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Johnson  |
FROM LONDON |
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in Winter Where all the people are pale and blond and all the girls are above average |
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Finland: A nation where folks like going out in the cold
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
All but the diehard cross-country ski crowd would agree that the worst season to visit Helsinki is winter. So with my luck it was only natural that Nokia invited me to come on up last week for a couple of days to work out details of a writing project.
The 0730 flight from London required that I get up at 0430 to allow two hours for British Airways security guys to perform their shakedown and internal examination in case I had anything that jingled on me or in me. I didn’t. But I was mentally prepared for the worst and that’s what I got: two hours of standing or sitting in queues but no real security, no probes, no bag search, no nothing. The only change in Heathrow security since September 11 is a new question from the perky girl behind the check-in counter: ”Are you carrying anything sharp, sir?” I considered answering, “My tongue,” but somehow this did not seem the time for drollery.
Helsinki is familiar territory to me. It was our nearest point of civilization when I was based in Moscow for The AP. My second daughter, Raphaelle, was born there, financed under virtually free-of-charge state health care plan. Our only bad memory is my wife’s recurring nightmare of the hospital admissions nurse shouting--between contractions--“Vat is religion?” A really big question when your cervix is jumping all over the place.
Anyway Helsinki last week shocked me with a blast of biting wind and the layers of ice and snow already underfoot. What I like about my home base, London, is its moderation in all things: in pace of life, in work ethic and even in weather. We hardly get a freeze most winters.
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Michael Johnson says, "Finland is a country where people love to go out in the cold." |
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But Finland is a country where people love to go out in the cold. The shops carry vast selections of furry headgear with earflaps, huge woolly gloves, thermal underwear, boots of all shapes and sizes, ski masks and best of all, chocolates filled with a teaspoon of Finlandia vodka. Even the bicycles have snow tires. Everyone is pale and blond and all the girls are above average.
My Nokia meetings went off smoothly, leaving me time to stroll the boulevards of the Finnish capital in the dark. It was only 3 p.m. but we are close to the Arctic Circle where it is always dark or never dark, depending on the time of year.
A friend of mine met me at his office, a large bloc in central Helsinki with an electric sign stretching across the façade: World Trade Center. I surprised myself gulping at the coincidence, and realized that in 48 hours no one in Finland had alluded to the events of September 11 or their aftermath in Afghanistan. Radical Islam seems pretty remote to the Finns after 70 years of Soviet communism on their doorstep and Nazi fascists loose in their country.
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fortress island of Suomenlinna, outside Helsinki. |
Finland today is splendidly isolated and unconcerned. In fact, since the collapse of the USSR, Finland has been on a holiday from history. It is a country so secure as to be almost boring. This is well-earned solace for a nation that was once a duchy of Tsarist Russia, won its independence only in 1919, and was attacked again by the Soviets at the start of World War II in the exceedingly brutal “Winter War”. The Russians had told their troops that the Finns were “a primitive people” and could easily be reintegrated into the USSR. Wrong on both counts.
This is where it gets really complicated. Finland was then occupied by the Germans and was implicated in the fight against the Allies (the good guys, for readers too young to remember). Then in 1944 a separate peace was signed between Finland and Russia, on the condition that the Germans leave Finland, which they refused to do voluntarily. So Finland and Russia then engaged the Germans in another bloody campaign, finally expelling them.
As part of the peace agreement, the Russians claimed everything the Germans had left behind in Finland--barracks, armament, factories--and shipped it by train back to Russia. Worse, huge war reparations were assessed on the Finns by the Russians, at a per capita rate even higher than those imposed on Germans. It was years before Finland paid off the “debt,” and Nokia products made up a large portion of the repayment.
So it’s easy to see why the Finns are glad to have a break in their international obligations.
My friend’s wife is an optician. On September 11 she was going about her trade, dispensing eyedrops and selling spectacles, when her torpor was briefly interrupted. A colleague rushed into her office yelling, “Have you heard? Two airliners have crashed into the World Trade Center!” She grabbed her Nokia phone and called her husband, hoping he had escaped in time. His voice had never sounded so sweet, she recalls.
And all of Helsinki, including the World Trade Center, went about its business.
© 2001 by Michael
Johnson. The Finland flag drawing is from IMSI's Master Clips
Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA. The photos are from a Helsinki travel website.
You
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email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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