Photos & Words

I am reminded how east we are by a sign I see while jogging around the two of Lappeenranta where we are visiting two friends and their daughter: 208 km to Pietari (St. Petersburg).

This is the last stop before returning to our cottage. We stay at a very nice and cosy light blue wooden house. Small (but not too small) garden. An apple tree. which is dropping its fruits on the green and wet grass.  A storage and the sauna are in a separate building also painted in light blue.

Our friends have worked a lot to make this place what it is today. But things change and they never stay the same. They have decided to move. The house is at the border of a nice area with many wooden houses similar to theirs. The problem is that being at the border, next to it runs a road which leads the traffic from Lappeenranta out of the town. On the other side of the road there are the tracks of the nearby railway station. The traffic both of cars and of passengers and freight trains (especially to Russia) has increased in recent years. So it is a bit noisy here.

We talk about it and the first thing that comes to my mind is the UN apartments on Ki Ma in Ha Noi. This was the place we first moved in before finding the Swedish Camp.  We lived at the fifth floor of this Bulgarian donated ugly block house. High enough to hear the uninterrupted of traffic from Ki Ma on of the main arteries of Ha Noi. From five in the morning to one at night an uninterrupted flow of motorbikes, cars and few underused red and yellow busses. As here in Lappeenranta it had peak hours: at eight in the morning the rush hour into town where you had to avoid motorbikes occupying the pedestrian paths on the side of the road. Traffic completely stacked in four directions at the junction towards the nearby lake. The same again at five in the afternoon.

Here in Lappeenranta is another story. Nothing comparable. Kind of empty street at all times. However while we talk about all this and we joke about Ha Noi I am reminded that all is relative. Probably if we would live here even after a time in Ha Noi we would slowly get used to the new noises, the new pace, the sound of the house and the sounds around it. After some time we would notice the cars, the freight train transporting iron at eleven in the night. Initially finding it reassuringly quiet and with time discovering that all these noises are too much and deciding to move. Who knows. All is relative, after all.

We are back in our cottage. Nice to be back for the last stage of our Finnish holiday. In a week or so I will be in Italy. Then London. So we are back in our Finnish home for a week.

I wrote a lot about me in these blogs. I also thought a lot about me during this trip. Had time with girls of course. I have been a good (and very generous in terms of money :-)) customer of Olga’s restaurant and shopping games. Red book for the girls. Did not think too much about work.

I thought about the last couple of summers.  2007: PhD defence, karonka, and 40th birthday on the same day, visit by my friends Paolo and Maurizio at the cottage, visit of my mother, only few days for us here in Hyväsalmi. 2008: short break before starting work in London with the nervous excitement of a new start and thoughts on our location or relocation to UK, ODI, challenge, work to do at the cottage. This years things are more settled. The mökki has now a well, the wooden roof has tar, the chimney has a hat, there is a nice wooden terrace and a nice laituri on the water.

We live in the Philippines and will be there for some time. I like my work. Katja likes hers. The girls seems happy with living there and the school and are also happy to be here. I will go back to Cremona after three and half years and look forward to see my nephew Antonio.

So time to enjoy these late summer or early autumn sunsets. Listen to the West wind. Look up in the trees for the tik-tik-tick noise of a woodpecker preparing his nest for the winter. Enjoy the cold air of the dark night on the skin after sauna and look at the stars which here are incredibly bright as there are no towns nearby.

Time to fill the lungs with clean air. Hold the breath for few seconds. Then let it go and be in the moment. The past and the future at a distance, as Tove Jansson once wrote.

We are back in Tampere. Is this my alma mater? Where I got my PhD. Or does the alma mater remains the university where one get his or her first degree? (in my case Parma). Do not know and in truth do not care much. It is just nice to be back here.

