fulbrighterinfinland

Signing Off

2006-12-30T18:45:00.000+02:00

When, nearly thirty years ago, Ted Turner started the Cable News Network, critics scoffed. How committed are you to this crazy idea? they asked. What will you do when the novelty wears off?

When he grew weary of answering such questions, Turner came up with an all-purpose retort: “We will stay on the air till the end of the world and then we will cover the story and sign off playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”

I think I can declare this blog a success, albeit a modest one, unlike Turner’s. I know that I have learned much from those who have shared their ideas publicly or by way of private emails. At times, I have been sorely challenged—and at other times, immensely entertained—by readers’ comments.

I left the land of glorious birch trees (see photo above) on December 20 and have been home--and reunited with my luggage on Christmas day--ever since. Meanwhile, fulbrighterinfinland has been running on fumes. I will be calling it quits after this post, but the site will remain open for awhile so that readers might conduct any residual business they might have.

I have begun to edit my previous posts and to compose a few more on subjects not covered heretofore to see if there is a book in here somewhere. I would welcome your suggestions about topics that should be explored further, or about blog-to-book conversions. (I’ve been told that they’re called “blooks.”)

Naivete is a wondrous thing. When I began this venture last August, I had no idea it would prove to be so demanding a master, so addictive, or so intensely gratifying. I am sorry to see it end, but life goes on. I sincerely thank you for your company and your support.

Hei hei!

Granite Igloo

2006-12-28T16:57:00.000+02:00

On the day I first arrived at the Oulu railway station last August, I espied an unusual structure alongside the tracks, and I made a note in my journal: “rock igloo,” followed by a question mark. Later, it occurred to me to ask one of my students about it.

“Interesting you should ask,” Hannu replied, “because the ‘igloo’ is currently being threatened by demolition. I believe the structure was built during the war or just before it. It was used as an auxiliary station house in war time because the area was often under bombardment by Russian planes for its strategic importance.” What had looked to me like an “igloo” is the fortified roof of an underground bunker.

Hannu went on to report that VR, the state railway, wants to build a “travel center” on that particular parcel of land, which would mean razing the igloo and the brick building next to it. He said the project had been controversial, in part because the city council caved in so readily to VR, and also because preservationists recognize that it “is one of the few buildings that represent the war time here.” Hannu noted that it might be a good place to install some kind of exhibit on Finland’s complicated role in the Second World War, which unfolded in two distinct stages—the Winter War (1940-41), and the Continuation War (1941-44).

This conversation took place mainly by e-mail. I wrote back and asked if the structure has a name. “They call it a kivikukko,” he replied, “which means ‘Stone Cock’ (and before you think much further, that really refers to a male chicken). I have no idea where the name comes from. Maybe because it is shaped a bit like an egg?”

Well, now I was starting to be intrigued.

Upon further reflection, Hannu noted that the shape of the structure “resembles a food that has been eaten in the Oulu region,” which is called kalakukko (fish cock?) In the meantime, I had been wondering, with all due respect to “cock” and “male chicken,” whether kukko might be better translated as “cuckoo.” The cuckoo is a fairly reclusive bird that looms large in Finnish—indeed, Western—culture, mainly because of its perverse practice of depositing its eggs in other birds’ nests so that its offspring might be raised by “foster parents.” Etymologically, cuckoo actually is related to “cuckold,” which seemed to me yet another reason to think that kivikukko might be a reference to surrogate, or even unnatural beds, or nests.

While we were speculating in this way, I was planning a trip to Rovaniemi, where there is a before-and-after exhibit devoted to the destruction of the city by the Germans at the end of the Continuation War. A close inspection confirmed that there was no rock igloo in 1939, and sure enough, the 1944 display shows a circular structure in ruins not far from the railway station.

At this point, I was pretty far along in the process of becoming a rock igloo connoisseur, which reminded me of the time—many moons ago, while living in Ohio—that I developed something of a romantic obsession with Indian mounds. Once enchanted, a landscape can appear littered with plundered Indian mounds or derelict rock igloos.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Hannu discovered that there is a scholarly literature on the subject, and that the definitive work has been done by Dr. Paavo Talman, a human geographer at the University of Helsinki. Dr. Talman confirms that Oulu’s granite igloo was constructed in 1941-42, that it is a particularly “stately monument,” and that it was subject to heavy bombardment.[1] Dr. Talman has done his homework—even the measurements, apparently:

Steel and concrete walls are 0.75 meters thick and the roof is 0.85 meters thick. Steel rails inside the concrete casting support the roof. Brick into two larger and two smaller rooms, a small toilet and a storeroom divide the interior space. The bunker has two entrance/exit corridors on opposite sides of the building. The corridor pathway is angular, to lessen bomb pressure wave intensity. Entrance/exit corridors are equipped with think steel doors. Doors and ventilation channels sealed tight enough to give protection from gas attacks. The base under the bunker, about 1.5
meters below the ground, is kept dry by drainage pipes. [2]

Among the miscellaneous factoids reported by Dr. Talman are that Oulu’s igloo is somewhat unique in never having had a sodden roof, and that it sometimes is rented out to a rock band that practices in the chamber. Dr. Talman endorses Hannu’s theory about the origin of the name. “Because of its odd shape, townspeople have given it a cosy name, kivikukko, which can be roughly translated as ‘Stony Pie.’” [3] And he makes a strong case for igloo preservation: “Their protection, as special national landmarks, should become part of a comprehensive architectural preservation program.”[4]

Not long after this barrage of disappointments (I so much preferred the cuckoo theory), I found myself boarding a southbound train to Helsinki, where I planned to spend a couple of days before flying home. There, I found another message from Hannu, who now reported that “the rock igloo is doomed. The last appeal for it has been turned down by the regional environment centre. It was felt that all the new buildings and the removal of some earlier ones caused the area to lose its special value and there was no basis for saving the stone cock and the brick building next to it.” He predicted that there would be a protest “that will not be able to change much.”

In the annals of preservation history, the loss of Oulu’s granite igloo probably does not rank as a disaster of epic proportions. Still, one wonders why the good citizens of Oulu are so indifferent to an important chapter of their city’s history. Even more mysterious is the tourist bureau’s willingness to let VR destroy a cultural resource that could, with a little creative marketing, become a major tourist attraction.

I am, as I said, a romantic. In my mind’s eye, I see a television advertisement—produced, perhaps, by the firm that came up with the suggestive “what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas” ad campaign. A helicopter flying low over Agra swoops down on the Taj Mahal, then circles the structure as the cameras capture, in slow motion, every gorgeous inch of it. “Been there?” asks the narrator—David McCullough, say. Suddenly, the helicopter is transported to Tuscany, where it hovers over the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “Done that?” the narrator asks again. Cue Peggy Lee. “And when you had been there, and done that, did you think to yourself, ‘Is that all there is?’ Admit it, you thought there must be something wrong with you because visiting these fabulous pilgrimage destintations wasn’t anywhere near as thrilling as you’d imagined it would be.”

Gradually, Peggy Lee yields to Sibelius, and the screen fills with black-and-white images of soldiers in white parkas, skiing through the forests of Lapland, rifles slung across their shoulders. It’s the winter of 1940. Over this footage, the narrator continues, “Isn’t it time you experienced something truly exciting? In northern Ostrobothnia, there is a place—a magical place—that conveys like no other the meaning of heroism, love of country, and manly devotion to duty. Come and behold the Rock Cock of Oulu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This message was sponsored by the Oulu Tourist Bureau, with our partners, VR and Viagra.”

I can dream, can't I?

[1] Paavo Talman, “Finnish Wartime Emergency Railway Stations (air raid shelters),” perhaps available through Dr. Talman at paalvo.talman@helsinki.fi.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.

Darkness at Noon (with apologies to Arthur Koestler)

2006-12-23T15:52:00.000+02:00

At about 11:50 a.m., ten minutes before check-out time at my hotel, I ran a quick errand up to Rovaniemi’s main square, which used to be called Sampo Square, which is the name of a bank. It’s now called Lordi’s Square, after the heavy metal group that has been adopted by the chamber of commerce here in Santa Claus City. Times change, eh?

Imagine my surprise when I encountered a reindeer, tethered in the heart of Lordi’s Square and surrounded by a score of curious on-lookers. Most of them, strangely enough, seemed to be locals. I’m not sure where all the Japanese tourists were when I was making a spectacle of myself, trying to frame my face with the reindeer over my shoulder. I’m afraid all the light ended up on me and left Donder over yonder in the semi-darkness. You can just barely make him out if you squint.

Reindeer are shy creatures, and the vibes I got indicated that Donder didn’t care much for the flash. So it all came down to one low-percentage shot, a long three-pointer at the buzzer. I nearly nailed it.

Rovaniemi and Hagerstown

2006-12-23T04:13:00.000+02:00

The other reason I went to Lapland after the semester ended was because I wanted to track down a loose end having to do with the history of city planning. Here’s a link to Rovaniemi's website, http://www.rovaniemi.fi/?deptid=3694, and here’s what my Lonely Planet guide has to say:

After its complete destruction by the Germans in 1944, it was rebuilt from a plan by Alvar Aalto, with the main streets radiating out from Hallituskatu in the shape of reindeer antlers, though this would only be obvious from the air.

First, let the record show that the reindeer antler plat would not be obvious from the air, any more than it is from a map. If you were to take a highlighter and use it very selectively on the city’s streets, I suppose you could produce a pattern that looked like reindeer antlers. I don’t doubt for a minute that Aalto saw reindeer’s antlers in the city’s streets, but then, as I learned years ago from good ol’ H. W. Jansen, Pablo Picasso could see a bull’s head in an old bicycle seat and a set of handlebars. But having a good eye is not the same thing as executing a “plan.” There is, too, the question of why a world-class architect not known for his egotism would impose a conceit of this sort on a client, especially one that happened to be an entire city.

My heart skipped a beat when I walked into the Rovaniemi room at Arktikum and saw what I immediately recognized as a city model, much like the model of Oulu that captured my fancy at the Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia. Then I noticed that there was actually a second one right next to it, and sure enough, both are models of Rovaniemi, one in 1939, the other in 1944—before and after the devastation wrought by the retreating German army. And they were done to the same scale.

That it was a disaster of Dresden-esque proportions is clear at once. A few buildings, not many, were left standing. I didn’t have time to study the street plan and compare it with a modern map of the city, but looking at the models, it seemed to me that while Aalto knocked out a few walls, so to speak, he didn’t build a new house. I would say that the main innovation was Hallituskatu, which seems to have been conceived as an imposing stage, one on which Aalto was able to perform himself. The avenue could justly be called Alvar Aallonkatu (Alvar Aalto’s street). He built the concert hall, the library, and the town hall there. (The photo above was taken inside the library. Fiat lux!)

Nearby, in the same room as the models, there is a TV monitor on which a film about the destruction of Rovaniemi runs on a continuous loop. The narration is in Finnish, but there can be no confusion about the story line, which has to do with the physical and human toll exacted by the leveling of this city. Much of the film looks as if it came from a government archive, but some of the footage appears to have been borrowed from home movies. It is apparent that there were, as always, romances between the soldiers and local women, some of whom are shown holding babies. The film ends with footage of cement mixers and bare-chested men shoveling the wreckage away.

The film is riveting. Afterwards, I looked around for an exhibit on Aalto’s reindeer-antler master plan. If there were anything to the story—anything other than a casual epistolary reference, maybe—surely it would be exhibited here, in this room, with the models and the film. But it’s not. I asked a tour guide if she knew the source for the story about the reindeer antler plan. She said she didn’t, and she said that she suspected it was not a “plan,” as such, but probably a “literary” reference. Even then, a direct and explicit “literary” reference would be well worth displaying—unless, of course, it were off-hand to the point of undermining the claim. I came away from Rovaniemi with more doubts than ever about Aalto’s alleged Big Plan.

