Finnish food

There are few foods here that I haven't liked. Finns drink their coffee VERY strong. (Coffee-kahvi)Just like in the Midwest, if you visit a home you'll most likely be invited to sit and drink coffee and have some pulla. Pulla is like a cinnamon bun or sweet bread. I've had a LOT of pulla and coffee while I've been here. White bread is very rare. Usually they eat rye bread or hard flat whole grain bread. It's usually buttered and eaten with cheese and ham. A difference here is that people eat bread with cheese and ham and cucumbers for breakfast!! Also, flavoured yoghurt comes in milk (milk - maito) cartons and is runnier so you can pour it on your mysli (granola) I've tried cloudberries. They look like giant orange raspberries. Also lingonberries which we ate on the reindeer meat. Lingonberries taste like cranberries, but they grow in the forest, not in bogs. The only thing I'm not fond of is salmiakki or salt licorice. I like Finnish black licorice, but the salmiakki is black licorice that is strong and salty. Also, there is pepper flavoured salmiakki. I really didn't like that. Finns also like tar-flavoured candy. Also I tried a bottle of Karhu, a Finnish beer. Karhu means bear. It's bitter beer.

Is it bravery or insanity...

if you drive out to a cabin by a lake in the woods on a crisp autum night. The moon is full and reflects off the glassy sheet of ice on the lake. You build a fire in the sauna, then when it's hot, you strip naked and sit in the sauna until you're so hot you can't breathe. You splash water on the rocks and steam rises, making the sauna feel even hotter. Moisture beads on your skin and drips off. You walk out into the brisk air, steam rising from your body. Feet aching you walk to the lake. Your stare at the dark water for a minute, break the ice, take a deep breath and jump in!!! Heart pounding, you jump out into air that feels suddenly warm. You walk back to the sauna, sit there until your feet stop aching. Then you do it all again. That's what we did on Saturday. (Marcos's mother goes swimming in the river year round. And she doesn't sit in the sauna first. They say if you start in summer and continue swimming once a week into the fall you don't even notice the difference when you have to cut a hole in the ice to go swimming. And it improves your circulation.)

Finnglish

http://www.makupalat.fi/kieli2.htm
a link to a some good Finnish-English dictionaries

Missa on vess? - Where is the bathroom?
Paljonko kello? - What time is it?

On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer and Vixen!

I ate Rudolph. You know...Santa's helper with the red nose. He was tasty. They herd reindeer in Northern Finland. During most of the year the reindeer roam free in the forests. Each herd has one or two with a bell around it's neck. All the reindeer belong to someone and once a year the herds are rounded up and some are butchered for the meat. It tastes a bit like venison.

Here I go again

As I write this I'm waiting for another airline ticket purchase to confirm. Yes, I'm off to Germany. My intended itinerary? Visit Verena in Bavaria, visit relatives in Baden-Wurtemberg and spend four weeks at the Göethe Institute in Berlin.

Your cell-phone is Finnish

Finland Fast Facts:

1. Nokia, maker of cell-phones, is a Finnish company that started out making rubber boots.
2. Finland has had a female president, Tarja Halonen, since 2000.
3. The literacy rate in Finland is around 99 percent.
4. Finland is the 7th largest country in Europe.
5. Students in Finland don't pay for University. In fact the government gives them money to live on while the study!

Thanks

I just finished checking my e-mail and it was so unbelievably nice to get e-mail from friends and family saying that you're reading this. It was so good to hear from you Lisa and Katie and Mom and Matt and I miss you all!!! I spent the weekend meeting people: Paivi's mom (who doesn't speak any English, but I showed her pictures of ND and my parents) and Paivi's dad (a journalist. He took pictures of me and I took pictures of him.) and Marcos's parents and their house and Paivi's brother and his family. Paivi's brother's family is the All-American Finnish family. They've lived in Dallas and travelled on the East Coast. Tommi, their 17-year-old son loves baseball and has Snoop Dog posters on his walls as well as a map of the US.
Sunday we saw a missionary evangelist name Michael Howard at Paivi's church, the Evangelical Free Church of Finland. That was an experience I'm not sure how to describe.....hmm...well I'll just say Michael Howard was very loud and a bit arrogant and neither Paivi nor I was real impressed with him. They sing many of the same praise songs here....but in Finnish. There are some Finnish praise songs as well. Finnish music is haunting and melancholic....it has a definite Russian flavour.
Today I went to the school again with Paivi. It was another full day of "How old are you?" "What is your favourite color?" "Do you have brothers and sisters?" The kids were a bit fidgety after their week long break. One thing I still love is hearing Paivi say "Good morning class." in this very proper teacherly way, as she stands very straight at the front and the kids stand very straight and proper by their desks. Then the kids reply "Goood mawr-ning Mis-ehs Pah-keh-len." (Use your imagination to duplicate the accent.....it doesn't quite come through written on the page. You need to hear it)

