/travel/cycling/To Kajaani and Back...almost.
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This weekend I took Friday off and went for a little bike ride. The first day of the bikeride was 154km, and took myself and my coworker Janne to his brothers' godparents' summer cottage. The second day was about 107km and brought us to his parents' summer cottage. Today was supposed to be nearly 150km again. This morning it started to rain. Hard. We waited for it to abate, and then got going. It was some of the coldest, wettest, unpleasant cycling I've done. We made it the 50km to Vaala where we could catch a train or bus. But they were both going to be quite a while, so we decided to continue another 33km or so to Utajýÿrvi. We got there about a minute before the train, and caught a warm trainride home.
The first day was sunny, and I have scientific documented evidence that you can get a sunburn in Finland. And because of the funny thing that the sun does here, it seemed to burn heretofore untanned places. Today in the cold my burn turned slightly purple, then I got the orange spots that I get when I'm cold, then I turned darker purple, then I put on my jacket. (Or rather, the jacket that I borrowed from Janne's parents.)
My knees were quite worse for the wear. And for the first time, I finally understand people complaining about a sore buttocks. I also had sore hips, and a bit of cardiovascular trouble on the first day, when Janne was fresh -- he's in much better shape than I am.
The two couples with whom we stayed were both lovely. I made the crystalization that, to paint with a broad brush, Finns are not "friendly" (perhaps "outgoing" is a better word; the point is that they don't randomly start talking to people much), but they are certainly very nice. I've been aware of some kind of dichotomy there for a while, but I finally put my finger on it nicely. Both cottages were lovely, and I really enjoyed the sauna. It definitely helped my joints, though the sunburn stung a bit.
A word on saunas: Finnish saunas are hot and fairly dry. They're pronounced "sow'-nah." They're almost exclusively nude, and towels aren't very welcome -- there are little pads to sit on so the wood doesn't burn you. Blowing your skin to cool it off doesn't. (In fact, it was rather painful. My best guess is that between your mouth and your skin the extra moisture in your breath picks up more heat than the "dry" air and carries it to your skin.) They're generally wood-heated, and tougher people put more water on the rocks, which carries more heat in the air. They have sauna competitions here, too. And they're a major part of the culture; there was no question about whether we would want to sauna.
I learned lots of Finnish this weekend, too. If had done something like that every week or two for 9 months, I think I'd be quite capable in Finnish. I was asking Janne about the various place-name suffixes (-lýÿhti, -joki, -jýÿrvi, -niemi, -harju, -salo, which are bay, river, lake, peninsula (or smaller), ridge, and large forest respectively.) I also finally nailed the Finnish alphabet pronunciations (aah, beh, say, day, eh, aff, gay, hoe, etc.).
Finally, tucked away at the bottom so nobody notices: I'm officially flexitarian. I guess. I ate fish, anyway, and it was very tasty. Salmon and shrimp the first night in a yummy pie (pirakka), and pike and pickerel and something else caught on the lake behind the cottage on the second night. All of the definitions on the web for "flexitarian" are way more "flex" than I am, though, since I don't really anticipate eating meat again for a while.
Pictures and a map eventually, I hope.
/travel/finland/Sudden Craving
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My kingdom for a Subway"! Sandwich!*
*Offer not valid on days ending in y.
/travel/finland/Profound Thoughts from a Weekend in Kuusamo
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Last weekend I went to Kuusamo. Coincidentally, so did Paul, but we didn't bump into each other.
I left in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The town was quiet, and I got a few shots of empty Oulu. On the bus out of town, there was a little garden of tulips, nearing full bloom. The busride was uneventful and sleepy.
Kuusamo is a reasonably large town. Nearby is Ruka, a major skiing center in Finland. We were outside a town outside of Ruka, in a rented cabin. The cabin itself was simple, and its surroundings were fairly bland.
The highlight was two light hikes through the Finnish forest. It doesn't take too long to get deep enough in the hills ("mountains", they say) that you can't hear anything that doesn't belong. I wish I had taken more time to just stop and listen, since somtimes the sounds of cities drives me to distraction. We all stopped on one of the little walkways at one point. You could hear exactly three things, and nothing more -- running water from nearby rapids, a few birds chirping, and our own little rustles as we stood in silence.
The Finnish forest is an interesting place. Because of the climate and lighting, the trees are generally narrow and spindly. The evergreens have long bare trunks and fairly sparse needles, and the leaves on the deciduous trees are small, but plentiful.
The trails we were on took us over bogs, up and down hills, and through flat fields with trees. We saw only a few signs of fauna, though these included the largest ant hill I've ever seen. The trail was often rocky, but the forest around us wasn't. It's obvious when you say it that way that the forest is rocky too, but it's not obvious when you're walking along. The rocks are lying under the forest, almost never visible.
The bogs are fascinating. They seemed stagnant, but if you looked carefully you could see clearly that the water was in fact flowing through them, reasonably quickly. There are only a few inches of water above the soft, moss-like growth that runs deep beneath them. All of the lakes and ponds tucked in the mountains were clear and lifeless. The usual sets of circles rippling outward from fish or frogs were absent, as were the little trails from an insect's wake. We saw one water bug the whole time. There's little algae and few lily pads. Things seem to decay slowly -- some ponds had an unnatural number of trees at the bottom.
When I was walking, I was trying to figure out how I would explain the beauty of those forests. They aren't more untouched than National Parks in Canada, and by most characteristics they aren't the beautiful. But they are. And then I figured it out: The whole forest puts the cycles of death and life and the perpetuity of those cycles directly, unavoidably in front of you. The forest felt ageless, markless, unsusceptible to forest fires or other traumas; Finland is relatively immune to severe weather and natural disasters like earthquakes. One thousand years ago, and one thousand years from now, these forest are the same. You could see trees in every state of life, from pinecone to sappling to fullgrown to fresh-fallen to covered in moss to being just a long narrow imperfection in the ground, completely buried in other life, more often than not with sapplings growing on it. Trees that had fallen still clinging to the earth around their shallow root structure seemed to make good starting points for ant-hills. Other than the trodden path that we walked along, everything was soft and moist, layer upon layer of life, death, death, and decay.
The forest was constantly in all states of life and death. It was impossible to separate the obvious cycle in any reasonable way if you looked at the forest instead of the trees.
/travel/finland/Ethics Essays Posted
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I wrote four essays for my practical ethics course.
Here they are:
1. SingerAndVeganism - "Extending Peter Singer's arguments towards Veganism, or letting it all fall down"
2. SingerAndTheEnvironment - "An emotional argument"
3. SingerAndAbortion - "An emotional argument[sic]" (Errr..that's a mistake -- I forgot to change the subtitle.)
4. PeterSingerOnWorldPoverty
Enjoy.
