Trip to Finland: Setting the Scene
People have been asking me to get to work putting up some information and photos about my trip to Finland this past July 2008. I have been home over 2 months now and am just starting to get caught back up on things around the house and the farm!
First of all, I had a great time. The country is full of natural beauty, the people were very nice, and the sheep were incredible. I was there for 7 days and visited 13 farms -- 12 of Finnsheep and one of Åland Sheep. (It is pronounced OH-lond.) I also got to meet with Dr. Juha Kantanen PhD who is doing genome mapping in Finnsheep and Dr. Perti Hankonen, the veterinarian who saved the Kainu Grey Finnsheep from extinction. We traveled through about 3/4 of Finland by car -- a rented Volvo which I drove. (No, I wasn't scared. Everyone asks me that. It was just like driving in the U.S. for the most part.) My host, Helena, is not able to drive because of problems with her legs, but she was a great navigator. This was quite a blessing because the road signs are in just Finnish (of course) or in the west also in Swedish. (The Spanish classes I took in high school and college were of absolutely no help.
)
This site has a very good map of Finland and when you put your mouse over a province it tells you what it is. I did not have time to go to Lapland, North Karelia or South Karelia. For only being in Finland for 7 days, I saw a lot!
Before I went, people who have been to Finland before told me a whole bunch of stuff about what Finland was like. I didn't find some of these things to be true. So I will describe how I found it...
The landscape looks a lot like Northern Wisconsin or Northern Minnesota. There are tons of white birch trees and pine trees. In the southern part of the country there are also spruce.
The forest on the Korhonen farm. The trunks are pines and there are little
sprouts of trees trying to grow up between them. The forests are very nice
and you can walk through them easily. There are mostly small plants and ferns
growing between the trees. No scrubby, thorny stuff.
I flew into Stockholm then into Helsinki. I didn't spend any time in Helsinki other than at the airport. Once you get out of Helsinki, there are very few 4 lane divided highways. Most of the roads are two lanes and very winding. They are in very good condition and I didn't see any potholes, even out in the countryside. There is about 6" of gravel along side the pavement and no shoulder to the road to speak of. So if you want to pull over, you have to wait for a bus stop which has a little turn-out and happens every mile or so.
This is a Finnish mailbox. (The kind you have for an individual home.) Some are different colors
- but otherwise all look the same. I gathered that the color was based on the manufacture date
of the box, not preference of the owner . They are made of plastic. These mailboxes fascinated me.
Note how the road has no shoulder.
Because the roads wind around so much and the speed limit changes frequently based on your proximity to a town, crossroad, or other things known only to the official who decides these things, you really have no idea how far you have traveled based on how long you have driven. Plus it stays light quite late into the night, so you don't know what time it is either. The upside of this is I didn't become very tired while driving!
This is a photo that I took of a traditional Finnish fence all made of natural sticks. I saw several of these driving through the countryside and finally saw this one in a place where I was out of the car to take a photo. You can see the 2-lane road behind it which is like most of the roads that we drove on.
There are large fields used as pasture or hay fields. I also saw quite a few fields of rape seed which is used to make Canola oil.
The bright yellow stuff is rape seed plants. I took this photo from a boat on the sea in the archipelago.
These fields are divided up by forest and also lakes. Once you see how things look you can understand how things can be close together in a small country and yet feel very remote. (The area of Finland is the size of Wisconsin and Minnesota put together.) You can see how there can still be predation problems on the sheep/lambs from bears, wolves and lynx because there are tons of places for them to hide.
The people were very polite and had proper manners. (More like the way that we behave in a formal business setting in the U.S..) But I found everyone very friendly and willing to talk to me. They were all very proud of their beautiful sheep and wanted to tell me about them and also look at the photos that I had brought and ask me about my Finnsheep in the U.S.. I had heard Finns described as "not wanting to talk" and I didn't find that to be true. But then I am quite quiet around "regular" people and when you get me around dog/sheep/fiber people, I can talk for hours. So maybe it is something similar.
