Saariselkä, Lapland!!

While Lapland occupies almost the entire northern half of Finland, it only has about 20,000 inhabitants (the entire population of Finland is 5 million), some of which are the native Sami people. It's dark most of the time in the winter, and it gets pretty cold. However, the weather was beautiful when I was there, with a very pleasant (and unseasonably warm) temperature of -7°C.
While many people visit Lapland in the winter for fashionable ski vacations, I mostly hiked around, took pictures, did some snow shoeing. Oh yeah, and I had my first conversation entirely in (broken) Finnish. I met a woman in the sauna who didn't speak English and was willing to have a conversation with very few verbs or prepositions.
The sun rose at approximately 11:30 and set at about 2:00 pm. These pictures were taken at about 1:00 pm, at the brightest time I could find! I may have seen the Northern Lights on my last day there.
While Lapland is a pretty common winter vacation spot, my Lonely Planet guide completely ignores the possibility of traveling to the north during winter and sticks with guiding travelers through the summer solstice and backpacking trips. I guess the authors find it hard to believe that some of us go there in spite of the darkness.


I went on a snow shoeing trip with some people from the Netherlands who flew up to Lapland for vacation.
This is what I looked like most of the time in Lapland with my warmest coat. I haven't had to wear it in Tampere yet, since we're also having unseasonably warm weather in Tampere. My new look is modeled after my Skype icon. Actually, this is what everyone looks like, you can't really tell us apart, once we're all bundled up!

Sotkamo!

My adviser, Tuula, grew up in Sotkamo. She invited me to join her family for their New Years festivities. We drove for about six hours through Kuopio, on some pretty rural roads. Matti, Tuula's husband, kept complaining about how lame it is to drive on roads with so little snow. "We dump so much salt all over the roads that it makes almost summer-like driving conditions. We can't have summer roads in the winter!" he complained. I personally was very glad that he was driving and not me.

There was one point when we came up on a car that was driving very very slowly down a rural road. "Any idea what's wrong here?" Matti asked.

"No snow tires?" I guessed based on previous experience in Tampere a few months before.

"Oh no," Matti and Tuula pointed out that it's against the law not to have snow tires on your car. "Everyone must have snow tires." Right. I sometimes forget how diligently people in Finland follow the rules, compared to Americans.

"This driver is probably drunk," Tuula told me, matter-of-factly. "We have to be careful way out here in the middle of nowhere." Hmmm, I always thought that drunk driving illegal.

It was quite interesting to hear everyone's opinions about their hometown and its history, especially in relationship to the fast changing EU policies. Her family used to have a small farm (on the order of five cows). With the new EU subsidies, small farms became very expensive and could no longer afford to exist, leaving only a much smaller number of larger farms in Finland. Of course large farms in Finland are much much smaller than large farms in the States. None the less, it's a bummer that Tuula's family had to stop farming.
The EU subsidies have allowed the community to build a community center, where Tuula and I enjoyed the brisk night air.

Tuula's mother still lives in the house that Tuula grew up in. Not only did Tuula grow up in it, but several generations before her also grew up in this very traditional Finnish house. There's a wood burning stove in the center of the house, as well as an old wood burning cooking stove, still used by her mother.

Since they live in such a rural town, they said that they have to rely on their neighbors for help (cleaning up after huge storms, hoisting tractors out of rivers, etc.). Matti said that he's glad that Tuula's father and grandfather were so helpful in the community because it's made the neighbors more willing the help him when he needs it. Can you believe it? Intergenerational neighborlyness?! The dads did most of the fireworks. As you can see, we were not hindered by limits on our explosive supply (by the truckload of fireworks depicted below). You're allowed to set off fireworks for one twelve hour period in Finland (6pm New Years Eve to 6 am on New Years Day). People really go crazy. Though, if you look closely you can see the kids were wearing safety goggles. Safety first!Tuula taught me how to make snow bonfires. OK OK, this little snow lantern is only 20 cm high, but with some trick photography looks much more impressive.
This is a moose hunting tower. A group of folks track and find the moose, somehow convince it to come back to this tower, and then get out of the way while the person in the tower shoots it. Hunting seems to involve much less shooting that it does in the US.
Behind the house the family stores all of this weird stuff in the "museum." There are old typewriters, skis, all kinds of good stuff. No electricity though, the open window provides the light!
Thanks Tuula and Matti!!