Raahe

It's a rainy day in Raahe. That's where I am today. Raahe is a quaint little seaside village about an hour's drive south of Oulu. I'm staying with Pieta, a friend who went hiking with Paivi, Marcos and me. We saw the Raahe museum today. It has the oldest diving suit in the world. It's made all of leather and quite huge.
The biggest frustration of being in a foreign country is not understanding the language. Most everyone speaks very good English, but most of the time they all speak Finnish and not understanding is driving me crazy!! But I'm picking up a bit of Finnish here and there and Marcos and Päivi are patient teachers. (teacher - opetaja).

Karhunkierros

Karhunkierros is the name of the hiking trail where we spent Saturday evening through Tuesday evening. It was wonderful. We hiked over bogs and past rushing rapids. We picked lingonberries and mixed them with the jam we put on our morning porridge. We drank the water right from the river. There are hikers huts all along the trail where we slept each night. There was firewood and a woodstove and benches to sleep on and outhouses, so it was quite nice and not nearly as cold as I'd expected. Tuesday night we went to Kuusamon Tropikki on the way home. It's a spa where we swam and hot tubbed and saunaed. And yes, in Finland you do sauna naked, but women and men sauna seperately. Wednesday we went to the Raunua zoo. I saw a polar bear and learned animal names in Finnish, then we went to the Arctic circle..the farthest north I've been and we drove to Sweden.

Finnish school

As I write this blog, I am sitting in a quiet teacher's lounge in a Finnish elementary school. The past few days have been a whirlwind and the next two weeks promise to be just as busy. Where to start? Yesterday: Thursday morning I awoke bleary eyed after a fitful night's rest. Päivi was just as groggy. We'd spent Wednesday afternoon and evening planning, organizing, scanning photos of North Dakota and thinking of games and songs for the children in Päivi's English classroom. I went with Päivi to her school all day Thursday. I gave a presentation in each of her classes on the USA and North Dakota. The kids start each class period by standing next to their desks. Päivi says "Good morning class" and the children respond "Good morning Mrs. Päckalen" then they begin the lesson. The elementary school here looks much like and American elementary school. There are the same desks, coat hooks, library, music room, gym, etc. The children had prepared questions for me such as "What's your name?, How old are you?" "Do you have pets?"...the basic questions you learn when you start learning a foreign lanuage. One child asked "Do you like George W. Bush?" !!! I replied that I don't, but some Americans do. We showed them the distance from Finland to the US on the globe, then showed them....ah, gotta go, the school assembly is starting.

Finland

Well, I'm here!! I got on the plane in Minot, North Dakota at 11:08 a.m. on Monday and Paivi and Marcos picked me up at the Oulu train station last night (Tuesday night) just after midnight. The loneliest I've ever felt was sitting for six hours in the Amsterdam airport and knowing that all the people I know and love were thousands of miles away and that if anything bad were to happen I only had myself and God to rely on to get me out of trouble. I'm writing from the University in Oulu. My friend Paivi is an English teacher at an elementary school in Oulu and her husband, Marcos is studying to be a teacher here at the University. In just a few minutes I'll join Marcos and his brother for lunch at the cafeteria. I'm staying on the couch in Paivi in Marcos tiny but adorable apartment. Finland is cold and cloudy this time of year, much like North Dakota. Finland is 70 percent forest, so there are lots of trees. It's strange to look around and see everything written in a language I can't understand. Even the keyboard on this computer is arranged differently than I'm used to.

