Suomen Soliloquies

My parents have been visiting me this week. Actually, we spent most of their travel time in Denmark and they are in Turku for a grand total of 48 hours. It is a very, very short visit. Visitors, I am finding, bring new perspectives to what has now become routine and normal. My parents have been noticing things that I never saw before. Like the brushes that are outside some of the stores for people to wipe their shoes on before coming inside. Or the amount of tulips that are in bloom everywhere (my mother loves flowers and they’re always the first thing she notices). One of my father's many pictures They are taking pictures of birdhouses, of streets that I pass every day without a second glance, of the trees around the Student Village. They are calling attention to how far things really are (I made them walk a lot but they were troopers and did it without complaint). Their appreciation for Turku far exceeded my own while we were walking along the river and en...

There aren’t many events that bring throngs of Finnish people together. Finns tend to avoid situations where they have to be with many people at once. This is a country, after all, where they sit one per row on the bus even when traveling with friends and hold their time in their summer cottages as sacred. But Vappu is one of those exceptions to the rule. I admittedly have been avoiding Vappu all week. We’ve had plenty of emails telling us about all of the parties and events going on around campus. Every one of these promises copious amounts of alcohol. This is decidedly not my scene and so I resolved to skip Vappu altogether. That resolve did not take long to thaw away. Curiosity got the best of me. In the most basic sense, Vappu is like Labor Day in the US. It is meant to honor those who work by giving everyone a day off. But it also heralds spring and after the long Finnish winter, everyone in Finland is ready for color and life to come back. The first par...