Finnish summer

What a treat it was to get invited by my friend Laura to her parents’ and her in-laws’ summer cottages! It is officially, FINALLY Finnish summer here now and is actually hot – nearing 90°F over the past few days – which is not something I thought Finland was capable of being after the last 6 months. With Finnish summer comes Finnish summer holiday season during which almost every Finn goes to his or her family’s summer cottage to rejuvenate and, as most summer cottages are very basic and without running water or electricity, to truly get away from the rest of the modern world. And with 200,000 lakes (not including the “small” ones) and approximately 180,000 islands in a country of around 5.3 million people, there is a lake or an island for every 14 people! Needless to say, there are plenty of beautiful lakefront or oceanfront places for a summer house and the Finns have definitely taken advantage of this unique offering of their country.

I came back from the US on the afternoon of June 30, the weekend after the big Midsummer holiday weekend, and while walking to work the next morning was wondering if I was so jetlagged that I had mistakenly woken up in the middle of the night…the always bustling downtown Helsinki streets during my morning “commute” to the office were almost completely empty with just a few stragglers here and there. (And it is sunny for 19-20 hours a day so you really could be walking around in broad daylight in the middle of the night and not realize it. It can be very confusing when you come back from a time zone 9 hours away!) Where was everyone, I wondered? Duh. Everyone was on holiday and at their summer cottages! The winters are so long, hard, and dark that when summer comes the Finns take full advantage of it, usually in the form of around 4 weeks of holiday (basically the whole month of July). The country practically shuts down! I went to my favorite lunch restaurant the other day to find a piece of paper in the window stating the place was closed between June 28th and August 9th. I was bummed that they were closed but envious of this many week holiday mentality – why have we not learned to do this yet in the US?! I’m taking three weeks off starting next week and was thinking that I was really pushing it only to find out that I am taking less vacation than practically everyone else in the office…from between one to four weeks less. Wow. I need to learn something about this whole holiday thing while I’m here!

In the spirit of showing the sad little American with no summer cottage what a true Finnish summer is all about, Laura graciously took me to hers for a cultural indoctrination of smoke saunas, Mölkky, and Hulju. Laura, her husband Jeri, another friend Kaori, and I all took off last Friday for the 5 hour drive to eastern Finland, a bit past the city of Kuopio. It’s only about 250 miles (400 km) but takes a good 5+ hours because the speed limits are rather conservative and the people here follow them nearly to the number. (In contrast, I have many memories of driving with my dad on the interstate in Montana with no speed limit and him getting $5 “wasting of resources” tickets when he pushed it too far.) Speeding over 10% above the speed limit in Finland warrants a speeding ticket with a fine commensurate to one’s salary and there are many well-known (true) stories of Finnish executives getting fines of thousands or even millions of Euros for one speeding ticket. One story I read from 2002 resulted in a speeding ticket for 116,000 euros (about $104,000 at the time) – the equivalent of 14 days of the rule breaker’s earnings the previous year – for the equivalent of speeding 16 mph over the speed limit. Yikes! And I thought my $200 ticket in west Texas for the same 16 mph over was bad! (In this particular case, the man appealed the case based upon the fact that he had a much lower income the next year. A different ticket which was issued for around $165,000 was reduced to about $9,000 after the speeder restated his earnings so there was some precedence set for the benefits of “re-filing!” Probably the only time you’re hoping you make less, a lot less, than the previous year.) The record for the highest speeding ticket fine paid was in 2002 by a 27 year old heir to a northern European meatpacking business. This man had made nearly $12 million dollars the previous year so was fined almost $200,000 for driving 50 mph in a 25 mph zone. Don’t mess with Texas? Don’t mess with Finland! At any rate, it took us quite a long time to go 250 miles but there was no way that I was going to be the one to suggest we drive faster!

We got to Laura’s parents’ summer cottage late that evening and I began to understand what this whole summer cottage obsession was about – this place was absolutely beautiful and so amazingly peaceful and quiet. If you hadn’t been able to see another summer house across the way on the lake you’d think you had the entire country to yourself. It was still sunny and gorgeous as Laura cooked chicken, vegetables, and pineapple on the grill which we then complemented with fresh homemade bread, salad, and wine. It was a feast! Naturally, we had to strategize about how and when we would do dessert (a delicious rhubarb and pear tart with fresh whipped cream) around going to sauna and we decided to do dessert before sauna so we wouldn’t be rushed. (Priorities!)