Sami

The Sami are the indigenous people of Finland. This is taken from
http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/saameng.html

"The economic foundation of the Sami hunting culture was destroyed by wiping out the most important game animals - the beaver and the wild reindeer. As game decreased the Sami no longer used their land as actively as earlier, and, thus, their land taxes grew smaller and were altogether repealed in 1924.
Simultaneously, the Sami were removed from the land registers. Their rights were "forgotten", and they were depicted in literature in the same way as natives elsewhere during the colonial period.
Settlers moved into the areas "unused" by the Sami, and they were granted certain rights to the lands and waters. Some Sami founded homesteads on their own land. By the 1980's, the lands and the waters of such homesteads were demarcated. On the basis of no known legal grounds, the state started to control the "public land" left outside the homesteads. The only cause shown was that the 'public lands" had always belonged to the state because they had never had an owner (res nullius). In a situation where the Supreme Court did not consider the state to be the owner of the lands, preservation areas were founded on these "public lands". Today, the state uses, conveys and rents "public land" and disallows the Sami to use it in many ways."
Sound familiar? They suffered the same plight as the Native Americans. Different story, same ending: loss of land, loss of livilihood, loss of culture.

Coming Out

On Tuesday I learned some surprising news. A very dear friend announced that she is bisexual. Whoa! I didn't see that one coming. But, to my friend (whose name I will not mention) I say this: I respect and admire you for having the courage to admit this truth to yourself and to your closest friends. And I am praying for you, though not that God would change you, as certain other people are praying. I'm praying that God would continue to give you the strength and courage to accept yourself as you are and that you would be at peace with yourself. You're still my friend and I still love you very much.
And hey, men don't seem to be working out for me! Maybe I'll try women for awhile!......okay, just kidding. I've been told that one out of every three women has considered having a relationship with the same sex. While I'll admit the thought has crossed my mind, I can't deny the way I'm wired, which is most definitely straight.
October 11 is National Coming Out Day. I'm choosing to "come out" as a straight ally. A straight ally is "someone who is not gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT) but personally advocates for GLBT equal rights and fair treatment". I have a number of dear friends who are gay, lesbian, and now one who is bisexual. I care about these people and believe they should be accepted, loved and be treated equally.

countdown...

So much to say, so little time. I spent the entire day packing. I now have what I need for three weeks in Finland, including backpacking, tucked safely away in one large backpack and one carryon size backpack. Photocopy of my passport in my bag, (check!) passport in my purse, (check!) and Euros in my purse (check!) Still don't have my life figured out, but I did download applications for Habitat for Humanity, Holden Village, Urban Servant Corps, and A Christian Ministry in the National Parks, all of which I will fill out soon.

Frustration

I hate life today. Total frustration! I got a really good deal on a ticket to Finland through Hotwire, but now I want to change my travel plans to visit Verena and some relatives in Germany and the ticket is completely unchangeable. No refunds, no changes, no nothing! I even called Hotwire Customer Care. Plus the flight I wanted from Helsinki to Oulu is no longer available. One week is far, far too little time to prepare for a trip overseas. And to top it all off I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with my life!!!!!!!! It's time to find a job and I don't even know where to begin, nor do I have the time because I'm so busy traipsing all over the globe. I've been offered jobs......but not PAYING jobs. I could teach piano lessons in Hazen, ND, heck I could teach piano lessons anywhere in North Dakota. But I can go anywhere in the US, or for that matter anywhere in the world, so why should I stay in North Dakota?! Why? 22 years here is long enough. My mind is spinning in circles and I'm totally overwhelmed. I wish someone would help me figure this mess out.

Home again, home again

Well, I'm home again. Yesterday we drove straight through from Spokane to Jamestown, ND. It only took 15 and a half hours. Fortunately I didn't have to do any of the driving and I was able to finish The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. Good book.
I'd left my car at the train station in Minot. Mom took me up to get her, but the stupid thing wouldn't start!! Since my Honda (Gelly) has a manual transmission, Mom gave me a pushstart. It was quite a picture: this late-middle aged woman pushing a little roller skate of a car through the Amtrak parking lot. A kind gentleman came along and offered to push my car with his car and she decided to start. I'm not sure what was wrong with her other than having sat for a month. She runs fine now.
10 days until Finland. I bought a Lonely Planet guide to Finland and I'm going to read it cover to cover. Did you know "Huomenta" means "Good morning" in Finnish?