It is 21:56. Outside is almost dark. A wind coming from the west makes the scattered clouds fly fast over the town. A bright full moon appears and disappears behind the moving clouds. We can watch this from the corner room at the seventh floor of the Grand Hotel Tammer.Below us the canal and dam that controls the water flow between the two huge lakes which are at different levels and define the shape of two sides of the town. This difference in the height above the sea level of these tow lake has made the fortune of the town and as often in these cases a Scots was first to spot the opportunity. Finlayson built on the little straits that separates these two lakes a factory and became known for the quality of its cotton fabric. This may have happened 100 years ago and the fabric is still sold today. Today as yesterday the water flow provides power.

Olga and Venla are enjoying the town. The Pikku Kakkonen play ground right in front of the hotel of course help and they have spent at least three hours today on the red wooden train, playing with sand, taking care of their dolls. Olga has memory of our time here when she was two and a half and that is quite amazing. The memories are coming back to her as we walked this evening across the main road to go for sauna to the Hotel Ilves where we stayed for my thesis defence. It is nice to see that she has some connection to Tampere. For Venla, although she was borne here, all is new.

Both are doing very well in this short trip in Southern Finland. They stand the hours in the car (though they require good supply of pulla or karialian pirakka and fruit juice).

Tonight I was watching at the town from our window.Quiet end-of-summer-beginning-of-autumn. Cold wind. Few cars and people in the streets as is is Wednesday. Streets lights providing lights for empty streets. Apartments with lights on. Life flowing in those apartments. the fire brigade station new the hotel with its strange tower which is a copy of a mosque minaret in funki style (as they called here in Finland). It reminds of some Klimt painting frames or the Glaswegian McIntosh. The raw of widows of the firemen on duity. Some light on. few off. Fire men at home. Quiet feeling while the clouds reflects the bright light of the full moon and fly fats over this town.

We are now travelling again East. We left Tampere this morning and searched for some time for National Road 6. On the exit from town we passed the hospital where Venla was born.

We travel and travel. The girls are getting tired of the car and of changing place every day or second day. But they are good and continue with their strange way of communicating in Finnish with the mother and English among themselves. We tell Olga to use Finnish with her sister but she replies that Venla does not know enough Finnish. And she is right. As for me. Italian has been abandoned many kilometres ago, in the Philippines. But I do not give up: speak to them in Italian and get replies in English. This is how our little family works.

This part of Finland is quite dull. Flat with just few very very low hills. Fields. Patches of forest and, what is quite surprising, no lakes. It rains. The national road is very quiet for Vietnamese standards, but with some traffic for Finnish ones. These are trucks travelling to Russia. Transporting goods or maybe returning empty after a delivery in Finland. There are also Russian cars. Mainly big ones such as Volvo four wheel drives.

When I was young I wanted to become a lorry driver and drive across Europe. I remember looking with admiration at the German drivers who used to bring their huge trucks full of cattle in our farm house or Catello, the Italian driver who worked a lot for our family with his huge Iveco travelling one week to day to Sicily and the next to Hamburg. As it turns out I have a job a like which is making me travel much further than the European borders.

We pass Lahti. Then Reach Kouvola and stop for a coffee which turns out to be a full typical Finnish meal with smoked salmon. I walk in the garden with Olga and she discover a mini wooden house for kids. It was used by the two cousins of Katja who live here.  A dream toy for Olga. She ventures in and soon she opens the door and with her head out asks me: papa’ do you want to play restaurant game?

I sit on a mini-chair and make my order: coffee with mil and pulla. Olga goes back in and I hear her starting to put a imaginary cattle on the stove.  I look at the garden and notice a bush with kind of Asian plants with rain drops resting on the long still green leaves. I think about the road we travel and those lorries.  Maybe this trip is turning also into a trip into memories, at least for me.

We are in Jyväskylä, the tow where Katja and me lived about 10 years ago. Before Olga came to us. We visit Katja grand mother and are here for two nights. I take the chance and go for a long run as I want to visit the area  where we used to live and Laajavuori and its intricate web of walking paths in the summer and cross country ski tracks in the winter.

I am never sure about visit a place where I used to live earlier on. Not only one realizes how fast time go, but at the time it is a bit like looking at images in a photo album where I am not really the same person I am now.