I also came away with a better understanding of the scale of Helsinki’s effort to avert the depopulation of the Finnish countryside. A comparison might help to convey a sense of the scale here. The population of Rovaniemi is roughly 35,000—about the same as that of Hagerstown, Maryland. Hagerstown, of course, is not a state capital. It doesn’t have an air force base. It also doesn’t have a major museum, or a university. God knows it doesn’t have a concert hall, let alone one built by a world-famous architect. It has a library, though. I checked, just to make sure.

My impression is that the Finnish government has largely succeeded in making provincial centers such as Rovaniemi desirable places to live, with the result that young people do not think that they have to move to Helsinki, or the south, generally, in order to have a decent life. Finnish university graduates seem to be willing to relocate to wherever the jobs are. But all things being equal, they would prefer to stay close to hearth and home—in Oulu, or Rovaniemi, or wherever.

I think one of the reasons that Finland has been able to pull it off has to do with the university system, which is somewhat monolithic—all important decisions come out of Helsinki, or now, Helsinki and Brussels—but it is much less hierarchical than American higher education. The University of Helsinki is probably Finland’s leading university. But it simply does not have the paramount status that a Harvard or a Stanford enjoys in the States. In Finland, each university has its distinctive niche in the national system. The Ministry of Education tries to avoid duplication of effort. By consensus, any sense of hierarchy is downplayed—even at the University of Helsinki, and that is precisely what an egalitarian political culture requires.

Not that Helsinki is winning any popularity contests as a consequence. I told a colleague that I was planning to spend some time in Helsinki at the end of the semester. "That sounds like fun," he said, but then he qualified that by saying that people in Helsinki aren't as "genuine" as people in Oulu. From such incidents I infer that people in the provinces have an ambivalent attitude toward the national capital, and I suppose that's true of the United States as well.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

2006-12-20T04:04:00.000+02:00

In Finland, Christmas is Joulu, which is related to our word, “yule,” and Santa Claus is Joulupukki. It is said that he lives in Rovaniemi.

This post is being composed on a laptop computer in the Hotelli Cumulus Rovaniemi, just a few kilometers south of the Arctic Circle (Napapiiri). I have just had dinner here in the hotel, at the “Polar” restaurant, which has lots of reindeer on the menu. The Finns have staked out a claim to be the world’s official “North Pole,” and they have pretty much made it stick. Here’s a link: http://www.rovaniemi.fi/?deptid=3694.

Rovaniemi is the capital of Lapland and offers many attractions that they’d be pleased to tell you about over at the Santa Claus Tourist Centre. You can mail your Christmas cards from the Santa Claus Main Post Office. Lots of people do. You can stay in the Santa Claus Hotel, if you wish. You can have a Big Mac at the world’s northernmost McDonald’s. Not far outside of town, up at the Arctic Circle, and easily accessible by reindeer-led sleigh (or snowmobile), is Santa Claus Village. As the Lonely Planet guide puts it, “Rarely do you get a chance to see such unadulterated commercialism in one neat little package.”

Let the record show that I came to Rovaniemi for two reasons. First, I wanted to see Arktikum, a museum of Arctic natural history and culture, which is said to be one of the better museums in Finland. Second, I wanted to find out more about Alvar Aalto’s contribution to the rebuilding of Rovaniemi after the Second World War. I’ll cover that subject in a separate post.

Insert pregnant pause here.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I thought that if I came away from Rovaniemi owning a picture of myself with Donder or Blitzen, well, that would be pretty neat, too.

Rovaniemi is only about two hours north of Oulu, where all the snow has melted, so I was disappointed, but not particularly surprised, to step off the train and onto bare pavement. Then I discovered that I’d have to share a snowless, lightless “North Pole” adventure with several thousand Japanese tourists. I think most of them are high-school kids, and the ones who have acquired the traditional Sámi hats with the pointy little tops are cute as all get out. I hope they didn’t have their hearts set on a snowmobile safari.

The locals complain about the lack of snow because it is very, very bad for business. In addition, there is the concern, usually unstated, that the weird weather might be a harbinger of global warming. The rivers and lakes here aren’t even frozen.

If nothing else, a nice blanket of snow would have helped to brighten things up a bit. I am composing this particular paragraph at 10:45 a.m., while waiting for the sun to come up before trudging over to Arktikum. I would settle for its lurking just off-stage, if you know what I mean.

* * *

Okay, I’m back. I decided to shove off in the dark this morning. I’m glad I did, because Arktikum is well worth a visit. It’s on the water, not too far from the city center, and it’s a very sophisticated, haitekki facility. I saw a ten-minute film, called Under the Northern Lights, that features the most gorgeous nature photography this side of the National Geographic Society.

The building itself, which is the work of Danish architects Birch-Bonderup & Thorup-Waade, is spectacular. Most of the exhibition space lies under a long, glass atrium that looks like a streamlined diesel locomotive, pointing due north. That’s because Arktikum is all about the natural history of the circumpolar region, and also about the Sámi and other peoples of the far north. Many of the exhibits lie underground, and that makes a certain amount of sense, as well. There is a library for those wanting to do serious research. The exhibits at Arktikum have been prepared by two different institutions, The Arctic Centre, which is part of the University of Lapland, and The Provincial Museum of Lapland.

And that raises the issue of government subsidies. Rovaniemi is not a large city. There are only 35,000 people here, and it is the capital of a region with a depressed economy. Without a program of systematically re-directly resources to this part of the world, Lapland would be in big trouble. My point is that cultural institutions such as the University of Lapland and Arktikum are part of a much larger strategy.

I have heard people here lament what is happening in Sweden, where it is said that the population is declining everywhere but in Stockholm. I don’t know if that’s true; I’m just repeating what I’ve been told. Years ago, the Finns developed an antithesis that involves substantial investment in regional development nodes in the hope that they will be able to hold their own, economically and culturally, against the magnetic power of Helsinki. In Oulu, for example, government subsidies have made the University of Oulu a major regional university, and the university has helped to turn the city and surrounding area into the “Silicon Valley of the North.” It’s the reason Mikhail Gorbachev came to Oulu in 1989, when he was still in charge of saving the U.S.S.R.

But the puppy doesn’t always grow into its paws, at least in quite the way that was intended. And you never know when an unexpected turn of events will render your Big Plans superfluous or irrelevant. In Rovaniemi, a funny thing happened on the way to the Arctic museum.

What happened was Lordi Mania, and then its (entirely predictable) appropriation by the local chamber of commerce. For the uninitiated, Lordi is a heavy metal rock group. From Rovaniemi magazine:

Lordi blasted Rovaniemi onto the European map with its historical Eurovsion win on 21 May 2006. For years to come this win will surely spark off questions such as “Where were you when our monsters won the Eurovision?” How has this mania changed Mr. Lordi’s home city of Rovaniemi? Read our Lordi ABC.

The Square: The Rovaniemi Sampo Square (the main square in the city center—KK) was renamed Lordi’s Square in the group’s honour and the group pressed their hands into cement for posterity.
Cola: Lordi Cola came on the market last September. Mr. Lordi designed the labels for the six-packs.
Hard Rock Hallelujah! Lordi won the 51st Eurovision Song Contest with Hard Rock Hallelujah. They received 292 points, the highest in the contest’s history.
Kebab: Torikeidas on the edge of the Market Square sells Lordi Kebabs, and it gave the group members VIP passes for a lifetime’s free supply.
Honorary citizenship: The City of Rovaniemi awarded the group’s members honorary citizenship.
Souvenirs: Lordi shirts and pins sell like hot cakes in Rovaniemi shops. The city’s tourist office printed their own shirts “Bringing back the balls to Rovaniemi.”
Rockaurant: December 2006 will see the opening of the monster-themed Lordi’s Rockaurant. A family restaurant by day and a rock pub at night, the idea is to go international.
Tomi Putaansuu: Mr. Lordi from Rovaniemi has positively brought Lapland to world attention. The group has brought Rovaniemi’s international image to the fore.
The group’s history: It all started with a horror movie fan’s homemade masks. Mr. Lordi has made music since the early 90s. He has always had a clear vision on how he wants the band to look and sound—they make all their own costumes, masks and props themselves. Their breakthrough hit was Would you Love a Monster Man? in 2002. They released albums in 2002 and 2004.[1]

With all due respect to my Lonely Planet guide, I don’t think that Rovaniemi is all about “unadulterated commercialism.” I think it’s about the tension between a central planning ethos and the imperatives of global capitalism. A city—especially one on the socio-economic margins, but any city, really—can ill afford to risk everything on one or the other. So they hedge their bets. If public works projects don’t bail Rovaniemi out, then maybe an unholy alliance between Father Christmas and Lordi will.

I hope that readers will forgive me for making an irresistible Pittsburgh reference. The city of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew W. Mellon—of iron and steel, of the Urban Renaissance and the Golden Triangle—is now a city that has lost its heavy industry and half its population. Today, its largest employers are its universities and hospitals. So Pittsburgh has harnessed itself to an engine of growth called Andy Warhol. The idea is that the Andy Warhol Museum on the city’s north side, which is being marketed as the world’s largest museum devoted to the work of a single artist, will generate enough tourist revenue for the city to compete in the post-industrial age. Something had to be done. You were expecting Santa Claus, maybe?

[1] “Lordi Mania—who, where, when?” Rovaniemi (Winter 2006-2007), p. 27.

Star Boys

2006-12-19T08:37:00.000+02:00

I’m not at all ready for Christmas. That is due in part to the fact that we’ve had almost no snow since the storm that buried us at the end of October. It also is due to the absence from my life of the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Ordinarily, we take our CDs out immediately after Thanksgiving and gorge on descant for a month or more. They don’t always go back on the shelf right away after we’ve rung in the new year, either.

This year, I’ve had the Star Boys competition (tiernapojat) instead. Let me back up a minute to say that Oulu is well known for its eccentricity. Actually, it is making a decent living off its quirks. This is the city that hosts an annual Garlic Night food festival. One of the big events of the year is the Air Guitar World Championships. In March, there's the Ice Swimming competition, and in June, the Tar Rowing event on the Oulu River. Let’s not forget the statue of a tubby little policeman who “guards” the market square.

Then there are the epiphany boy carolers, better known as the Star Boys, who perform a play based on a medieval folk adaptation of the story of the Three Kings, or Wise Men, who follow the Christmas star. The tradition was imported from Sweden and ultimately from Germany, but the people of northern Ostrobothnia made it their own in the nineteenth century. In Oulu, Star Boys performances date to 1873. Oulu appropriated Star Boys in the way that Rovaniemi appropriated Santa Claus (more on that subject next week).

There are very precise requirements. The boys sing in unison. Their voices can’t have changed yet. Girls need not apply. The play “is always performed in the Oulu dialect, although a healthy mix of variations has begun to emerge in modern days.”[1] There are four characters. King Herod is dressed in a red cape. The King of the Moors wears a black costume and blackface. There is a knight in the employ of Herod, who often wears a blue cape and brandishes a sword at key moments. Finally, there is the “Star Twirler” known as Mänkki. I am not making this up.

The script calls for a certain amount of fighting, posturing, and boasting. The Church never approved of these folk performances, which were inclined to embellish the biblical narrative. Some parts of the story have been rearranged, and at some point in the nineteenth century, the play acquired an imperial coda when a tribute to Tsar Alexander was tacked on.

Traditionally, the boys travel about serenading the townspeople in exchange for money or some other type of prize. The photo up top was taken on the ground floor of the Stockmann department store. After their performance, I followed them up the escalator and noticed “a healthy mix of variation” from tradition; the Star Boy second from the left—the one with the blond pony tail—is a girl. I also saw Star Boys performing in Zakuska the other night. It is said that they do their most successful fund-raising in the city’s bars.