Most people are not fair blondes like people imagine Northern Europeans to be. (I saw a lot of those very blonde people in the Stockholm airport on my way there.) While there were a few blondes, most of the people I saw in Finland were very fair skinned but had brownish hair. One thing that was really nice was that I could go into public places and blend in, as long as I didn't talk. (When I packed, I tried to select generic clothing that didn't have printing on it.) This was great for me because my dream in going to other places is just to be a "fly on the wall" so you can see how people really live their lives.
Not everyone speaks English. (I was told by Americans who have visited Finland that they did. Maybe it just everyone who works at Nokia does.) The younger people all speak English and with very good accents because they get American TV shows in Finland now. I think I initially overwhelmed Helena's sons by talking way too fast. Their accents were so good that it seemed like talking to American teenagers (except that Helena's sons have better manners). Many of the middle aged people and older people studied English when they were in school. Some of them still speak English quite well. Others are "rusty" because they haven't used it for many years, though I suspect they could understand me quite well even if they weren't comfortable speaking. Just a few people spoke no English at all. In the western part of Finland, which is across the Baltic Sea from Sweden, most people speak Swedish as their first language and Finnish as their second language. Some also speak English as their third language. Fortunately Helena, my host, is a professional Finnish-English translator, so she was able to translate for me when needed.
There is no land to buy. It doesn't matter how much money you have to spend, it just doesn't exist. All of the farms that I visited had been in the owners' families for generations. Or possibly it had been part of a larger parcel divided amongst family member when the previous generation died. I saw many beautiful homes that have been in families for generations and people still live there. The homes, barns and many other buildings are all made of wood. (They have a lot of trees there and appear to manage their forests very well - harvesting and replanting the trees.)
The houses are traditionally dark red with white trim and most are that color. However, I stayed in a white house and a grey house. Manor houses are traditionally yellow -- but the one I visited was very pale pink.
It is not light out all night - like daytime. From people's descriptions of Finand as the "land of the midnight sun", I expected it to look like day all the time. That isn't true... at least in most of Finland. (I think that up in the far north of Finland in Lapland it might be that way.) In central and southern Finland, in July, it looks more or less like day until 11 PM. Then it starts to look like early dawn and continues to look that way until early dawn. This means that when you wake up, you have to look at a clock to figure out if you should be getting up yet or not. It might be 6 AM or it might be 3:30 AM. It looks pretty much the same.
It was rather hard for me to sleep while it was still rather light out. And when I did fall asleep and woke up in the morning, the presence of light told me that I should be waking up. While I didn't ever have jet lag, the difference in the light / dark outside was hard to transition to and by the time I was just starting to be able to sleep close to a normal number of hours, it was time to go home. If I am able to go back again, I think I will train myself to sleep wearing a sleep mask for about a month at home before I go.
The Finnish people themselves don't seem to need that many hours of sleep in the summertime. They all told me that it is so dark, cold and snowy all winter, that they try to pack in as many hours of activity as possible in the summer. I think this is aided by the many hours of daylight, which seems to make you feel like you are on some kind of sunshine "high". (Sort of the opposite of Seasonal Affective Disorder.) It is probably also aided by the enormous amounts of coffee that they drink.
They have their first morning coffee when they get up, then coffee with breakfast. There is often coffee with lunch and a mid-afternoon coffee break which they have with a snack. There is often coffee with dinner or after dinner and sometimes more coffee in the evening. And it is all "leaded". There is no decaf except for instant coffee. They drink their coffee out of small cups -- like the kind that come with your good china. So they are not the huge mugs that we get in the U.S.. So it is small amounts of caffeine throughout the day and I never saw people hyper or jittery.
And of course we were visiting people, so we would often have coffee and a snack a the people's house. My record was the day I had seven cups of coffee. I could have had ten -- I turned down some. Fortunately, caffeine doesn't bother me. I have been known to nearly fall asleep drinking coffee after dinner at home.
Finnish is a cool but difficult language -- assuming it is not your native language of course. It is not related to the languages of neighboring countries such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. It is related to Hungarian. One easy tip is to remember that all words (with very few exceptions) have the accent on the first syllable. So while we might say Hel-SINK-i in the US, it is really pronounced HEL-sink-i. When I first arrived, I couldn't even guess how a word might be pronounced. By the time I left, I could at least give sounding out a word a good try. I did learn maybe a dozen or so words in Finnish and feel like I got a feel for how the language sounds.
to be continued...
