Skip to main content

Christmas is here!


This post has a lot of pictures, which means really bad formatting on my part. Apologies!

Christmas tree lighting! Notice the huge crowd?
This week I have my first visitor. Ironically, he lived on my floor two months ago and had been living in another dorm in Turku for six months before he moved back to his hometown in Italy. So Turku isn’t exactly new to him and he told me as much. In fact, he complained that there wasn’t really anything to do in Turku (to which the appropriate response would have been to say that he was here to see me so that shouldn’t matter. But that is now a lost opportunity).

The truth is that Turku is completely different now than it was two months ago, much less in August when I first arrived. I have said on multiple occasions that I love being in Turku and Christmastime might be one of the best seasons to pay a visit. Shops have put Christmas lights up. Kauppatori has a pathway cutting right through it that is adorned with lights, creating the illusion of a canopy covering part of the square.

And there is the majestic 20-feet-tall Christmas tree in front of the cathedral. I had the fortune of walking by moments before they lit the tree a week ago. The square in front of the cathedral was packed with the largest crowd I have seen gathered in Turku thus far, showing how important Christmas is to the city.

But my favorite are the bridges.

There are several bridges that cross the Aura throughout the city. Throughout the year, these bridges have colorful lights glowing in the darkness, making it a little more bearable when the sun already sets at 4 in the afternoon in early November. Two bridges in particular, though, for whatever reason, have been decorated especially elaborately for Christmas.

The first bridge


One is very simple, in both structure and decoration. Year round this bridge is lit up with a soft shade of green and blue light so it glows in the darkness. In honor of the holidays, the city has put small speakers that are tucked away in the railing. All day long, these speakers play music for the passers-by. This includes a variety of classical music, sometimes Christmas songs, sometimes upbeat tunes and sometimes pleasant orchestra pieces.





I’ve always wished that my life could have a soundtrack like there is in the movies and walking across this bridge makes me feel like I do.






A view of the second bridge from afar

Standing on the second bridge





The second bridge is much more elaborate. Like the first, it also includes music and lights but there are also pine trees that have been lined all along both sides of the bridge. The trees exude a faint smell of pine and there are always at least one or two people taking pictures or video as they walk across. When there is snow on the ground the bridge feels like a winter wonderland.










I love the amount of care and holiday spirit that has gone into the bridges, tree and city lights. It’s as if the city is saying that, even though the days are dark and the sunlight seems to be permanently be hidden behind clouds, there is still plenty to be cheerful about.


Ornaments at the mall





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Heart of the City

The past week in New York was jarring to say the least. Though the city still makes me overwhelmed by even the smallest of tasks (where do you go to buy a pack of cards??), I have begun to slowly get used to the constant movement of the city and everything that comes with it. The sound of airplanes flying constantly from La Guardia over my apartment doesn't register any more. I can estimate how crowded the train will be based on what time I am leaving my apartment in the morning or TC in the evening. And although the feeling of always needing to do more still raises the specter of anxiety to make everything I do feel inadequate, I've become resigned to its presence to the point that it is part and parcel of the city itself. Solitude is rare in the city, but last week it was the norm All of these things fell apart this week though, one by one, as another phantom seeped into our lives. Starting with an email from our college president that optimistically called off only no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Critical Wisdom

The Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College has a reputation for being difficult, especially at the doctoral level. It isn’t difficult in the way my advanced data analysis class is difficult, where we are expected to learn complex statistical concepts while also learning how to code in the dreaded Stata software. Instead, it is impossibly abstract and theoretical, with most classes requiring us to write papers where we construct complex arguments supported by plenty of other people’s theoretical musings. These frameworks challenge us at our very core, a process that is fraught with emotional ups and downs, so much so that a professor in the department has called the program as a “Pedagogy of Monsters” and written an article about it. The program has changed the way I see the world. For example, I recently went to go see Isn’t it Romantic with some colleagues from the Writing Center. Besides the social aspect of actually going somewhere that wasn’t to work or acc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Holding Sand

 My mother once gave me the sound advice to avoid holding tightly onto things (she was specifically talking about people at the time) because if you do, they have a habit of slipping away. She did this through a marvelous metaphor that went like this: If you have sand in your hand and make a fist, the sand begins to fall out and you are left with less sand than you started with. If you gently cup you hand and let the sand come in however, it remains in your hand, and you can perhaps even add more. This metaphor has stuck with me because it helped me with the problem that I was having back then. But I’ve come back to it again and again and slowly been realizing the smaller and more subtle ways that I grab onto things. These things are now always visible or tangible, but they still have important implications. Take meditation. I meditate every day. It’s like brushing my teeth, I simply can’t skip this part of my day. But unlike brushing my teeth, which is a methodical and easy ...
Post a Comment
Read more