The music itself is entirely unlike the Christmas carols we know and love, or hate. It is a little like a stylized version of chant, and I have heard the word “pagan” used to describe it. I suppose it is an acquired taste. I’ll say that I vastly prefer it to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Joulupukki,” which I have heard twice or thrice.

Happy holidays!

[1] Look at Oulu: the Official Oulu Guide, p. 26.

The Mysterious Rites of Sauna, part three

2006-12-18T10:23:00.000+02:00

In part one of this trilogy, I reported that the sauna in my kerrostalo is on a thermostat set at 80 degrees Celsius—176 degrees Fahrenheit. (Since then, someone has raised it to 85.) I said that I thought the sauna had helped me recover from a serious head cold. I also confessed that I don’t really know what to do with myself in there. What I didn’t quite say was that some serious waves of loneliness—the only ones I’ve experienced here, really—have swept over me in that Nordic caldarium.

In part two, I said that I had learned to attend to the rites of sauna for their own sake, and not as a means of spiritual transcendence, and that from now on I would be content to let sauna theology take care of itself. I have been enjoying my sauna ever since I adopted this Episcopalian attitude.

I thought I was ready for part three, which coincided with a visit from a friend from the States. George and I go way back—to the fall of 1965, to be exact. He was my teacher in college, and I asked him to serve as the outside reviewer for a student project I had been supervising over here. In addition to being smart and well read, George is an unusually curious and amiable human being, which is why he’s good at asking questions and offering constructive criticism. It’s also one of the reasons he enjoys travel. He talks to strangers. He is a fellow-traveler of the Finnish Sauna Society, and he actually has a sauna in his basement. In fact, he had written to me earlier to explain that sauna was a social occasion, not a set of rituals. You can see why I was eager to sit at his feet, so to speak.

We had a very nice dinner at my favorite Russian place, Zakuska. Then we repaired to the Holiday Inn across the street from Oulu’s Lutheran Cathedral (see the September 26, 2006 post, “Yikes?”). We headed straight for the sauna, where we stripped and stood under the shower for a minute so we’d have some moisture to contribute to the atmosphere right away.

The sauna in my block of flats is nice. You walk up two steps and sit on an elevated bench, across the aisle from the stove. There is a little railing that you can put your feet on, but mostly you just have to face forward with your feet flat on the floor, and that gets a little uncomfortable after awhile. When it’s time to pour some water over the rocks to generate some holy löyly, you have to get up and negotiate the stairs—not that easy when you’re a little woozy. If you had company, you’d be sitting side-by-side, which is okay, but ideally, there would be the possibility of some eye contact. But basically, as I have said, the sauna in my kerrostalo is almost all right.

The sauna in the Holiday Inn is infinitely better. It’s an in-the-round affair. The stove sits in the middle, down below the circular bench. You don’t have to stare straight ahead at a wooden wall. You can make eye contact with the man next to you, or across the way. Then too, there’s a railing that somehow invites you to prop your feet up and lean back. Plus, you can summon the löyly without having to get up. This is a vastly superior design, not only because the seating is more comfortable, but mainly because it facilitates socializing.

But if you can’t stand the heat, you should get out of the sauna, to quote good ol’ Harry Trumalainen. It seemed awfully hot in there right from the get-go. At one point George checked the thermometer: 106 degrees Celsius. That, brothers and sisters, is 223 degrees Fahrenheit. Jaysus, it was hot in there.

After awhile, a young Pakistani fellow joined us. George engaged him in conversation right away. We learned that he works in Oulu’s haitekki sector, and he seemed like an amiable chap. I could tell that the two of them were going to bond. Meanwhile, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I lasted maybe twenty minutes, start to finish, before bailing out. The real rites of sauna are social, and I’m just not gregarious enough. “Know thyself,” someone once said.

It occurred to me later that at the very least I could have asked our Pakistani mate to take a picture of George and me—a G-rated one to decorate the blog, natch—but I didn’t even think to do that. I wonder, what is the boiling point of digital cameras? Does anybody know?

Tornio-Haparanda Site Visit

2006-12-16T10:42:00.000+02:00

In Rome, years ago, I was told a joke about two English women who couldn’t decide which of the two palaces in the city center was the actual Palazzo Venezia, and which was the otherwise undistinguished nineteenth-century building that had been constructed, just for the sake of symmetry, to frame the piazza. Back and forth they went, consulting their Blue Guides and Georgina Masson and making the case for one, then the other. “Either way,” one of them concluded, “we’ve seen it.”

There are some things that you need to see just to cross them off your list. Because of what I learned this semester about the Tornio-Haparanda border erasure project, the planned EuroCity at its core became just such a destination for me (see Out on the Border and HAPARANDATORNIO, posted on 01 and 04 December, respectively).

So off to the formerly Janus-faced border city went I, with friend George in tow. George is a good sport. From Oulu, it’s a two-hour-and-twenty-minute bus ride each way. We shrewdly calculated that the 9:20 bus would get us there at mid-day, the only time that outdoor photography would be even remotely feasible.

We arrived on schedule at 11:40. As luck would have it, the skies were overcast and yellowish, with intermittent rain. A few weeks earlier, ten or more centimeters of snow on the ground would have helped illuminate the city. As it was, my bossy camera insisted that there wasn’t enough light to take pictures, even at what passes for high noon in these parts.

The temperature must have been hovering right around nolla, because while the ground appeared to be merely wet, there actually was a layer of ice underneath that made the footing extremely treacherous. During the earlier snowstorm a layer of gravel had been applied to help people get traction. George told me that it’s called “grit” in the U.K., and that it is laid down by “gritmen.” For some reason, that captured my fancy. In my next life, I want to be a True Gritman.

As it turned out, there really were not a lot of photo opportunities in Tornio-Haparanda. By far the most photogenic thing we saw was an odd little Orthodox church that was built in the nineteenth century. There is actually a very famous church in Tornio, a 1686 beauty that tourists come from all over to see. It’s two blocks from the bus station. For reasons that will become clear, we never saw it.

Within a few minutes after our arrival at the Tornio bus station, we were standing at the international border. At this writing, EuroCity is a massive construction project that began with the building of a dike designed to seal off one of the channels of the Tornio River. Land is now being reclaimed on the former river bed, and that is where the celebrated EuroCity will rise. I was reminded of the Dutch new towns that have been built on “polders” reclaimed from the former Zuider Zee. But here, of course, it’s all high-rise apartment buildings in the Scandinavian mode. See photo up top.

The two former customs houses stand on either side of the land reclamation project. Both are slated for adaptive re-use. In between, on what is called the Green Line, is a new joint tourist center that objectifies the “branding” and “visioning” mission that is at the heart of EuroCity, and of Tarmo Pikner’s thesis project. For some reason, the tourist center was closed, so we had to just gawk at the embryonic EuroCity without guidance or plan.

From the Green Line, we made our way—careening, like Ray Bolger and Burt Lahr, down the yellow grit road—into Sweden and past the big new IKEA store, which has already opened with great fanfare. The store is intended to serve a four-nation market (Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia), and also as one of the anchors of EuroCity. It is on the Haparanda side, and that is no coincidence, as the Marxists used to say. IKEA is a Swedish company. International boundaries still count for something, it turns out.

We were reminded of that several times—first, by signs cautioning us that the border is temporal as well as spatial and political. Finland is one hour ahead of Sweden, and presumably always will be. PR types have made much of this quirk. It is said, for instance, that if you time it just right (anytime after 11:01 p.m. on a sunny Saturday night in summer, I suppose) at the jointly operated golf course that straddles the Green Line out in the ‘burbs, you can tee up in Sweden and drive a ball into both Finland and “next week.” I suppose this makes Haparanda-Tornio a “City of Tomorrow,” but I’m not sanguine about the marketability of this arcanum.

Like all IKEA outlets, the one in Haparanda is a Very Big Box. So far, at least, nothing has been done around its edges to accommodate the kinds of “mixed primary uses” that Jane Jacobs says are essential in combating “border vacuums.” There are some existing shops adjacent to the Green Line on the Tornio side, and they will help to generate activity, just as the high-rise apartment houses will stimulate demand for local services. But how any IKEA can ever become integral to healthy urban tissue remains a mystery to me.

Along the way, we noted that while the city seemed pretty dead, the Alko on the Tornio side was hopping. In fact, we noticed that a bus had parked out front, and that passengers had debouched, some with empty suitcases. Others already were struggling back with their loot. Clearly, they were here to re-stock their vodka cellars.

At first, I thought, these people must be from remote corners of Lapland, and this is the closest Alko. Later, I remembered reading in a guide book that people routinely travel from Sweden to Tornio because the booze is cheaper in Finland. What we were witnessing was a busload of thirsty Swedes taking advantage of another feature of the international border that is not likely to be erased soon. The Swedes buy their booze in Finland, and the Finns buy their booze in Estonia. I wonder where the Estonians go.

By the time we had seen what there is to see of the incipient EuroCity, it was only 12:25, and we realized we had a chance to catch the 12:35 bus back to Oulu. We crossed a different bridge back into Finland. We picked up the pace and made it with a couple of minutes to spare. We had spent less than an hour, all told, in Tornio-Haparanda, but now I can claim to be an expert on international border erasure, and I have a under-exposed photo of the Green Line Tourist Information Centre to prove it. George promised not to blow my cover. He really is a good sport.

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us

2006-12-15T09:01:00.000+02:00

I seem to be having an attack of the lit’ry fever today. Bear with me.

The Finns are famously curious about how they are regarded by others in the world. Part of that curiosity seems to originate in concern about whether they are regarded by others at all. Assure them that every American knows all there is to know about Mr. Lordi and his heavy metal group’s victory in the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest (okay, just in case: http://www.lordi.fi/main.site?action=app/gallery/random&dir_id=7), and they will beam. You’ve made their day. Aurinko paistaa. Tell them that you’ve never seen Conan O’Brien’s celebrated telecasts from Finland, and you will send them into a slough of despond (it’s from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, here: http://www.classicallibrary.org/bunyan/pilgrim/2.htm.).

Americans, I would submit, are less curious about how they are perceived abroad. We are confident, rightly so, that people round the world know who we are. Though one must beware. Here in Finland, there is always the distinct possibility that the person to whom you’re speaking will know more about U.S. history, geography, and culture than you do.

How, exactly, America is regarded abroad is another matter entirely. I have been peppered with indelicate questions (“Did you vote for Bush?” “Why are there no grocery stores in your city centers?” “How can people pay for healthcare in your country?”) so frequently by the supposedly reserved Finns that I am inclined to think that our “approval ratings” aren’t what we’d like them to be. There is not much one more or less mild-mannered Fulbrighter can do about that, alas.

Let me introduce as evidence of the sorry state of American credibility abroad several conversations and email exchanges I have had with a colleague over here. Our dialogue began with a casual query on his part about my seminar on the history of Pittsburgh. I asked him if he had ever been to the city. He said no, but that he had relatives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Ashtabula, Ohio. I know a little bit about both towns, as it happens, so I told him what I knew, and then followed up with a link to Morgantown’s dopey people-mover system, which he enjoyed. Later, he printed out the lyrics of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” (“They're really rockin Boston, In Pittsburgh, P. A.”) which was when I started to realize that he not only knew something about Pittsburgh, it was clear that he knew more than a little about American popular music.

I probed a little, and he explained that he and his brother had visited the States in 1984, searching for the roots of rock-‘n-roll. That led naturally enough to Rhythm & Blues, and to Chicago, where the two Finnish lads somehow found their way to a club so deeply buried in the city’s South Side that the performers felt they had to drive them back to the Loop, for safety’s sake, after the show.