While I have been in multiple saunas here over the past 6 months, I had not yet been in a traditional smoke sauna so this was to be a new experience. Most saunas are electric saunas but the traditional Finnish sauna is a smoke sauna in which there is a fireplace without a chimney but just a small hole in the ceiling instead. This type of sauna usually houses an open rock stove and as the burning wood heats the stones (which may take many hours and perhaps even up to a day) the resulting smoke circles and blackens the room with soot before escaping out the small vent in the ceiling. Any soot on the floor or benches is cleaned off before you then use the sauna but the ceiling remains characteristically black.

Once the sauna has been properly heated, the smoke is fully released out of the ceiling vent, you hang your clothes and towels on the hooks outside the door, grab your beer or cider, and get ready to sweat. These things are typically heated to around 170-230°F so this is no laughing matter! The first thing you do when you get in is to douse yourself in water from the water bucket just inside the door and then you find a place to park and you just sit there and relax…and talk…sometimes drink…and, for me, always overheat. After 15 minutes or even fewer if you just can’t stand it anymore (not that I would know), you walk out of the sauna, down the always well trodden pathway and wooden pier to the lake, and then, of course, you jump naked into the freezing cold water. You then gasp for air and frantically blink a few times as your body goes through about 30 seconds of shock, swim around for another 2 minutes, get out, traipse back up to the sauna, and do it again. Rinse and repeat for as many times as you like for a “standard” sauna of about an hour and 15 minutes or a “long” sauna of two hours or more.

I had been to sauna with Laura multiple times before at different events (there are saunas everywhere here…in homes, apartments, offices, company headquarters…2 million saunas in a country of 5 million people!) and most recently at our main client’s summer cottage outside of Helsinki where he had invited our entire working team for a lovely end of case celebratory event. Laura and I were the only women on the team so we sauna’ed together first while the men waited up at the house to go second. We were sitting in the sauna there when Laura got up to go for the “standard” al fresco swim. I must have looked at her with a shocked look on my face when she asked if I was coming, “I am not swimming naked in the lake outside our client’s house while he’s up there making us dinner!” I almost hissed. She shrugged the “prudish American” shrug and jumped right in. “It’s refreshing!” she yelled from the water as I sat on the edge of the pier and pulled my towel a little tighter around me. Are these people crazy?!

I felt a bit embarrassed when we had finished in sauna and went back up to the house to tell the guys it was their turn, “You didn’t swim in the lake?!” more than one of them asked me, incredulous. Um, nope. Still not really ok with this whole thing! But, in typical American-learning-to-sauna-form, my first sauna was terrible because I went without a Finn, didn’t know what I was doing, stayed in for 45 minutes, and nearly made myself sick. My second sauna was in winter with a group of Finns who taught me how to do it properly and I enjoyed it but there was no lake involved. My third sauna was at my client’s house and I knew the sauna drill but wasn’t willing to skinny dip in the lake. My fourth sauna was at a Laura’s summer house at which point I was peer-pressured into the swim and then, shockingly, was the one who pushed the group to do it again. (It really is refreshing!) By my fifth time, at Laura’s in-laws’ sauna, I was an old pro…cider in hand, clothes off, in smoke sauna (eyes closed), too hot, down the pier, in the lake, repeat. Next escalation step would be to do the same in winter but I’m not sure that I will ever be woman enough for that swim! I humbly admit inferiority to the Finns with respect to sauna skill, cold water appreciation, and alcohol tolerance!

At the end of sauna you give yourself a bucket bath including the whole hair-washing and soaping-up shebang, a bit awkward given this is done front and center on the floor of the sauna while all your fellow sauna-ees have stadium seating for the performance (not that any of them cares a bit but, again, prudish American), and then you head back to the house always more relaxed and usually ready for more alcohol. I have to say that the longer I stay here the bigger sauna fan I become but I still don’t know that I’d want to do this every day as many Finns do! For a country of very quiet and private people, this is a rather unexpected and bizarre social staple!