I leave from mummi home and follow the lake. Past behind the high rise Alvar Aalto designed about 50 years ago. The memory become clearer as I recognize the paths I used to run. Here is the the ice hockey ring where I played foot ball one summer and broke my right knee cruxiat ligament after an insane attempt to get an unreachable ball. I was operated in this town by Prof. Kiviranta who did a very good job. I am running smoothly and my right knee is strong.

I am on the other side of the lake . Climb up to Vioinmankatu where we used to live. Give just a glance to the block house and turn right to reach Laajavuori which is about 3 km away. We lived in small flat which seem so large in my memories. Our first home. My first real home after some years of student accommodations and temporary housing working in the Basque country and Cambodia.

I reach the hill of Laajavuori and enter the forest. Find it easy to follow the paths I used to run. I looked at the watch. I am already running 40 minutes. I know now it will be  along run to get back to mummo house.

I reach the top of the hill which in the winter is a down hill ski centre. I look west. Only forest. Hill after hill after hill. They look like green waves with touches of yellow on the top of the birch trees. I look east. The town Its white houses. The university campus divided by the lake.  A modern bridge linking the humanities on one side to the physics and the nuclear accelerator on the other side.

It is windy up here. Better to start running back climbing slowly down from this hill.

After 14 hours by plane and 5 hours by train for me to reach the red wooden house on the top of the Niinikumpu hill is always a special moment. We always arrive by car from the railway station which is about 10 km away. We enter the garden through two very old and high pine trees and see the house front door of the house. It more than 10 years now that I come here but it is always a special moment especially after such a long trip as from Asia. The only similar moment I can recall now is the first sip of a cold beer after a a very long track in the woods. Camping and wearing the same clothes for days. Washing in ice cold streams. reaching the destination and open a cold beer. The fist sip the one with the best taste. The same for me is to reach Niinikumpu. Then and there I leave work and all the rest behind me. Some pictures of Niinikumpu can be found below in the Finland Out of Focus.

Mi sento un po’ come uno dei personaggi di un racconto di Haruki Murakami. Sono le 5:44 del mattino. Mi giro e rigiro da un po’ nel letto senza successo: il sonno se ne e’ andato. Il fuso orario che non si e’ ancora adeguato all’Europa. I pensieri. Non so.  Mi alzo. Metto l’orologio al polso. Cammino sulla punta dei piedi per evitare che il pavimento di legno scricchioli troppo e svegli Venla.

Scendo in cucina. Guardo dalla finestra. Albeggia. La campagna e’  di un verde scuro ed intenso. Le betulle hanno i primi spruzzi gialli di autunno sui rami piu’ alti.

Apro la porta sul retro. Scendo in giardino. Tre, quattro scalini non di piu’. Il fiato si condensa in leggere nuvole di vapore e non riesco a ricordare l’ultima volta che mi e’ successo. Sono a piedi nudi sul legno della nuova terrazza che Jorma ha fatto costruire sull’erba. I pantaloni di cotone blu del pigiama fatti fare ad Hoi An. La T-shirt bianca comprata a Londra. Il legno e’ leggermente bagnato dalla rugiada. Respiro profondamente. Il cielo e’ di un bel blu freddo. Non una nuvola. Il sole ancora nascosto dietro ai pini verso est. Respiro di nuovo profondamente. Also le braccia. Curvo la schiena e inizio la mia serie di esercizi quotidiani: il Saluto al Sole (anche se mi accorgo su guardare verso sud, verso il lago che laggiu’ lontano costeggia questa piccola collina di Niinikumpu).

Rientro. Accendo la macchina del caffe’. Nel salotto si sente solo il ticchettio del vecchio orologio a pendolo. Katja e le bimbe dormono  ancora. Jorma e Mirja anche. Taglio il pane nero (come lo chiamavo da bambino). Prendo la marmella e il burro dal frigorifero. Il brontolio della macchina del caffé mi avvisa che é pronto. Sento il profumo salire dalla tazza. Accendo il laptop e, come sempre mi accade, penso se scrivere queste parole in inglese o in italiano. Oggi decido per l’italiano.