Remarks from my Trip

This was a trip of wonderful contrasts. Finland was for me the perfect place to relax. It is a landscape where there are no mountains to climb, one that is devoid of sights "not to be missed" and blanketed by a comfortable quilt of curvaceous lakes, fields of practical grasses, and humble mossy forests. It is a place without extraneous ornament in landscape or culture and this makes it one of the most effective of retreats. It seems to me that even the famous saunas, an element of trendy spas here and across Europe, are not considered luxuries in Finland, but a practical way to remain clean, warm, relaxed and Finnish. I took full advantage of the saunas, trying three different kinks in Finland and another kind in Estonia (The modern electric common in virtually everyone's home or apartment, a wood-fired Sauna at Hanna's grandparents' farm in Huotari, a savu or flueless wood-fired sauna that helped celebrate Hanna's brother and sister-in-law's marriage, and a public sauna in Tallinn, Estonia.) I could not bare to go a day without a good sweat and therefore did not while I was there. My present suffering has produced much scheming as to how I might procure my own sauna...

Another point: Through the connectivity of the internet, I was able to get in contact with Paulina and Pekka, some friends I had met over six years ago when we were all exchange students in Graz, Austria. Because we were driving back through their home town on the way to Helsinki from the countryside, Jeff and Hanna were gracious enough to stop in to make a little visit. What a fantastic thing it is to catch up with friends made so briefly in the grand scheme of things the better part of a decade later! Over coffee at midnight, we unpacked memories and experiences that I had not thought of in years. Very much worth the small effort, and I hope to continue to meet old friends and acquaintances around the world and at home.

My little overnight trip to Tallinn, the capital city of the Baltic state of Estonia, on the ferry reminded me of the more opulent ways of continental Europe. A tourist and shopping center (cheap tax-free Finnish beer!) for the Helsinkites, Tallinn appears to have unabashedly embraced the various ornaments of its various occupiers. It is certainly fair that they now profit from what the empires had built. A quick walk through Tallinn shows that it is a fair walled city that shows its the medieval influence of the Germans. However, dotted throughout are examples of Russian imperial, Soviet Russian, and the more recent and admittedly more democratic western capitalistic influences. (I looked very hard, and I saw maybe two cars that were built in the twentieth century!) This is not to say that one can't find indigenous culture in Tallinn. Indigenous culture just seems, like in nearly all of the E.U., to be indigenous only within the context of all its other cultural influences. Note that this comes from the point view of a tourist there for less than 24 hours who had no real contact with Estonians...

On to New York! Carl and Jenny, more friends from my Austrian experience, were my hosts with a cozy base camp in Astoria in Queens. (The walls of their apartment were studded in many places with great pictures of Graz and Stiermark, which again evoked great memories of six years ago.) New York is vast beyond my previous expectations. Really for the first time since wandering around Freiburg when I was sixteen, did I feel the distinct rush of being overwhelmed in a city.

Carl was an intrepid guide, if oppressed by the heat and humidity. As we toured the different parts of the city, it was very difficult to suppress conjuring up old associations with New York from popular culture and my studies: Little Italy and The Godfather, Greenwich Village and turn-of-the-century American radicals, Brownstones with stoops and Harlem Jazz, distant views of Ellis Island and the end of Fiddler on the Roof, Rockefeller Center and "hi mom"-ing tourists behind the Today Show, the big construction site downtown and the unfortunate defining moment of the present age, and a hundred other things. It is good to begin to soak up a place that is a reference point for so much in American culture.

I hope to upload a smattering of photos that illustrate the contrasts of my trip. There are many actual stories that came from this trip that I have neither the patience or time to elucidate, but hopefully we can catch up over coffee soon and swap stories.