First of all, I had a great time. The country is full of natural beauty, the people were very nice, and the sheep were incredible. I was there for 7 days and visited 13 farms -- 12 of Finnsheep and one of Åland Sheep. (It is pronounced OH-lond.) I also got to meet with Dr. Juha Kantanen PhD who is doing genome mapping in Finnsheep and Dr. Perti Hankonen, the veterinarian who saved the Kainu Grey Finnsheep from extinction. We traveled through about 3/4 of Finland by car -- a rented Volvo which I drove. (No, I wasn't scared. Everyone asks me that. It was just like driving in the U.S. for the most part.) My host, Helena, is not able to drive because of problems with her legs, but she was a great navigator. This was quite a blessing because the road signs are in just Finnish (of course) or in the west also in Swedish. (The Spanish classes I took in high school and college were of absolutely no help.
)This site has a very good map of Finland and when you put your mouse over a province it tells you what it is. I did not have time to go to Lapland, North Karelia or South Karelia. For only being in Finland for 7 days, I saw a lot!
Before I went, people who have been to Finland before told me a whole bunch of stuff about what Finland was like. I didn't find some of these things to be true. So I will describe how I found it...
The landscape looks a lot like Northern Wisconsin or Northern Minnesota. There are tons of white birch trees and pine trees. In the southern part of the country there are also spruce.
The forest on the Korhonen farm. The trunks are pines and there are little
sprouts of trees trying to grow up between them. The forests are very nice
and you can walk through them easily. There are mostly small plants and ferns
growing between the trees. No scrubby, thorny stuff.
I flew into Stockholm then into Helsinki. I didn't spend any time in Helsinki other than at the airport. Once you get out of Helsinki, there are very few 4 lane divided highways. Most of the roads are two lanes and very winding. They are in very good condition and I didn't see any potholes, even out in the countryside. There is about 6" of gravel along side the pavement and no shoulder to the road to speak of. So if you want to pull over, you have to wait for a bus stop which has a little turn-out and happens every mile or so.
This is a Finnish mailbox. (The kind you have for an individual home.) Some are different colors
- but otherwise all look the same. I gathered that the color was based on the manufacture date
of the box, not preference of the owner . They are made of plastic. These mailboxes fascinated me.
Note how the road has no shoulder.
Because the roads wind around so much and the speed limit changes frequently based on your proximity to a town, crossroad, or other things known only to the official who decides these things, you really have no idea how far you have traveled based on how long you have driven. Plus it stays light quite late into the night, so you don't know what time it is either. The upside of this is I didn't become very tired while driving!
This is a photo that I took of a traditional Finnish fence all made of natural sticks. I saw several of these driving through the countryside and finally saw this one in a place where I was out of the car to take a photo. You can see the 2-lane road behind it which is like most of the roads that we drove on.
There are large fields used as pasture or hay fields. I also saw quite a few fields of rape seed which is used to make Canola oil.
The bright yellow stuff is rape seed plants. I took this photo from a boat on the sea in the archipelago.
These fields are divided up by forest and also lakes. Once you see how things look you can understand how things can be close together in a small country and yet feel very remote. (The area of Finland is the size of Wisconsin and Minnesota put together.) You can see how there can still be predation problems on the sheep/lambs from bears, wolves and lynx because there are tons of places for them to hide.
The people were very polite and had proper manners. (More like the way that we behave in a formal business setting in the U.S..) But I found everyone very friendly and willing to talk to me. They were all very proud of their beautiful sheep and wanted to tell me about them and also look at the photos that I had brought and ask me about my Finnsheep in the U.S.. I had heard Finns described as "not wanting to talk" and I didn't find that to be true. But then I am quite quiet around "regular" people and when you get me around dog/sheep/fiber people, I can talk for hours. So maybe it is something similar.
Most people are not fair blondes like people imagine Northern Europeans to be. (I saw a lot of those very blonde people in the Stockholm airport on my way there.) While there were a few blondes, most of the people I saw in Finland were very fair skinned but had brownish hair. One thing that was really nice was that I could go into public places and blend in, as long as I didn't talk. (When I packed, I tried to select generic clothing that didn't have printing on it.) This was great for me because my dream in going to other places is just to be a "fly on the wall" so you can see how people really live their lives.