These two Finnish pilgrims paid some serious dues. They measured their progress in Greyhound bus miles. They slept at the YMCA (cue the Village People). They dined at McDonald’s and Burger King so they could add to their collection of vintage 45s. The trail eventually led them to the Delta Blues Museum, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where they

signed the visitors’ book in the public library where the Blues Museum was (and still is, I think—Muddy Waters, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker lived there in their younger days). The apprentice (white, young) was smiling as he saw that we wrote Helsinki, Finland (adding Europe) and asked us if that was in another county! (not country, but COUNTY!)

My colleague was, of course, appalled. And it made me think that that gift “to see ourselves as others see us” might be a mixed blessing. Click on the title of this post for a link to the Delta Blues Museum.

Blood Language

2006-12-14T17:47:00.000+02:00

Whenever I venture out of lovely Oulu, I consult my Lonely Planet guide to prepare myself. Last week, on the train to Tampere, under “Places to Eat,” I read the following: “The scary-looking Tampere specialty, mustamakkara, a thick black sausage made with cow’s blood, can be found lurking at any of the city’s several markets, including the kauppahalli (indoor market). Some locals insist mustamakkara tastes best with milk and cranberry jam.”

Well, that got my attention. I had seen mustamakkara (literally, black sausage) many times, but I had never tried it before. Tampere seemed just the right place to give it a go.

Blood sausage is scary-looking. I tried it with my scrambled eggs on the morning I checked out of the Hotelli Cumulus Pinja in Tampere. I immediately wished I had taken the nakki instead. They’re too bland! The blood is responsible for the color, but the flavor is mild, and the consistency is more mealy than meaty. Somewhere I have read that it contains rye, and it’s possible that there are other cereals in there. Once you get past its looks, mustamakkara is anything but scary. It’s Felix Unger "lurking" under the Lordi mask. I decided finally that it tastes best with milk and cranberry jam.

And that makes me think of the notoriously scary language that is spoken in these parts. Suomea is in fact a very hard language to learn, especially for a sixty-something guy who was never particularly good at learning foreign languages in the first place. (In an earlier post, I described myself as under-endowed, which elicited a number of private email messages, several of them hilarious. I know what you’re thinking: thanks for not sharing.)

Anyway, last Friday night, in Tampere, over a dish of Finnish meatballs, I told my dinner companion that I had found studying Finnish very enriching. He asked whether I intended to continue my language course when I returned to the States. I said I thought I probably would. “Why?” he asked. I wasn’t ready for that.

What I said, was, “I find it a really fascinating language, and language is the best route into the culture,” which avoided the question of whether I could ever hope to learn enough Finnish to get “into the culture,” or to actually use it in-country. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I suspect it was something akin to “Sure, Finnish is a fascinating language. So is Chinese.” Good point.

Yes, Finnish is difficult. It’s not an Indo-European language, there are precious few cognates, and the nouns decline. Even the word for “no” declines. There are fifteen or so cases, and the language lacks articles, prepositions, grammatical gender, and future tense. It does have postpositions, though, and the challenging partitive case. Perkele!

But why should it be any harder for an American to learn Finnish than for a native speaker of this unusual language to learn English, which is not intrinsically easy, either. Surely English must seem just as bizarre to a Finn, at least at first, as Finnish does to us. Why should tit for tat not be identical to tat for tit?

To which there is one good retort, and it has to do with the World Wide Web, television, movies, and popular music. English is pervasive, and Finnish is arcane—everywhere but here.

Still, . . . One of my colleagues here complains that people in Helsinki think that the distance from Helsinki to Oulu is farther than the distance from Oulu to Helsinki. “They invite us to mid-week meetings in Helsinki,” he moans, “as if we were just down the street. When you invite them to come to Oulu for something, they act as if you want them to fly to the moon.”

In the gospel according to Jean Piaget, children go through an egocentric stage where they can understand that they have siblings, but not that they themselves might be someone’s sibling. Without a sense of reciprocity, you get the “My brother was an only child” phenomenon. People in this country take it for granted that it is unreasonable to expect an American to learn Finnish. They will tell you that in unaccented British English (though, granted, even some of the most fluent will stumble over our pesky articles, or mix up their third person singular pronouns). Frankly, I find this double standard a powerful incentive to re-up—I mean, just to prove a point.

There might be more to it than that. I wonder if, subconsciously, I’m not ready to let go of Finland just yet.

Vanha Rauma

2006-12-14T16:41:00.000+02:00

I was adopted for a day by a family in Tampere—which rhymes, by the way.

Attentive readers of this blog know that immediately upon my arrival in Finland I fell in love with the old wooden buildings in the center of Oulu. Ever since, the self-deprecating locals have done everything they could think of to cool my ardor. They’re nothing special, ‘twas said, more than once. Remember the devastating fire of 1822, people reminded me; they’re not that old. And there aren’t that many of them, what with the Russian bombing during the Continuation War, not to mention the urbanist enthusiasms of the 1960s, which might have been worse. Oulu has been unlucky on the wooden building front, was the verdict of those who live here. You should go to Raahe, they would add.

Raahe is only a little over an hour away by express bus. Twice I consulted the timetables, but then, both times, I had to scub the mission at the last minute. And so it was that Raahe, like many a hometown attraction, was a victim of convenience. Now it ranks close to the top of my list of things to do—right up there with Porvoo and Savonlinna, just a notch below St. Petersburg—when I return to this part of the world, which I surely will do, with my better half in tow, one fine Kesäkuu or Heinäkuu day.

One reason I never made it to Raahe is that I arranged a trip—on non-refundable terms—to Rauma, which is much farther away and harder to get to, instead. Rauma has a medieval church with rare paintings on the ceiling, a city hall built in 1776, and several masonry houses. Everything else is wood. Vanha Rauma hasn’t had a fire since 1682, and it suffered no twentieth-century war damage, which explains why in 1991 its 28 hectares were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—Finland’s first, along with the fortress of Suomenlinna. It consists of some 600 wooden buildings—that’s right, six hundred—on an essentially medieval street plan at the heart of a modern city of 37,000 souls. Vanha Rauma claims to be “the most complete and widely preserved wooden town in the Nordic countries.”[1]

According to my knowledgeable and thoroughly charming tour guide, an expert on the history of UNESCO World Heritage policies, one of the keys to understanding this site is that Old Rauma is adamant about being a living city, not an outdoor museum. It is no Williamsburg, with its citizen-interpreters. There are four little museums here, and while their collections are of some interest, they are probably more useful as a means of penetrating the architecture, of seeing the facades from the other side, as it were.

The architecture fairly leaps off the street here. The buildings are drop-dead gorgeous, but by that I don’t mean that they are anything like a Palladian villa, or the Taj Mahal. Rauma’s wooden buildings are gorgeous in the way that the Greek Revival farmhouses of Ohio’s Western Reserve are gorgeous. A few of Rauma’s houses were owned by wealthy nineteenth-century merchants, but most of them were intended as, and have been, the homes of ordinary people. One of the chief virtues of Vanha Rauma is that people were not thrown out of their homes to make way for gentrification. Nor does the UNESCO designation signify that Old Rauma aspires to be an elitist ghetto. It probably could be called a “gated community,” however.

I mean that in two senses. Once, there was a palisade around the whole town, with tollgates at several points on the perimeter. As my tour guide explained, the individual homeowners bore responsibility for maintenance of the wall, and so they had an interest in limiting its length, and that made for a city that was compact and densely populated. Growth was managed by “in-fill” on the existing streets and blocks, rather than by sprawl. Vanha Rauma is the special place that it is today largely because of that circumferential enclosure, which was put up in the 1620s and not removed until 1809.

Vanha Rauma was and is gated in another sense. Private homes consisted of a “narrow double cabinhouse,”[2] plus porches, kitchens, and various outbuildings used for storage, animals, privies—and saunas, of course. New rooms and outbuildings were added incrementally, as needed. There would be several such residential complexes on a block, and the building walls themselves, plus interstitial fences, were used to enclose the whole block. What was contained within, in both form and function, would have resembled the medieval settlements that John Stilgoe has described as landschafts.[3] Access to the introspective blocks and private residences was and is gained through wooden gates. Today, Rauma’s gates—along with its windows—are among its most attractive physical features. I was even able to get a few photos, despite bleak mid-winter skies and a landscape that cried out for a blanket of reflective snow.

At one point, strange as it may seem, I was reminded of New Mexico—specifically, Chimayó, a very early Spanish settlement in which the walls of individual residences were conscripted to serve as part of the town’s fortifications, and which used free-standing walls for its interstitial connections. The sense of enclosure at Chimayó is palpable, and very much the same as at Rauma.

The integrity of architectural style at Vanha Rauma is the result of a period of prosperity beginning in the 1890s. A brochure published by the Rauma Museum explains:

The late flourishing of sailing ships in Rauma brought in its wake building construction. However it was not possible to construct new buildings because they would not follow the square area plans, as this would have required buildings on several plots to be acquired and then knocked down, so the people in Rauma referred to rebuild the old. Over a period of ten years, two thirds of the buildings in Old Rauma got a new appearance, when their cladding was changed to the decorative Neo Renaissance style. Due to the short period of change the appearance of the area was preserved as a whole and has remained nearly the same for the last one hundred years.[4]

A few of the details here are distinctive—or were new to me, at any rate. Some buildings, for example, have “breathing bases,” squarish openings in the foundation to allow for better ventilation. I couldn’t figure out what they were at first. My guide explained that they sometimes lead to crawl spaces that could be used by homeowners to check for moisture and dry rot. A brochure published by Tammela, the Old Rauma Renovation Centre, has a drawing that shows how the ventilation system works, complete with a cat underneath the floorboards.

Then there is the story of renovation, which begins in the late 1960s, and of the subsequent preparation of what is called locally the “preservative” townplan, which went into effect in 1982. This was a period of intense consciousness raising that culminated in the World Heritage designation in 1991. In the beginning, many people in Old Rauma were unaware of the architectural glory that lay under their peeling paint and sagging cornices.

How could they have known? In those days, the Old Town was a decidedly unfashionable section of an unglamorous city in a country that had embraced Modernism in the way that it does everything else—that is, by consensus. The buildings of Old Rauma had been carved up and jerry-rigged to accommodate people who would have preferred not to live so modestly, and in such close quarters. There was no central heating here. There was little in the way of electrical wiring, let alone plumbing. There was talk about demolition and rebuilding. But homeowners renovated, one house at a time, instead, and the people who did so have profited from the improvement in their standard of living as well as from the increase in property values.

They were educated by the aforementioned Tammela, which also, it must be said, is an architectural review board with the authority to grant or deny building permits. That in turn means that it must balance the public interest in preservation against private property rights, and that is never easy. Tammela occupies quarters in one of the larger buildings in the old city, which it uses to demonstrate restoration techniques. It’s the building on the left in the photo up top. You can, for example, learn about different kinds of insulation techniques at Tammela, and the staff will help you choose the one most appropriate to your needs. You can learn how to do the work yourself. Tammela also maintains a “bank of spare parts”—things like doors—that were obtained when buildings have had to be sacrificed. I picked up a flyer containing “a recipe for traditional red ochre paint.” The education campaign required to get local residents to buy into the World Heritage Site campaign is a story in itself, one that my guide has looked into in some detail.

I was very surprised to learn that only 800 people live in Old Rauma’s 600 wooden buildings. The explanation begins with the fact that people want more elbow room nowadays, so makeshift partitions and other innovations have been removed, making spaces more commodious. And modern plumbing has been installed, meaning that privies could be removed or converted to other uses. In fact, many of Old Rauma’s 600 wooden buildings are the outbuildings referred to above, along with a number of shops.