Germany

I spent most of my time in Germany in Munich at Dita's house. In the summertime, Munich is known for not only its beer, but its beer gardens. You can bring your own food and drink really good beer outside in these gardens. They aren't very popular in the winter. On Christmas Eve we visited the cemetery, like you do in Germany on Christmas Eve. It was hopping with lots of people lighting candles and decorating the graves. "Is it making you sad to be at the cemetery?" Dita asked me. She's been to the States a lot and has hosted many Americans so she knows that many Americans don't like to talk about death and related topics. Ever since Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, I've become pretty interested in the cemetery as a cultural treasure chest. As Dita lit candles on her mother's grave site, I asked if it would be alright if I took a picture with her in it. "With me on it," she said as she looked up. "Not in it," she emphasized with a laugh, providing me with some cemetery humor.

I found it soothing that it was so easy it was to talk about our relatives who have passed away, as well as the logistics of having a cemetery in the middle of such a large city. I had a lot of questions, once I realized it was OK to talk about it. Dita told that bodies are usually buried for 30 or 40 years and then removed. "After all, we don't need to have a grave site to think about our loved ones. Thirty years is enough," she pointed out. At first it seemed foreignly practical, but then I realized that we probably do the exactly the same thing in the States. We just don't talk about graves, cemeteries, or dead people, so I have no idea how long bodies stay in a grave in the States.
The entire time in Munich was full of good food. Dita is amazing in the kitchen. "Do you feel like having a mocha machiato?" she would ask. And then a few minutes later she would come out of the kitchen with two mocha machiatos. Every meal was artfully crafted. I haven't eaten so well in my whole life. I think I gained 5 kilos! This was Christmas dinner in Munich. We had duck!
On my way back to Tampere, I stayed overnight in Frankfurt and enjoyed a few museums and lots of people watching. I heard a loud, American accent say "this is such a cute square, it looks like it was modeled after Disneyland!" Oh dear.

Austria

A trip to Central Europe was just the thing. I got a good dose of culture, visited museums, and though I don't speak German, I appreciated its similarities to the English language. Some of the words are very similar. In addition, the rhythm and tones were much more like English than Finnish. If I started to zone out, I could trick myself into thinking that I understood. In fact, Dita took me to a philharmonic concert in Munich, with a very entertaining conductor that liked to tell jokes between pieces. I found myself laughing in the right places without even knowing what I was laughing at. I can't do that with Finnish. This is a picture of the Christmas Market near the philharmonic concert in Munich.
In Austria I visited Vienna and Salzburg, where my father studied abroad when he was 19 years old.
I met up with Clare, another traveller from New Zealand, to crash the opera in Vienna one night. There are standing-room-only tickets that are affordable for us budget folks. Standing-room-only was an experience in itself. First you go into the "standing room" and mark your spot. Then you're ushered out of the standing room until 15 minutes before the show. Some places were accidently double marked, leading to even more people cramming themselves into a designated "standing zone," than it was intended for. In some ways it reminded me of the mini-buses in Africa. A few people got sick before intermission and had to leave. The man behind me kept encroaching onto the very place on the floor upon which my feet were placed. In spite of the challenges, Clare and I were determined to see the whole show (Romeo and Juliet) performed in French. It's a beautiful opera house. When I started feeling faint, I would picture Beethoven and Strauss conducting their orchestras hundred of years ago.

Bikes are a big deal all over Europe, Austria is no exception. This photo was taken from the area of Vienna that is full of museums. I went to an interactive music museum that reminded me of high school physics class, but also had some nice exhibits on famous composers who were born or worked in Vienna. I saw a Picasso exhibit, along with Andy Warhol's polaroid reproductions of famous people, at the Albertina.

As a general rule, I spend a lot of my tourist time (and free time in general), walking around and soaking up the culture. These rent-a-bikes worked sort of like the lockers at the airport. They're a good idea and they have excellent baskets on their handlebars.

David recommended this place that serves the best schnitzel he's ever had. It was the best schnitzel I ever had too!