Finland
After a few weeks of two or three day stops interspersed with two or three days of train travel I was pretty tired of movement by the time we got to Finland.
At the Finlandski station we got in, with a bit of time to spare, and went to board the train, only to find at the last moment that international departures necessitated going back out on to the street and in through another entrance where our passports and tickets were examined, so we boarded our train panting and puffing!
The train was a bright new Finnish train, all moulded plastic and modernity, with automatic doors, comfortable seating, a bistro car even free wi-fi. After Russian trains it seemed very flash but, even also somehow cheap – plastic never lasts!
The journey was pleasant – even the border checks, done on the train as it travelled, were friendly and hassle-free – passing through gently rolling country, mostly forested, some open, with lots of lakes. Once in Finland the towns were clearly more modern, the farms neater, but the change wasn't dramatic – the change in cultures and ways of life is though. Finland is a very prosperous, stable western democracy with a highly developed economy and progressive social, transport and environmental policies (to name a few areas), where everyone speaks incredibly good English and are, in an understated way, incredibly helpful; Russia is a wonderful, fascinating place, but … well, read the last few posts!
We arrived in Helsinki just after 11pm and headed to the Air BnB place not far from the centre we'd booked and settled gratefully into the comfortable bed. I didn't see a great deal of Helsinki over the next few days, catching up on writing and generally taking a break from the obligations of seeing and understanding my environment. I'd been to Helsinki once before, in 1992 when leaving Russia for Sweden via Tallinn and ferries to Helsinki then, after a cold, wet autumn night sleeping in various spots around town, another ferry to Stockholm. I remember then how incredibly clean and rich everything and everyone looked; this time the difference wasn't nearly so big, but it definitely is the west!
Helsinki itself is a pleasant, calm city on the water. As alluded, my input circuits were overloaded, so I can't pretend to have really immersed myself in its pleasures, though we did have a few wanders, got a public ferry across the harbour and back and even went to an Aussie bar, where you can buy bad Australian beer at exorbitant prices. We also met up with a Finnish couple through couchsurfing and spent a half day with them bushwalking – it was an absolute balm to be out of cities, even for half a day, and walking in the bush!
Out and about in the bush near Helsinki - Nuuksio National Park
The balm continued when our BnB host, who'd kindly transformed himself into a couchsurfing host, invited us to come up with him to the family holiday house for a few days, so we extended our stay in Helsinki to a third night then headed up to his family's place. Many Finns have a summer cottage, where they spend lots of time during the summer months and so it was off to Mårten's family's place for a few days of even more relaxation. By relaxation I mean a small, comfortable, cute house on a rise in a forest, 30 yards from a pristine lake. And a wood-fired sauna in the basement.
Summer cottage
We spent another 2 ½ days there, with a great many hours in the sauna – interspersed with dips in the cold lake! It was a day or two off the summer solstice, so it barely got dark (Helsinki is about the same latitude as St. Petersburg) at all, meaning it was easy to stay up through the night and into dawn, which meant four in the morning on the first night!
I hadn't realised how central saunas are to Finnish life; most residential buildings have a communal sauna that is shared amongst tenants and new apartments even have saunas in the apartment itself! And of course, all the summer houses have saunas, so there's a lot of time spent in the wonderful heat of a sauna. We were told by a number of people that saunas are where you have your most meaningful conversations and that all the big political and business decisions are made in them!
It's hard to describe what's so pleasant about being cooked alive, then jumping into a freezing (well, 16 degree) lake. After the first few rounds the heat penetrates to the centre of your body, so, strangely, the sauna doesn't feel as hot; but, also, the cold water is more bearable and you can sit out in the cold night air after a dip for quarter of an hour in weather that was chilly fully clothed earlier in the evening. Your body reaches some kind of equilibrium and so does your mind, everything becoming relaxed and equanimous.
It was precisely and exactly what I needed!
On the third day there and after six very relaxing days in Finland, Mårten dropped us off at the train in Karjaa, the nearest station to his cottage paradise, and we travelled to Turku, the historic former capital of Finland and hopped on an overnight ferry to Sweden. In typical northern European manner, the train station was right next to the port, so we hopped off another lovely Finnish train and onto the ferry a few hundred metres away.