One of the appealing things about the place is that it does not seek to be a pristine, decontaminated cultural district. In general, of course, the neo-Renaissance religion in architecture holds sway here. But the preservationists seem to have a very enlightened attitude about non-conforming structures and uses. The occasional incongruous building is tolerated. I saw one, a cheap 1970s structure that tries hard to fit in, but really can’t. Yes, it is an eyesore, and yet it seems to be generally understood that its continued presence helps to tell the story of how preservation was regarded at one time, and how neo-Renaissance forms were apprehended at the level of the individual resident.

There is also a poignant dimension to Rauma, and that has to do with its UNESCO-ratified status as the poster child for wooden towns. Rauma’s success pleases me very much, and I’m impressed with the way people here have handled their leadership responsibilities. At the same time, I sympathize with the Raahes of the world, which have been relegated to the status of permanent also-rans. Raahe, as my guide put it, “is Rauma twenty years ago,” but it will never, ever, catch up, mainly because Rauma got there first. It reminds me of the hierarchy of American higher education. For every Princeton and Amherst, there are probably fifty thoroughly admirable but entirely anonymous and under-endowed liberal arts colleges in Ohio that deserved a better fate. There is something utterly unfair about that.

Finally—to return to the script—there were within living memory as many as eleven grocery stores, most of them mom-and-pops, in Old Rauma. Now there is none. But soon, there will be a Prisma in the buffer zone just outside the historic district. Prisma is a supermarket, and it typically is a Very Big Box indeed. It will come with a vast parking lagoon, and we can expect it to be an incongruous excrescence on the face of a well-preserved dowager queen.

Here is where I began to worry, not so much about the aesthetics as about the threat posed by the Prisma to Rauma’s continued existence as a living city. This worry actually gave rise to a second New Mexico memory, which occurred to me in the bus on the way out of town. A few years ago, a friend introduced my wife and me to a young woman who had grown up in Taos Pueblo, and who spent the better part of a day showing us around, introducing us to her relatives, all of whom seemed to be artists and/or artists’ models. Taos Pueblo is an artists’ colony, it seems, where the residents take in each other’s laundry—in a picturesque way, of course, to attract the tourists. That is not so very far—minus the Rockefeller money—from Williamsburg. Nor is it all that far—minus the saunas—from Rauma. And it’s precisely what Old Rauma has sought, quite rightly, to avoid. My point is that the old town could use some grocery stores, and that will be impossible once the Prisma opens.

So, you might well wonder, if this post is all about Rauma (and New Mexico!), why did I open with the little jingle about Tampere? It’s because Tampere served as my base camp for this expedition. That’s where I met up with both of the learned and generous scholars who did their best—while a third minded a baby at home—to introduce me to Tampere, a city that actually has a much better claim than Rauma to uniqueness among Finnish cities.

I was escorted past the carnival of brick—the power stations, factories, textile mills, chimneys, and tanneries—lying alongside the Tammerkoski, in the industrial heart of a city that was Finland’s Manchester (or Pittsburgh, I fancy to think). In recent years, most of the brick buildings of the Finlayson and Tampella factories have been successfully converted to recreational use. They have done their heavy lifting and their sweating. Now they have been ordered to have fun. It seems they’ve learned how.

One of my Tampere informants extolled the virtues of the Amuri Museum of Workers’ Housing, a block of tenement apartments and shops that is open only in the summer. I also learned about the flat, once occupied by V. I. Lenin in exile (1905-1906), and now, I take it, a rather campy museum. Next time. After Raahe.

[1] Old Rauma: World Heritage Town, brochure published by the Rauma Museum.

[2] Old Rauma: World Heritage Town, brochure published by the Rauma Museum.
[3] John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
[4] Old Rauma: World Heritage Town, brochure published by the Rauma Museum.

Independence Day in Helsinki

2006-12-13T09:07:00.000+02:00

After the patriotic singing in front of the Oulu City Hall, I watched the choir walk away with their torches to the cemetery at Intiö, where there was another, smaller ceremony. Meanwhile, I rushed back to the flat to do what people do all over Finland on Independence Day. I turned on my TV and watched the annual Gala Reception held at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki. This, too, is a Very Big Deal.

There were 1,800 people at this year’s event, and it appeared that each one went through the receiving line to shake the hands of President Tarja Halonen and her husband, Dr. Pentti Arajaervi. I wasn’t surprised that the TV cameras were there to cover the poo-bahs and nabobs of Finnish high society as they pressed the flesh of the republican queen and her prince consort. What surprised me was that the cameras remained riveted on the receiving line for what seemed like hours. (I didn’t know enough to time it.) The thing is that this—the receiving line—was not preliminary to a main event. There would be dancing later, but this was the main event.

Out of devotion to this blog, I watched the whole thing despite the fact that I didn’t know enough to ask, let alone answer, the most basic questions, which, according to Jukka Laakkonen of the Oulun Ylioppilaslehti (the student newspaper here), were “Who will have the most amazing dress this year? Will the prime minister arrive alone or with someone special? What will happen if Olli Saarela and Eero Heinäluoma should meet in the wc-queue after few drinks? Will Mr. Lordi arrive with his mask on or will he arrive at all?” (“News in Brief,” 05.12.2006, p. 6).

I suspect some readers might be wanting a little background here. I’ll do my best. Since 2003, Finland’s prime minister has been Matti Vanhanen, who is divorced and has been the subject of numerous tabloid stories, despite the fact that he is a teetotaler, a centrist, and generally pretty boring. On the other hand, he stands tall at 6 feet 5 inches, and Jacques Chirac—who keeps making cameo appearances in this blog despite my best my efforts to keep him out—once referred to him as “the sexiest man in Finland.” I have seen pictures of the Mr. Vanhanen, but I wouldn’t recognize the man if I ran into him in the herkku at Stockmann’s.

Olli Saarela is a film director who is married to the present Minister of Culture. Eero Heinäluoma is the Finance Minister. In a dispute that somehow arose in budget negotiations several months ago, Mr. Saarela called Mr. Heinäluoma a “miserable, big and bald-headed sissy.” As for Mr. Lordi, he definitely did not arrive in his latex mask. I can say that with confidence; I watched the whole bloody program. Whether he arrived at all, I couldn’t say, because I don’t know what he looks like--I mean, without the mask.

Here are my impressions, offered strictly for the amusement of my Finnish colleagues, who tell me they enjoy my naïve observations about Finnish society. One of them said they remind him of Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, which seemed flattering until I remembered how many people were deeply offended by that weird book, which Sam Clemens had the good sense to publish posthumously:
Tarja Halonen’s open face, and especially her broad, easy smile—yes, she does look like Conan O’Brien—are immensely appealing. She and her husband did well to greet 1,800 guests without having to ice down their swollen hands.
I think her feet were killing her.
For a country that seems egalitarian in the extreme, the Gala Reception certainly featured a very large number of sashes and epaulets, not to mention large medals dangling on chains from wrinkled necks.
The sashes and epaulets and medals may help to explain the “now equally-traditional reception for the poor” that was held in Hakaniemi Square. That’s a quote from the Helsingin Sanomat (click on the title of this post above for a link). On the other hand, it doesn’t begin to explain how “anarchy” would help to address Finland’s “inequalities,” whatever they might be.
I noticed that most people just walked up to the President and stuck out their hand. Every now and then someone would bow before offering their hand, and that seemed to me a lovely way of showing respect for her office. In the Far East, batters bow to the umpire before entering that batter’s box. We don’t bow anymore, do we? It’s a shame. I would draw the line at the curtsy, though.
I noticed that many people fawned over the President and then dispatched Dr. Arajaervi with something like a perfunctory glancing blow. I hope someone was taking names.
I couldn’t help but notice the uncanny instinct that people have for pairing off--springer spaniels with springer spaniels, beagles with beagles, mastiffs with mastiffs, as if they had been matched up by Noah himself. Every once in a while, there’d be an Irish setter (usually a young one, female) paired with a bloodhound (usually an old one, male), but not very often. Really, I’ve never seen a better argument against central planning. People can do these things for themselves, by golly.
It seemed to me that as the receiving line dragged on and on, people started speeding through, as if to say, we know we’re worthless, and we hate to burden you with our presence. I thought that the very last person in line, a gentleman with a white beard, gave new meaning to the word “shame-faced.”

And when everything was said and done, the hosts moved to another room in the Presidential Palace, and there commenced yet another receiving line, this one (I think) featuring bishops and university rectors and senior civil servants. Whatever they’re paying her, it isn’t enough.

Independence Day in Oulu

2006-12-11T14:46:00.000+02:00

It’s called Itsenäisyyspäivä, and it’s a Very Big Deal.

Enlightened people say that one needn’t bother memorizing dates, because you can always look them up. But I’ve found that properly contextualizing a given event usually involves memorizing a bloody date, like it or not. Finnish independence, which we are celebrating as this post is being constructed, is one of those events.

The story of Finnish independence is vaguely familiar. They declared it, and then they waited for the world’s verdict. In the case of Finland, the world waited in turn for V. I. Lenin to decide what to do. Remember that the October Revolution had just occurred, the implications of which were unclear for Finland, which was a Grand Duchy of the recently deceased Russian Empire. Remember, too, that while hindsight allows us to see that the days of the German Empire were severely numbered, the outcome of the Great War still seemed uncertain on December 6, 1917.

Lenin cleverly recognized Finland’s independence, and then armed the Finnish Red cadres, based in Tampere, to spread the Bolshevik revolution in these parts, while he was taking care of business at home. What happened next is summarized succinctly by the Lonely Planet guide to Finland, and while it might be an over-simplification, it manages to put things in an international context:

On 28 January 1918, the Civil War flared in two separate locations. The Reds attempted to foment revolution in Helsinki. The Whites (as the government troops were now called), led by CGE Mannerheim, clashed with Russian troops near Vaasa. During 108 days of fighting in two locations, approximately 30,000 Finns were killed by their fellow citizens. The Reds, comprising the working class, aspired to Russian-style socialist revolution while retaining independence. The nationalist Whites dreamed of monarchy and sought to emulate Germany.

The Whites eventually gained victory under Mannerheim, with Germany’s help. The devastating war ended in May 1918. Prince of Hessen, Friedrich Karl, was elected king of Finland by the Eduskunta on 9 October 1918—but the German monarchy collapsed one month later, following Germany’s defeat in WWI. Finland now faced a dilemma: the Russian presence was a clear security risk, but Germany was a discredited political model because of its war loss.”[1]

Keep in mind that new Soviet-style regimes were cropping up all over the place—in Kurt Eisner’s Bavaria, for example—and in a world of general strikes and revolutionary rhetoric, even the American “Red Scare” of that era may not have been as far-fetched as it might look to us, with the benefit of hindsight.

At any rate, it was under these unpropitious circumstances that Finland—i.e., the victorious Whites—created a republic, and then the issue was essentially the same one that faced the people of the United States after the ratification of the Constitution—whether they could “keep it,” to nick a good line from Benjamin Franklin.

Finland’s declaration of independence is what we’re celebrating today. Meanwhile, a cone of silence has been lowered over the Finnish Civil War that followed so closely on its heels. Thirty thousand casualties are a lot for a small country, and every casualty represented an incalculable loss, for that is the nature of internecine warfare.

Let me now take this global narrative down to the level of what we used to call the “common man,” and daily life in the city I have called home for these past months.

The Independence Day celebration in Oulu took place from 5:45 to 6:00 at the City Hall (kaupungintalo, literally town house) on Kirkkokatu. Since I got a late start, I had the good fortune to see one of the choirs in procession on Kasarmintie, each member wearing a “school cap” and carrying a torch. I tagged along behind the police escort, and we all moved briskly toward the city center.

