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TAYLOR MAN ABOUT LONDON |
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...and rest your brain |
 "There are thousands of lakes and they have a raw, unspoilt beauty..." |
Seduced by the land where
your brain can chill out
of TheColumnists.com
I’ve never thought about going to Finland before, nor anywhere in Scandinavia. My first consideration when choosing a holiday destination is climate--I go somewhere that’s warmer than chilly England. Then last year I started dating a Finnish girl and now we’re visiting her home town of Lahti, an hour’s drive north of Helsinki. At first I thought there was little to connect my impressions of the country, but quickly a unifying theme began to emerge…
Finland provides peace of mind. Go there to rest your brain.
Finland is simply a mellow, peaceful country--its calm a soothing antidote to the nagging tension of London. I didn’t hear a siren until day three, and haven’t heard one since. This peace and even pace is just perfect for someone fresh off the plane from Heathrow. It certainly had a fairly immediate effect on me--I’m not in the habit of sleeping during the day, even on vacation, but several times this week I’ve simply passed out through sheer contentment.
Even Finland’s geography is soothing. A map of its central area looks like a big puddle. There are thousands of lakes and they have a raw, unspoilt beauty. Many people here have what they call ‘summer cabins’--wooden lake-side houses that may be only 20 miles from where they live for the rest of the year. Finland’s house prices are sensible, unlike those in the UK, so I could buy seven good-sized summer cabins for the price of my pokey London apartment. And driving to your cabin is a serene pleasure, with little traffic on the highways, beautiful scenery, and good service stations. The cars in Finland pass each other like eagles in a big sky. In London the traffic is akin to a crowded chicken run at feeding time.
Helsinki itself is quiet
and undemonstrative. There’s nothing immediately remarkable
about it, nothing that proclaims its importance, elegance or
grandeur. To be unkind you could call it bland. Nokia’s
here of course, with its impressive bay-side headquarters in
the outskirts--an appropriate setting for one of the world’s
major corporations. But you get a sense in Helsinki, and in Finland
in general, that the real action is happening elsewhere. That
suits me, especially on vacation, but others might find it restricting.
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you get the feeling the action is happening elsewhere |
There are few countries in the world whose environment can be so transformed during the course of the year. On my first evening we took a stroll around town at 11 p.m., just as the sun was going down. The next morning I was woken by bright sunlight at 3.30 a.m. The flip side is short, freezing winter days, and I don’t think I could stay here long at that time of year. It’s bad enough in London, but here you could miss daytime by just lingering too long over lunch. The Finns, typically, say you just get used to it.
“Getting used to it,” “not worrying too much” and “letting it happen” are typical Finnish sentiments. It occurs to me that the Finns may all be given an overdose of sang-froid at birth. How else would their first instinct be to encourage their kids to take up ski jumping?
There are three mini ski jumps in Lahti, the smallest for young kids to start on, but even that involves a drop of about 50 feet. It makes the park slide in my London neighbourhood seem very tame. Then there’s the big jump on which the world championship is often held--so huge that you can see it from several miles away. Up close it’s utterly terrifying. It takes 20 minutes to climb from the basin in which the jumpers end up to the foot of the tower from which they begin their descent. You go up the tower in an elevator to be greeted by a massive view over southern Finland, a giant lake stretching northwards. I edged over to the gate from which the jumpers set off on an almost vertical drop, and looked several hundred feet down at the basin and Lahti beyond. I didn’t know whether to admire those who’d willingly hurl themselves from such a height without a parachute, or just throw up. I settled for an involuntary sway.
Jumping from great heights at an early age must have given Finnish people an ability to say a firm “so what?” to issues that would cause major problems elsewhere. Take Finland’s ethnic make-up. Its racial uniformity is immediately striking, nearly everyone being blue eyed and blond. (I’ve seen one black person so far.) The tourist information states that four per cent of the resident population is ‘foreign’--an ambiguous term that would cause politically correct apoplexy in the proudly multi-cultural UK, and I’m sure the U.S. would have problems with it, too. The Finns, on the other hand, just choose not to worry.
And then there’s Finland’s recent history. For the last 60 years or so Finland has walked along a diplomatic tightrope that would have caused the British or French to implode with self-doubt. It finished ‘on the losing side’ (as the Finns put it) in the second world war, having cut a deal with the Germans to allow them to pass through Lapland and attack the Soviet Union. It then faced half a century of humouring its giant neighbour in the east, but somehow managed to do so whilst calmly retaining its western status and political relationships. It’s now a fully-fledged member of the European Union. Such chameleonic qualities the rest of Europe can only admire.
In fact I reckon we could learn a lot from the Finns. About how to enjoy life, what to worry about, and how to treat each other. I’ve enjoyed my stay here immensely. Finland has so much time and space--something that Brits like me crave. I’ve spent many hours this week just listening to the silence, breathing in the freshness and revelling in the expanse. This is a cool, unflustered part of the world where nothing too dreadful happens. You really can come here to give your mind a rest.
But minds need activity and engagement too. Even mine. So, for now, it’s back to manic London for some serious stress.
©2003 by Robert Taylor. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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