortcuts straight over the top of them. In Helsinki the ocean freezes and last summer flamingos in the zoo, which is on an island, were killed by foxes which just walked over the ice from the mainland.
Later in Helsinki a friend I was staying with would question my choice to wear jeans by saying, 'It's plus thirty outside!' The 'plus' bit was relevant, because the temperatures here range from about plus to minus thirty-five degrees centigrade. It has a nice symmetry, I guess. Given the extremes they were used to I was surprised what pussies they were when the temperature dropped even just a bit. Sometimes after a day of thirty it'd drop to fifteen, and the Finns would emerge in the morning all rugged up and complaining about the cold: 'It's fucking freezing!'
'Freezing? You guys are used to minus thirty! Woddafokk?' I'd say back. I'd say 'woddafokk' because that's how they say 'what the fuck?', kind of like the whole thing is one word. It's a translation of the Finnish mitä vittua. Mitä means 'what' and vittua literally means 'cunt' but in practice gets used like 'fuck'. They don't have the word 'the' in Finnish, or any of the indefinite articles like 'a' or 'an'. They just say the equivalent of 'what fuck?!', and everyone knows which fuck they're asking about, so I guess it works out.
It turned out the answer to my woddafokk? is that they don't like changes in temperature. Thirty is ok, negative thirty is ok, but any sudden changes of temperature turn them into big pussies. So much for that.
Ok: back in time. It was Saturday. We went to a tango hall. Here in rural Finland they have wooden halls on hilltops where they dance tango on Saturday nights in summer. Travelling musicians brought tango music to Finland early in the twentieth century and it caught on in a big way. Here all the tangos have a Baltic feel, all minor chords and melancholy themes, some from old folklore. The tango halls are where the country people used to court, and this one was full of guys with big moustaches and the women who loved them, ambling around the hall arm in arm. Their tango was way more casual than Argentine tango and looked to my eye more like a waltz. The whole affair looked like a country dance, because it was, and there were little kids dancing with each other and their parents. I went to buy a beer but they only had children's beer, which isn't very alcoholic.
Moustaches? Yeah, moustaches. Here you decide when you're a young teenager whether you want to go to university or learn a trade. The uni-bound go to high school and the trade-bound go to moustache school, where they grow moustaches and mullets and get given trucker caps and learn to paint rally cars. The houses on the back roads around here have old muscle cars and beetles painted in rally colours sitting in the front yards or rusting on blocks next to red barns.
We stayed at the dance for a bit and then went to the local pub, miles away over the pretty backroads full of red barns and muscle cars and fields and lakes and forests and fields and lakes. It was a tiny wooden room by the main road. Pekka backed the car into the car park in case we needed to get away quickly.
'Sometimes.. it gets violent here,' he said.
We went in. There were more guys who'd been to moustache school, drinking shots. They outnumbered the women by three to one, which I guess could explain at least some of the fights. The imbalance was there because Finland is subject to the same rural female brain drain as everywhere else. Women go to the city to get better education and better jobs, and the men stay behind to look after the land. They have the same 'Farmer Finds A Wife' reality TV shows as everywhere else, too.
On stage was an acoustic three-piece band, playing Irish songs they'd translated into Finnish. They had penny-whistles and everything. The songs were about drinking and fucking, and they went down a treat with the drunk lonely guys from moustache school. The band finished their set with something I instantly half-recognised, even though it was in Finnish. I knew I'd heard it a lot but I couldn't place it. I had a sensation I've written about before, where the feeling of knowing a song accompanies the inability to remember what it is. Eventually I worked it out. It was weirdly out of place here on the other side of the world and yet perfect, speaking equally to travellers far from home like me and the farmers who'd stayed home but whose teenage sweethearts had split for the big city. It went like this:
So it's-a lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night we'll hear the wild dingoes call
But there's-a nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer
- Slim Dusty, 'A Pub With No Beer'
Love to all xxx