A second choir had already assembled on the steps of City Hall, and it was they who did most of the singing. They sang four or five songs, each of which was followed by the clomp clomp clomp of people applauding in gloves and mittens. At the end, everyone was asked to join in singing a song that I didn’t happen to know. I kept busy trying to get a decent photograph in the dark. I failed.

Only one of the songs performed was familiar to me, and that, of course, was Sibelius’s Finlandia Suite. Now, let me back up a minute to say that I am probably as patriotic as the next guy, but I do not normally get all misty-eyed when I hear patriotic music. For me, the Star Spangled Banner means that the first pitch is just moments away. I strongly prefer America the Beautiful, but I am able to contain my emotion when I hear it. I find both God Bless America and its counterfoil, This Land Is Your Land, far too strident. Sousa fires me up, but that’s martial, rather than patriotic, music, per se.

The music of romantic nationalism, on the other hand, “peels my potatoes,” to steal another line, this one from a friend who will let me get away with it. I am not generally a Francophile, or an admirer of the French Revolution specifically, and yet Le Marseillaise knocks me out. Every time. By the way, in the painting above, that’s Rouget de Lisle, composer of Le Marseillaise, singing it for the first time.

As for Sibelius, I am not a fan of his, either. There’s just something about the Finlandia Suite. If I had allowed myself, I would have burst into tears last Wednesday at the Itsenäisyyspäivä ceremonies, and it would have had nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with music. I have always responded strongly to music—many different kinds of music—and I have always been glad of it. Still, I felt a little silly, choking back my emotions in front of the Oulu City Hall.

[1] Paul Harding and Jennifer Brewer, Finland (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 4th edition, 2003), p. 13.

What's Showing at the Alvar Aalto Museum

2006-12-07T10:48:00.000+02:00

Finland has proposed Paimio Hospital to be inscribed on the Unesco World
Heritage List. The nominated property covers the entire Paimio Hospital area, including the residential buildings, the water supply and purification plants, and their surroundings. The scope of the buffer zone is circular, extending from the main building as the centre point. This ensures that the view from the roof terrace of the hospital towards the forested landscape is preserved.

Paimio, a tuberculosis sanatorium designed by Alvar Aalto and built in 1930-33, enjoyed acclaim around the world during its construction and influenced the breakthrough of Functionalism and its spread through Finland and Scandinavia in general.

Paimio Hospital combines a new approach to sanatorium design with the breakthrough of modern architecture. Aalto’s chief aim was to promote the well-being and recovery of patients through architecture. He availed of the potential in new architecture to meet the demand for standarisation and hygiene. He
combined these with artistic creativity and a personal touch. Experiments with innovative technical solutions and advanced interior design, especially regarding wooden furniture, can be seen in the hospital. A humanism that is distinctive of Aalto’s design, and has enriched modern architecture, can be found there.

The spirit and key features of the sanatorium period are still strongly evident. Paimio’s significance lies in it continuing role as a hospital. The buildings and their immediate surroundings form an integral whole. The ambience and the hierarchy of spaces have been preserved despite the many changes. The relationship between buildings and landscape still endures.

Paimio Hospital represents a synthesis that is characterised by a milieu formed by buildings in harmony with nature, the functionality of a ‘medical instrument’, the innovation of both buildings and building methods, the design of details and appropriate materials, and harmony of the colours used. These properties are the foundation of the hospital’s continued use in the future.

Paimio Hospital meets many of the criteria required for a building to be inscribed on the World Heritage List. It represents a unique example of human creativity, exhibits an important interchange on development in architecture and is an outstanding example of a type of building and architectural ensemble which illustrates a significant stage in human history.

The proposal of Paimio Hospital to the World Heritage List accords with the recommendation that Finland concentrates on cultural heritage from underrepresented categories of the global strategy. One of these is e.g. the twentieth century architectural heritage. The proposal was prepared by the National Board of Antiquities. Contributing parties and experts were Turku University Hospital, Paimio Hospital, Paimio Municipality, the Alvar Aalto Foundation, and the Finnish Museum of Architecture. The earliest possible occasion for decision on Paimio Hospital nomination will be at the World Heritage Committee Session in 2007.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Alvar Aalto Museum.

Tuiran Paloasema

2006-12-05T15:36:00.000+02:00

I have mentioned in previous posts that I live in a neighborhood called Tuira, which is just across the Oulu River (Oulujoki) from the city center (keskusta). Ordinarily, I walk back and forth through a series of parks lying on islands separated by rivulets that form part of the river’s delta. In Scotland these rivulets would be called “burns”; as a matter of fact, Finland is a lot like Scotland (starting with the light, or lack of it).

I have written, too, that my block of flats (kerrostalo) is situated on a street called Koskitie, which translates as Rapids Road. Yes, the river used to get pretty wild just at this point, which is why there is a power station across the street from my flat. The Merikosken power plant looms large here in Tuira. I bike or walk down Koskitie every morning past the power plant to Merikosken Street (Merikoskenkatu), where I catch a bus to the university, or else I run into friendly drunks (see the post called “Hyvää Matkaa!”). In the afternoons, I might stop at the Merikosken Grilli for some takeaway stir-fry. In any case, I will give a wide berth to the Merikulma Pub and the rowdy fellows who tend to spill out of it at all hours.

I have written, too, about the museum in the park, the Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia, that contains a huge and highly detailed model of the city of Oulu as it was in 1938, and which I have used to form a mental image of what had been “a traditional ‘wooden town’ in the late 1930’s, a ‘white city’ which had a dreamy air about it on a Sunday afternoon in summer, when a gentle breeze fanned the people as they sat in the lush parks alongside the stream, on the islands of Hupisaaret or beneath the lilacs or rowans on their own gardens.” The source of this passage is Olavi K. Fält, “From an Idyll to a New War,” in Oulupolis: The History of Oulu as an International City (Oulu: Oulu City Council, 1999, pp. 89-108 at 99). All subsequent references are to this valuable essay.

Laying a modern map next to the model in the museum, one can easily perceive that Tuira was completely rebuilt after World War II. The Merikosken power station was the centerpiece of this project. A channel was dug and a dam was built to feed the river into the power station, and land was reclaimed to accommodate Toivoniemi, a suite of modernist high-rises that were built on a ground plan attributed to the great Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, who also gets credit for a set of fountains that transformed the river into an urban amenity. Officially (i.e., on the maps), this area is called Koskikeskus, Rapids Central, in other words.

I also have written about the footbridge that I ride my bike or walk across when I’m headed for the city center. Actually, it’s part footbridge, part dam. The dam in turn explains why in recent years they have installed a kalatie (fish road) here; we would call it a “ladder” that allows salmon and other species to make the journey upriver to spawn.

“I knew all that,” you’re thinking to yourself. Of course you did, since you are a conscientious, not to say compulsive, reader of this blog. But there are some things you probably didn’t know, because I didn’t know them either. First of all, there is the matter of the “Second World War.” People don’t call it that, because here it was a drama that played out in several discrete acts. The first was the Winter War, during which the Finns covered themselves in glory by repelling a massive Soviet invasion. Those old clips you’ve seen of soldiers in white parkas and skis, rifles slung over their shoulders—that’s the Winter War, which formally ended on March 13, 1940. What followed was a period during which Finland attempted to chart its own destiny while being moved like a pawn in a high-stakes chess match between the Soviet Union and Germany.

The second act was the Continuation War, which followed hard upon the German attack on the Soviet Union that began on June 22, 1941. The Finns now began carefully to do business with the Germans, whose occupation of Norway and whose opening of the eastern front invested Finland, especially the northern part of the country, with strategic importance. Meanwhile, the Soviets metamorphosed into allies of the Allies—that is, of Great Britain, the United States, and “Free France.” And that complicated things for all parties, not least for Marshall Mannerheim, the Finnish Commander in Chief.

In the final act, when Germany’s prospects were looking increasingly bleak, the Finns prudently make a separate peace with the Allied army that was at its gates—the Red army—the terms of which unfortunately required them to disarm any German troops remaining in Finland after September 15, 1944. In the unhappy “coda” to the Continuation War, practically everything north of Oulu was torched or leveled by the Wehrmacht as it retreated from the country. A well informed source with a mordant sense of humor explained to me that while the Soviets won the Continuation War, the Finns came in second.

The uniqueness of Finland’s role in the Second World War makes fascinating reading in any event. But for a political scientist practicing urban history without a license, and one who happens to be renting a flat in Tuira, the narrative is powerful enough to add a somewhat sinister overlay to an otherwise benign and familiar landscape. Olavi Fält writes that by the summer of 1942, Toppila, a port adjacent to Tuira proper, “was becoming the Germans’ main supply port in the whole of Finland. The Wehrmacht placed the office of its commandant and its transport headquarters, patrol battalion and centre for troops on leave in Oulu, and in the autumn the SS troops set up an extensive servicing and training centre in Tuira” (p. 103). On page 102 of Oulupolis, there’s a photo of German tanks rumbling down Tuira’s main drag, Valtatie, which is probably not more than 100 meters from my flat.

Fält writes that the most conspicuous German settlement in the Oulu region was right here in River City; in fact, Tuira was known locally as “Little Berlin,” and it “consisted of 275 temporary buildings and covered an area of 64 ha.” (p. 104). Most of these buildings were easily removed after the war, but one structure was built to last, and that was the German officers’ club, which survives today as the Tuira fire station (see photo up top), in a part of town that has been known ever since as Alppila, owing to the vaguely Alpine style of the club.

Adding an element of surrealism here is evidence that the Germans “brought a measure of affluence to the city. The high wages that they paid and the free food given to their employees attracted people to work for them, and both the City Council and private citizens obtained an income by renting land and accommodation to them and offering various services. All this increased the city’s tax revenues, of course, and reduced the need to raise the rate of tax during the war” (pp. 105-107). Fält observes that relations between the German and Finnish authorities in Oulu “remained good throughout the Continuation War” (p. 104). When it came time for the Germans to extricate themselves from Suomi, that operation, too, was orchestrated by their leadership in Oulu, and it seems to have been conducted in a manner that could fairly be described as courtly.

Completing the story of the alteration of the Tuira landscape during this period is the altogether extraordinary image of “Russian prisoners of war at work building the Merikoski Power Station in January 1942.” At times, there were up to 150 of them working on the project. In the photo that appears on page 105 of Oulupolis, the POWs appear to be rearranging Tuira’s landscape and riverscape underneath what looks like a foot of snow. Believe it or not, these were the lucky ones.

Recently, there has been a flap in Finland having to do with photos of the war in Lapland that have been suppressed for the past sixty years. The images have now been released, and they are not for the squeamish. Some show alleged Russian spies having a smoke with their executioners, and then, minutes later, facing a Finnish firing squad. Bloated corpses lie in the weeds, or are piled promiscuously on trucks. Most gruesome is substantial evidence that cannibalism, especially on the part of desperate Russian soldiers, was “not uncommon,” as the Helsingin Sanomat puts it. One photo shows a pile of human ribs artfully arranged next to a cast-iron skillet that was discovered in a snowbank. Click on the title of this post up top for a link.

Hyvää ruokaa Oulussa, part three

2006-12-05T09:12:00.000+02:00

Hei, foodies. It’s time for the November edition of Good Eats in Oulu. This month third place goes to the Merikosken Grilli, mainly for yeoman service in the Cheap Eats division.

On the day I arrived in Oulu, I was met at the railway station by one of my handlers, who predicted, as she drove into my neighborhood, that I would have more than one meal at Merikosken Grilli. She was right. I have found it to be a very valuable resource—in part, truthfully, because it is located next to my bus stop. On days when I stay late at the university and don’t feel like either going into the city center to forage for dinner or rolling up my sleeves to prepare a meal in the flat, Merikosken Grilli is a godsend. Aside from the issue of propinquity, it has its own distinctive merits.

