Helsinki 2011

The Lutheran Cathedral and the Helsinki Harbor

My time in Helsinki has come to a close. I write this on the morning of the day that I fly out.

It's been a good trip all around. The work with Heikki Haario and Antti Solonen was more productive than I could have hoped. The trip to the Finnish lakes with Heikki, Antti, and Heikki's son Ilmari was a lot of fun. Staying in the city center and visiting old haunts and old friends (particularly the Haarios and Kaskinens) was good. Three weeks was too long though.

Coming back to Helsinki after having lived here for a year in 2006-07, many small memories come back: the food, our old haunts, the feel of the place, the people, bits of the language. Very little seems to have changed since we left four years ago, and yet I think back to how small the kids were then, and it seems that much has changed in my life.

Helsinki is a great and beautiful city. This year it was ranked, by some US magazine, as the best city in the world to live in. I can believe it. Nonetheless, here for work, alone, and having had lived here for a year, the newness wears off quick, leaving me feeling lonely and far from home. I can't wait to get back to the family.

It's mid-summer weekend right now, one of the biggest holiday weekends of the year in Finland, and the city is shut down. Still, the main part of the city center is packed with tourists, and as I've said in previous journals, tourists are of a different mind-set than people living normal life. A lot of money is flying out of their pockets, so they start doing funny things. For example, twice while I've been here, eating at a self-serve salad or soup bar downtown, I've seen a traveler take such an enormous quantity of food -- and these aren't fat people, mind you -- that they will certainly be sick after eating it all.  But they're going to get more than their money's worth with something, by golly, even if they have to make themselves sick doing it. It seems a kind of temporary insanity sets in.

Anyway, I can finally go home and settle into Missoula again. It's been weird being here while the family is in New Zealand and then Missoula. I feel rootless.

Ilmari and Heikki on Saimaa Lake