Not everyone speaks English. (I was told by Americans who have visited Finland that they did. Maybe it just everyone who works at Nokia does.) The younger people all speak English and with very good accents because they get American TV shows in Finland now. I think I initially overwhelmed Helena's sons by talking way too fast. Their accents were so good that it seemed like talking to American teenagers (except that Helena's sons have better manners). Many of the middle aged people and older people studied English when they were in school. Some of them still speak English quite well. Others are "rusty" because they haven't used it for many years, though I suspect they could understand me quite well even if they weren't comfortable speaking. Just a few people spoke no English at all. In the western part of Finland, which is across the Baltic Sea from Sweden, most people speak Swedish as their first language and Finnish as their second language. Some also speak English as their third language. Fortunately Helena, my host, is a professional Finnish-English translator, so she was able to translate for me when needed.
There is no land to buy. It doesn't matter how much money you have to spend, it just doesn't exist. All of the farms that I visited had been in the owners' families for generations. Or possibly it had been part of a larger parcel divided amongst family member when the previous generation died. I saw many beautiful homes that have been in families for generations and people still live there. The homes, barns and many other buildings are all made of wood. (They have a lot of trees there and appear to manage their forests very well - harvesting and replanting the trees.)
The houses are traditionally dark red with white trim and most are that color. However, I stayed in a white house and a grey house. Manor houses are traditionally yellow -- but the one I visited was very pale pink.
It is not light out all night - like daytime. From people's descriptions of Finand as the "land of the midnight sun", I expected it to look like day all the time. That isn't true... at least in most of Finland. (I think that up in the far north of Finland in Lapland it might be that way.) In central and southern Finland, in July, it looks more or less like day until 11 PM. Then it starts to look like early dawn and continues to look that way until early dawn. This means that when you wake up, you have to look at a clock to figure out if you should be getting up yet or not. It might be 6 AM or it might be 3:30 AM. It looks pretty much the same.
It was rather hard for me to sleep while it was still rather light out. And when I did fall asleep and woke up in the morning, the presence of light told me that I should be waking up. While I didn't ever have jet lag, the difference in the light / dark outside was hard to transition to and by the time I was just starting to be able to sleep close to a normal number of hours, it was time to go home. If I am able to go back again, I think I will train myself to sleep wearing a sleep mask for about a month at home before I go.
The Finnish people themselves don't seem to need that many hours of sleep in the summertime. They all told me that it is so dark, cold and snowy all winter, that they try to pack in as many hours of activity as possible in the summer. I think this is aided by the many hours of daylight, which seems to make you feel like you are on some kind of sunshine "high". (Sort of the opposite of Seasonal Affective Disorder.) It is probably also aided by the enormous amounts of coffee that they drink.
They have their first morning coffee when they get up, then coffee with breakfast. There is often coffee with lunch and a mid-afternoon coffee break which they have with a snack. There is often coffee with dinner or after dinner and sometimes more coffee in the evening. And it is all "leaded". There is no decaf except for instant coffee. They drink their coffee out of small cups -- like the kind that come with your good china. So they are not the huge mugs that we get in the U.S.. So it is small amounts of caffeine throughout the day and I never saw people hyper or jittery.
And of course we were visiting people, so we would often have coffee and a snack a the people's house. My record was the day I had seven cups of coffee. I could have had ten -- I turned down some. Fortunately, caffeine doesn't bother me. I have been known to nearly fall asleep drinking coffee after dinner at home.
Finnish is a cool but difficult language -- assuming it is not your native language of course. It is not related to the languages of neighboring countries such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. It is related to Hungarian. One easy tip is to remember that all words (with very few exceptions) have the accent on the first syllable. So while we might say Hel-SINK-i in the US, it is really pronounced HEL-sink-i. When I first arrived, I couldn't even guess how a word might be pronounced. By the time I left, I could at least give sounding out a word a good try. I did learn maybe a dozen or so words in Finnish and feel like I got a feel for how the language sounds.
to be continued...
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