Maybe I should back up a minute. When you are living for an extended period far away from home, you have to figure out how to eat well without breaking the bank. And this can be tricky, especially if you don’t have a fully equipped kitchen. We all know the drill. You stay away from the main tourist attractions and the big hotels. You avoid places that are full of empty tables in prime time. You eschew the ooh-la-la Francophone establishments and any joint that has to advertise. You look for ethnic cuisine, diners, and fish houses—places lying ever so slightly north of greasy spoon territory. You stroll around blue-collar districts in search of that special neighborhood-oriented eatery with six tables, a talented mummo (grandma) in the kitchen, and a big dog dozing by the front door.

That formula works in Italy, but not in Oulu. For one thing, while there are loads of fish here, there are no fish houses, per se. Also, there are no diners, and no Finnish knock-offs of that legendary Alexandria monument to incompetent spelling, the Wafle Shop. Yes, there are the usual ethnic restaurants, and we’ve reviewed several of them in previous posts, particularly New Bombay and Pikku Thai. I have tried four Chinese places in Oulu. I enjoyed the Szechuan chicken at Flavour Palace on Saaristonkatu. At Kiinalainen Ravintola Beijing, on Rantakatu, I had a bowl of scrumptious chicken and mushroom soup, but I thought the entrée I ordered there was only so-so. Neither of the other two Chinese places was at all satisfactory; one of them had pizza on the menu. A new favorite is Pailin, in the Kasarmi area, which could with some justice be called an “Asian fusion” place. Oulu’s smart set meets there on Sunday afternoons.

Merikosken Grilli is about as close as Finland comes to a neighborhood diner. It is run by Asians. Whether they are all members of the same family is unclear, though it seems likely. My hunch is that they are Vietnamese, but there is no telling that from the menu, which is a not-all-that-common blend of blue-collar and international.

Some of the staff members are fairly proficient in English, and when they’re behind the counter you can dispense with the menu. One time I just asked for shrimp fried rice; it was excellent. When the non-English speakers are working the counter, it’s more of a crapshoot. They would prefer to have me point at something on the menu—or, even better, at one of the signs posted overhead to advertise the daily specials. A moment’s hesitation, and they are steering me toward the hampurilainen—hamburger, of course. I never order hamburgers out because I prefer the ones that I make at the flat with high-grade ground beef from Stockmann.

The last time I was at Merikosken Grilli I ordered the Szechuan chicken from the generic Asian menu. It cost 6.50 euros. No matter what you order, the wait is about ten minutes. I carried it home and had a very enjoyable meal in the excellent company of BBC World, appropriately enough.

Second place for November goes to Pizzeria Napoli, another Merikoskenkatu institution. I read somewhere that there are 45 pizza places in Oulu, and I would be willing to bet that at least 35 of them are also kebab joints. And they are all essentially the same. All feature salad bars, where the main attraction is cabbage soaked in vinegar. There will be other things on offer, such as cucumbers, pickles, and maybe bell peppers—even chili peppers, if you’re lucky.

At Napoli, I usually order the #8 pizza, which is a seafood medley. It comes with generous quantities of succulent little shrimp, fresh mussels, and tuna fish. I think I could justify giving Napoli the silver medal on the basis of the fresh mussels alone. When was the last time you had mussels on a pizza?

Pizzeria Napoli seems to be a family-run operation. Dad stands at the oven and is clearly in charge. Like Merikosken Grilli, there is absolutely nothing pretentious about this place. I order my pizza and a nice cold Karhu, then fill up a little plate with cabbage at the salad bar. I pick at the cabbage and read my International Herald Tribune while the pizza is baking. After awhile, the pretty blond daughter with the short attention span delivers my pizza. Every time, I think to myself that I’ll eat half of it now and ask for a box to take the other half home. Then I marvel at how thin the crust is, and before you know it, I’m approaching the finish line. I wash down the last bite with my last swig of beer, and then I belly up to the counter to settle my account—never more than 8 euros. I pocket my change, say kiitos and hei hei, and then I wobble home on my bike. Is this the good life, or what?

The Grand Prize this month goes to Ravintola Matala (see photo above), down on the market square, Kauppatori. It’s actually next door to Kiinalainen Ravintola Beijing. Yes, this place is the anti-Napoli. It is definitely pretentious, and it counts as a Big Splurge.

I had often studied the menu near the front door of Matala, and once or twice I pressed my formidable nose against the glass to check the place out. The candelabras on the window sills were, I thought, a good sign, though I made a note to myself to bring my credit card. I decided this would be a good place to order reindeer, poro.

I arrived at about six o’clock on a weeknight. I noticed that the place was set up for two big parties, and the staff was momentarily spooked when I showed up, with no reservation, asking for a table for one. Soon enough, I was offered my choice of two desirable tables, both of which had been set for parties of four.

My reindeer was beautifully presented—three little tenderloins on a bed of vegetables, with port wine sauce poured over the top. I had spent enough time inspecting reindeer—in the kauppahalli and Stockmann—to know that it is extremely lean. Since reindeer doesn’t produce enough juice on its own, the port wine sauce at Matala seemed just the right treatment.

The meat itself tastes a little like venison. Poro would never be confused with any of the common red meats—i.e., beef, veal, or lamb. The consistency is not entirely unlike that of liver, though it is not like liver in any other respect. My reindeer—I ordered it medium—was served with baby kernels of white corn and a mix of julienned vegetables that included peapods and mushrooms, quite possibly shitakes, though I couldn’t be sure.

Good as the poro was, I can’t say that it was the star of the show. On the waiter’s recommendation, I ordered the cauliflower soup, which was divine. A creamy cauliflower lagoon encapsulating an atoll of fried foie gras, it was garnished with a few sprigs of basil. Bread infused with sun-dried tomatoes was accompanied by Spanish olive oil. The service was exemplary. With two glasses of Kadette, a South African red wine that nicely complemented the reindeer, plus an espresso at the end of the meal, the bill came to 55.50 euros—well worth the money, though not absolutely perfect in every respect. Let us now pick the nits.

I had unwelcome company at the table. I am starting to think that when we are finished with it, planet Earth will be inherited by fruit flies. The problem with fruit flies is that, first, they are very difficult to catch in mid-air, and second, while they are likely to drown in your wine, that is a Pyrrhic victory at best.

The espresso was excellent, with a nice creamy head, but it was not quite hot enough, and it was missing its partner of choice, lemon peel. Plus, it was accompanied by a little square of milk chocolate; dark chocolate would have been infinitely better.

Finally, the background music was provided by a commercial radio station offering an eclectic mix of artists ranging from the Grateful Dead to Patsy Cline. True, it was barely audible, but that is not an acceptable defense. A restaurant maintaining the highest standards in its kitchen needs to have classical music—Handel or Vivaldi, perhaps, but certainly not Jerry Garcia—on whatever one calls a “turntable” nowadays.

Hyvää ruokahalua! Heippa!

HAPARANDATORNIO

2006-12-04T15:48:00.000+02:00

(Continued from 1 December post, "Out on the Border")

With an international border, you essentially have one monolith (a nation state) rubbing directly against another, and the whole point of the boundary (although enforcement efforts can be vigorous or lax, depending on international relations) is to prevent seepage in either direction. Insinuation or penetration will be more or less unacceptable in this context, and it often will be regarded as infiltration, illegal immigration, smuggling, or worse. And “triangulation”—i.e., introducing a third element to complicate land use patterns and facilitate integration, or dovetailing, is not ordinarily an option.

And triangulation sometimes only exacerbates the problem. I’m thinking here of the international border between Great Britain and France, which didn’t have “border vacuums” because the English Channel served as a buffer—i.e., a fuzzy, multi-functional “seam”--for many centuries. But since triangulation—that is, construction of the Channel Tunnel and the opening of a high-speed rail link between London and Paris—the international border has become a no-man’s-land of chain-link fences, German shepherds, and high-tech security systems designed to thwart would-be illegal immigrants willing to take grave risks.

We have the opposite of those dynamics on display at another international border, the one between Finland and Sweden, at Tornio-Haparanda, or Haparanda-Tornio, where the European Union is helping to finance an effort to build bridges—literally, and also figuratively—between two adjoining cities.

The scene of this experiment is about 130 kilometers north of Oulu, where the Tornio River (Torniojoki) flows into the Gulf of Bothnia. Given its location, Tornio was from the beginning a key link between Lapland and the rest of the world. The town was chartered by the King of Sweden in 1620. With the peace of Hamina of 1809, the international border was fixed at the river (which, like many rivers, has not wanted to stay put), and Tornio was incorporated into the Russian Empire along with the rest of the Grand Duchy of Finland. To compensate for the loss, the Swedes established Haparanda on the west side of the river.

The border between the two empires was well guarded for a long time, but in the course of the twentieth century it became relatively porous. In 1944, to cite just one instance of international cooperation, Haparanda sent a volunteer fire brigade all the way to Oulu in response to wartime bombing. I gather from various websites dealing with the borderlands that there were a number of cultural links between the two cities, and that the municipalities began to seize opportunities after the war to cooperate any time it meant saving money. In the 1960s, the two cities agreed on construction of a jointly owned and operated swimming pool. Wikipedia reports that the two towns “also have a common golf course, situated astride the border.” You can tee off in one country into the other country and a different time zone. Sweden is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time; Finland two.

In 1987, the two municipalities established a kind of advisory council called the Provincia Bothniensis. Since that time, a number of cooperative projects have been undertaken involving fire and ambulance service, schools and libraries, heating services, health care, and tourist information offices. The key event in the history of cross-border integration took place in 1995, when both Sweden and Finland entered the European Union. In recent years the municipalities have undertaken co-sponsorship of a state employment agency, as well as various infrastructure projects.

Today, Tornio is a community of about 25,000 predominately Finnish-speaking people; Haparanda has a population of maybe 10,000, most of whom are Swedish speakers. Tornio has a steel mill and a major brewery. Today, it is estimated that approximately 16,000 people cross the border daily. Access to each municipality’s official website is provided through a common portal (click on the title of this post for a link).

The E.U. has made funds available specifically for border erasure, and Tornio-Haparanda have (has?) aggressively pursued these funding opportunities. Wikipedia provides a characteristically concise account of the current situation: “Tornio and Haparanda have a history as twin cities, and are set to merge under the name EuroCity. A new city centre is under construction on the old border and many municipal services are shared.”

But here’s the neat part. At the precise point where the customs houses (and, presumably, the border vacuums) used to be, down by the Torniojoki itself, there is a major construction project underway to try to knit these two communities together. Evidently, cooperation between the two urban planning authorities is fairly recent. It is said that in the 1980s Tornio was planning to build a new city center (keskusta) on its east side, which would have meant literally turning its back on Haparanda. Nowadays, at EuroCity, the two cities are preparing for a warm, hopefully lucrative, embrace.

I have learned most of this from a post-graduate student in geography at the University of Oulu, Tarmo Pikner, who has written a paper called “Moving imaginations in development networks: a case study about the cross-border town planning” (all subsequent quotations are from this paper). Pikner is interested in the role of spatial imagination, which he sees as a metaphor moving the planning process through three stages—generating interest, “enrollment,” and circulation. The content of the idea becomes active as both a sign and an agent of change. He also is interested in attendant patterns of discourse in the “construction” of cities. Thus, he is very much interested in the metaphorical dimensions of urbanity and the role of language in promoting international integration.

The common ground of EuroCity itself conveys something of the spirit of cooperation, and according to Pikner, the joint enterprise of Tornio-Haparanda is now being referred to as På Gränsen-Rajalla, which is an expression that means “on the border,” and usually is formed by Swedish on the left side and Finnish on the right, though I have sometimes seen it the away way round. Either way, it is a trope, one that “moves and carries the changing package of ideas, practices and institutions.” And it is an exercise in branding, and in “visioning.” There is even a sense in which Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” applies, in as much as images of EuroCity and På Gränsen-Rajalla replace strictly municipal (i.e., national) ideas and nomenclature.

