Skip to main content

New Beginnings


Today while I sat in the very comfortable blue chairs that sit in the prized location of our living room, I decided to put on some music. This was despite my better judgement since I was working on reading a rather dense book for one of my PhD classes starting in September and needed full concentration capacity. Having recently acquired Spotify thanks to my bf, I decided to peruse the vast database to find a new playlist to try. I found one called #vainsuomihitit, or “only Finnish hits.” Feeling adventurous, I decided to give it a whirl.



I had never heard any of the songs on the list and, when I listened to them, I knew that they were not songs I would actively choose to listen to. Yet, hearing the words—only a portion of which I could understand—made emotions well up. They reminded me of Finland, where walking down the street I would hear this beautiful language being spoken and see it written all around me.



A typical Aurajoki picture
Now in a Finnish mindset, even looking into my parents’ back yard made me think of the Finnish cottages I have spent so much of the summer in. I imagined the river that is the subject of every cliched picture on my Facebook wall from international students’ posts and felt a longing to walk along it, while cyclists whizzed effortlessly past—the crowds are never so dense as to make this difficult, this is Finland after all— and people sat on the grassy hill along the river enjoying the last days of summer. I missed the quick breeze that began to bite at dusk even in the midst of summer. I even missed the feeling of darkness in winter that made you forget that it was only 3:30 in the afternoon.



I have been quite happy being settled at home for this past month so this sudden longing for Turku surprised me. It is, perhaps a mark of how as we grow older, new places begin to creep their way into our hearts and become the place we consider home. We replace the steadiness of the place of our childhood with the place (or places) that will be where we find stability as adults. And our relationship with those places is quite different than the place where we grew up. The latter is rooted in nostalgia while the former is rooted in responsibility and the future.



My new Finnish bed sheet for NYC,
thanks to the bf
The idea of home has been on my mind recently because the place I call home is about to change as I head to New York City to begin working on my PhD program. New York City is not a place I particularly want to live but it will be the place where I work for my future and where I will continue to pave my own path.


I cannot in all honesty say that I am eager for this next move. But the idea of continuing the growth that began in Turku in a city that literally grows every day does entice me somewhat. So while I will undoubtedly miss the nostalgia of home and have left a piece of my heart in Turku, while I plan on covering as much of my grad school apartment in memorabilia that remind me of both, I will try to take what I can from my new home. Because in it lies my future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And so it begins!

Only 2 more days before I leave for my next adventure! Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve had a lot of questions and they’ve followed a general pattern. I thought this would be the perfect place to answer all of them at once. For the geographically inclined, Finland is far north right next to Russia. It is so far north that a fourth of the country is in the Arctic Circle. This means that this part of Finland experiences the midnight sun, when the sun never sets in the summer, and the polar night, when the sun doesn’t rise during the winter. The far north is also known as the Lapland. Turku, the city that will be my new home for the next two years, is in the southwest corner of Finland so my day and nights won’t be as extreme as the Lapland but it will be more extreme than what we experience here in the Midwest. My plane journey to Finland will be a total of nine hours, with a very short layover in Iceland. Once I land in Helsinki, I only have an hour-forty-minute lo...
2 comments
Read more

The Lifeblood of NYC

As you walk along the sidewalk of New York City, you’ll notice that periodically, the cement gives way to a metal grate. Sometimes, the reverberating rumbling echoes through these grates, telling you that a train is passing beneath your feet. Every time I hear that sound, my heart skips a beat. Quintessential NYC, but the real life blood of the city is its metros I’ve always loved the sound of trains. My aunt’s house is in the heart of Mumbai, right next to the railway tracks used by passing local trains. As a child, trapped inside with nothing to do while the adults slept or were busy in the kitchen, I would stand in my aunt’s balcony overlooking the tracks and watch the trains go by, lulled into a peaceful reverie as I listened to them. But watching trains in Mumbai is very different from riding the dark and dirty metros of New York. Metro stations are gloomy from the lack of natural light and filthy from the many people rushing past, spilling their drinks, spitting, sp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Summer (Cottage) Fun

This is a very selfish post. I am writing it purely to relive memories because, even though I have absolutely loved being at home for this week, eating my mother’s cooking, meeting friends and remembering what 30 ° (90 ° for my American friends) weather feels like, part of me misses Finland. I probably wouldn’t miss it so much if it weren’t for a weekend trip I took before leaving to a friend’s summer cottage. It was quintessentially Finnish. (And then later that week we made hernekeitto and pannukakku . You can’t get more Finnish than that.) The cottage was tucked away in the middle of woods. Though there were two other cottages not far from ours, we couldn’t see or hear anything from our neighbors, thus giving the illusion that we were completely secluded from the outside world. Cottages are generally located near a body of water, either a lake or the ocean. This cottage was by a lake. It actually belongs to my friend’s mother who spends almos...
1 comment
Read more