After sauna (maybe between saunas – I don’t remember – the multiple bouts of heat and water got me all mixed up!), we hit the next fun Finnish summer cottage tradition which is called Hulju and is like a very basic, no-jet hot tub. While enjoying Hulju we got attacked by another major player in the Finnish summer world…the mosquito! I, as the fresh meat in the group (which maybe means that I complained the most vs. got bitten the most), cut this event pretty short in favor of the sauna. I may not be able to stand the heat for long but mosquitoes can’t stand it at all. Ha! After the many smoke sauna / cold water / hot water treatments of the evening, we finally took off to the beds in our cabin and slept great in the perfect summer silence.

The next day, we woke up to a great breakfast of homemade porridge (courtesy of Laura’s lovely mother) and berries and then drove off to Laura’s in-laws’ summer cottage. Again, this summer place was quaint and lovely with beautiful flowers all over the property, cute little buildings (the “old main house,” “the new main house,” an enclosed grilling gazebo overlooking the lake, a smoke sauna of course!), and a very welcoming Finnish family. We played a traditional Finnish yard game called Mölkky where you stack pins with numbers on them (think bowling), and throw a small wooden post at them in an attempt to knock over either one pin, in which you get the number of points displayed on the pin, or as many pins in possible, for which you get points equal to the number of pins knocked down. Each time a pin is knocked down, it is set back up in its new position so while the pins are all grouped together initially they may quickly get spread out if someone is successful at “breaking” them (like in pool). The goal is to be the first to hit exactly 50 points so you can see that you actually do need to be a bit strategic in your play (and your post-throwing accuracy!). I played with Laura, Kaori, Laura’s friend Hantta, and Laura’s mother-in-law and I actually got to 50 first!...and then lost to Hantta when she got to 50 on the same turn and beat me in the tie breaker. Bummer! It was a fun game though and was absolutely perfect weather so it was great to be out enjoying the day.

We had a great lunch, took a sauna (Laura’s mother-in-law was sad that we had forgotten to grab birch twigs before sauna so that we could warm them up over the stones and then hit ourselves on the backs with them – another Finnish tradition which is supposedly also “refreshing” and leaves you smelling great…think I might stick with soap for the time being as a less painful alternative for smelling great!), ate fresh crepes courtesy of Jeri (with jam and sugar - amazing!), and then left for Kuopio for an evening wine festival. The wine festival was really fun and was made even better by the excellent weather. We listened to the Finnish performers while we tried multiple Greek, Italian, and Croatian wines and then finished out the night at a local bar on the terrace. It was pretty great to be sitting outside with a drink in hand as the sun set around midnight.

We spent the night in Kuopio and then went to the local landmark, the Puijo tower, the next day to get views of the city and the surrounding area. Finland, as you might imagine from the lake statistics I gave earlier, is literally covered in lakes (many of which connect and you can actually get extremely far inland, all the way to Kuopio for instance, from the sea by traveling on connecting lakes) which makes for a very uniquely pretty landscape. We then ate lunch at the “best restaurant in Finland for muikku.” Muikku is a small, freshwater whitefish which is traditionally prepared fried (called “vendace” when fried) and eaten with mashed potatoes. No, this didn’t sound particularly good to me (and yes, I had already been warned by a few Finns that it wasn’t very good) but when in Kuopio you must try muikku! I have to say that I was extremely hungry and when my plate appeared and was piled high with four inch long, whole (heads cut off but bones in and skin on) fried fish next to a mound of mashed potatoes I was a little sad! I ate about 5 of the 15 of them and called it good. That’s all the culture I had in me that day! (Another specialty of eastern Finland is kalakukko which is muikku baked in Finnish rye bread. No comment but I think you know what I am thinking.)

We finished the day by taking a ride on a new road which connects many of the tiny islands in the surrounding lakes. These lake islands basically create an “inland archipelago” which is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world and is really cool! It’s definitely something very unique to the area. Even better, we stopped for ice cream on our final ride to the train station which helped me recover from the muikku. Moi moi, muikku! (Bye bye, yucky little white fish!...Ok, “yucky” might be more editorialization than a direct translation.) Ice cream never tasted so good!

And most of all…kiitoksia (many thanks) Laura, Jeri, and families! See you in sauna!