At the same time, there is a physical, or material, dimension to the new enterprise on the border. “European Union membership removes partly practical bordering function(s) between the states and both towns. The border-line area around the river water becomes un-used and it can be translated into transnational development networks. Custom offices and border guards leave beside them activity space for new mediators around the border area development.” The rhetoric is all about “building bridges,” and there will literally be bridges, as many as four, perhaps, to carry vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians back and forth across the border. And there will be boats, as well.

Pikner writes that “The metaphor of centre continues through the development plan.” One vision of the EuroCity would have at its heart a “new market as open square creating contact surface between the towns on the border.” Another vision advocates multiple “markets” that would include a dance stage and various sports activities. A somewhat zanier idea involves a cross-border altar for international marriages. “We build without borders,” boasts a newsletter distributed in both municipalities.

In an effort to promote Jane Jacobs’s ideal of “mixed primary uses,” the common ground of EuroCity will include residential development, including housing for seniors, as well as commercial activity and cultural tourism. A dike is being built to close off part of the river and create new land for these purposes. A map published more recently than the one accompanying this post shows EuroCity under construction on land reclaimed from that bit of blue just to the west (above) of the Tornio town center. The new map also shows the flag of the European Union on that parcel of land, straddling the "green line." There also is to be a shopping mall, anchored by IKEA, which envisions a market that could potentially stretch into four countries—Norway and Russia, in addition to Sweden and Finland.

These, boys and girls, are Big Plans, and I am having a hard time with some of these abstractions. For one thing, it is hard to imagine how IKEA, it being precisely the kind of monolith that tends to generate border vacuums, is going to be incorporated into the higgledy-piggledly unplanned glory of healthy urban tissue.

But I intend to see Tornio-Haparanda for myself before my time in Finland is up. And I will file a report from the front.

Out on the Border

2006-12-01T16:44:00.000+02:00

In 1961, while I was in high school (sigh), Vintage published one of the great books of the twentieth century, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I read it for the first time a few years later, and there is a sense in which I am still recovering from the experience. Obituaries published after Jacobs’s recent death (in April, 2006) testified to the book’s impact on the generation that grew up in what might be called the “long” 1950s, which stretched well into the ‘60s, but then was exploded by the strange brew of Vietnam, urban rioting, and counter-culture romanticism.

The Death and Life helped to explain some of what was happening, or about to happen, in America’s cities—the urban rioting, at least. Jacobs argued that the prevailing wisdom about urban form and function had been concocted out of an intellectual stew that featured three principal ingredients: the celebrated White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept of a few years later; and the Skyscrapers-in-a-Park ideology promoted after the Great War by Le Corbusier and other International Style visionaries. Jacobs coined an epithet, Radiant Garden City Beautiful, that she used to lampoon all three of them at once.

The Death and Life opens with the following sentence: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” She then recalls a visit to Boston’s North End. “The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking.” The North End struck her as “the healthiest place in the city,” though when she reported that to her city planner friends, they insisted that it was a miserable and dangerous place, “a terrible slum.”

The planners thought that the North End, in all its higgledy-piggledy unplanned glory, needed to be rebuilt along Radiant Garden City Beautiful lines, and there was no talking them out of that, just as there was no dissuading “urban renewal” authorities from tucking into the federal trough to build high-rise public housing projects and expressways (think Robert Moses), or private developers from tearing down buildings just because they happened to be old.

Jacobs’s sweeping indictment of the city planning profession, and of prevailing attitudes about the dynamics of “slumming” and “unslumming,” was so radical that its lessons were instantly rejected by the smart set, most famously by Lewis Mumford, who ridiculed her for prescribing “home remedies for urban cancer.” Jacobs offended people by expressing her ideas in deliberately provocative prose: density is good; zoning is bad; old buildings are inherently valuable; parks and playgrounds are dangerous; children should play in the street. And yet anyone who suspended disbelief and actually read the book was shaken to the core. Page after sparkling page, chapter after relentless chapter, Jacobs stalked her rats and then set upon them with the jaws of an Airedale terrier.

Those of us who internalized Jacobs’ message will find that certain passages or concepts can come back vividly and unexpectedly back to life—when driving through the kind of area that she called a Great Blight of Dullness, for example, or walking through a neighborhood enlivened by mixed primary uses and the kind of natural surveillance systems that she termed “streets with eyes.”

I recently had occasion to recall Jacobs’s memorable treatment of the subject of “border vacuums.” Not having the book in front of me, I will do the best I can to summarize it from memory. Basically, the concept refers to the fact that some urban districts are dominated—not architecturally so much as functionally—by a single over-riding use. The problem, as she explained it, is not so much that single use in itself as the fact that it will try to suppress all other uses. Borrowing from the lexicon of such 1950s narratives as West Side Story, Jacobs liked to refer to these monoliths as “Turf.” Whatever is on the periphery of Turf will morph into barriers and dead ends, “border vacuums." Kevin Lynch called them “edges.”

Jacobs often cited large urban universities and hospitals as examples. Columbia University and the University of Chicago particularly provoked Jacobs’s wrath because of their insatiable appetite for land and their fear that they would be “contaminated” by non-conforming uses. A railroad right-of-way is almost a textbook case. As a swatch of linear, one-dimensional Turf, it will admit of no other uses. Not much can be done to mitigate the baneful effect of railroad tracks on adjoining property because trains do not mix well with other urban activities, except where there are railway stations, which, to the extent that they generate cross-traffic and commercial activity, precisely illustrate Jacobs’s point about the virtues of functional integration.

Jacobs suggested that addressing the problem of “border vacuums” required the fashioning of “seams,” or dovetailing, to effect a gradual transition from monolithic Turf to non-Turf. Sometimes, the best way to do that is by triangulation—that is, by introducing a third function to the mix. The goal is to create an area rendered lively and safe by a complex pattern of use by different kinds of people at different times of the day. Commercial activities in border areas, even on a small scale, such as with street vendors, can often serve to break up the hegemony of large-scale Turf.

The worst possible kind of “border vacuums” arise in places where one monolith directly abuts another. I don't recall whether Jacobs talks about international borders, but there is every reason to think that they would represent notable Turf-on-Turf challenges. The whole point of an international boundary is Turf guarding—to define us and them, in and out, and to prevent insinuation, penetration.

You are no doubt wondering where I am going with this narrative. The answer is that I’m going to Tornio-Haparanda. Come with me in the next post.

Allu, taas sulaa jää, Lenin elää ja alus saa tulla!

2006-11-30T10:13:00.000+02:00

In response to an Infrequently Asked Question (over there on the right under Links), and then in a September 27 post called “Take a number for service,” I have expressed my admiration for the Ota vuoronumero! system used by many retail establishments and offices to determine the order of service. Basically, it’s the drill that in the States we associate with the deli counter.

Responding to my suggestion that Ota vuoronumero! is a manifestation of Finnish orderliness and voluntary restraint, a friend wrote to me about a traffic accident caused by a woman who, out of sheer willfulness, or, if you prefer, sisu, crashed into his car because she refused to yield. (He won the ensuing court case.) Because the Finns are so assertive, he argues, they “somehow realize . . . that all hell would break out” if order was not imposed on them. I have actually had Finns tell me that it is not sheer coincidence that their language, amazingly, doesn’t have a word for “please.”

Roman Schatz, the author of a book called From Finland with Love (Helsinki: Johnny Kniga, 2005), offers testimony in support of my friend’s contention. The prevailing ethos of Finnish motorists, he claims, is “Drive as fast and as recklessly as possible, ignore all rules unless the police are near, sabotage, hamper, and impede everyone else on the road” (p. 78). I’ll have to admit that I have occasionally seen this streak of misanthropy for myself at bus stops, where Finns eschew the queue in favor of the scrum.

From Finland with Love is an insightful, albeit vulgar, little book written from the perspective of a German man who fell in love with a blonde he “met in a subway station in West Berlin” (p. 9). He followed her to Finland in 1986, and now he is “happily divorced” (p. 10) with two blonde children. Schatz’s book opens with a testimonial: “I love Finland, and I’m not ashamed to admit it” (p. 10).

Of course, I say that Schatz’s book is insightful because he seems to be impressed with many of the same things that have impressed me about this country. For example, he marvels at the way Finnish pedestrians refrain from crossing against the light. They will “stop at red lights, even in minus thirty degrees at four o’clock in the morning with absolutely no cars in sight” (p. 75).

He argues (persuasively, in my view) that the celebrated Finnish love affair with nature exceeds the bounds of reason: “For the Finns summer provides a great opportunity to leave behind the unnatural urban way of life that they never really felt comfortable with anyway: It’s back to their roots—meaning back to the state of bliss where you don’t have to see anybody for weeks and thus can afford to walk around in rubber boots and old sweatshirts, your face, hands and legs covered with mosquito bites” (pp. 85-86). Nokia, incidentally, made rubber boots (see photo above) before they turned to cell phones.

Based on a memorable experience with a drunk at the Merikoskenkatu bus stop (see the post called Hyvää Matkaa), Schatz’s account of the drinking habits of Finnish men rings all too true. “For a foreigner it’s difficult to share the Finnish enthusiasm for that one more drink at six o’clock in the morning” (p. 127).

There are other little nuggets in From Finland with Love, which I will reproduce here more for their entertainment value than as product endorsement:

"When you first arrive, Finland looks like a normal, pretty, expensive little country. Well, the light and the colours are different, at least in summer. In winter there isn’t really any light” (p. 13).
“So what exactly are the benefits of learning Finnish? Well, you can enjoy the most beautiful palindromes in the whole world: Allu, the ice is melting again, Lenin is alive and the vessel may come! Allu, taas sulaa jää, Lenin elää ja alus saa tulla!” (p. 23).
Finnish women “run the show. Finland is a matriarchal society” (p. 28).
“If you have decided to become a better person and rid yourself of everything unhealthy, unsafe and immoral, you’ve come to the right place. Finland cares for you like a loving mother” (p. 43).
Ergo, “Finland has the highest taxation and the lowest purchasing power in Europe” (p. 80).
“Where you’re from is of absolutely crucial importance in Finland…. The Finnish identity is based on places and ancestors rather than on work and career” (pp. 106-107).
“Losing control under the influence of alcohol (except behind the wheel—KK) is perfectly acceptable in this country” (p. 126).
On bridging the culture gap: “Give them (the Finns—KK) everything you’ve got. Get drunk with them, go to their saunas, jump in their lakes, eat their food, learn their language, sleep with them. See where it gets you” (p. 133).

Click on the title of this post, if you dare, for a link to Roman Schatz’s personal website.

What's Showing at Aboa Vetus

2006-11-29T10:01:00.000+02:00

I live in one of the world’s great museum cities, which is I why a strict accounting of the number of hours per week, or month, or year, I manage to log in the museums of Washington, D.C., would be profoundly embarrassing. The problem is that the regular round of errands and chores somehow fills every minute of every day.

As a Fulbrighter in Finland, however, I have plenty of time, after fulfilling my duties as teacher, housekeeper, and self-improvement faddist, to hit the museum trail, and I have been taking careful notes.

This is the third installment of a series on museums in Finland.

Some readers of this blog probably suspect that I have not had a single undocumented experience in Finland. At times, it seems that way to me, too. But that is not quite the case. I have not, for example, written about a trip in late October to Turku, where I participated in a seminar called “American Voices,” sponsored by Turun Yliopisto and the Fulbright Center in Helsinki. It was a great opportunity to learn more about my fellow Fulbrighters, who are a remarkably talented group with a wide array of interests, ranging from African-American history and culture to the making of rustic furniture, autobiographical writing, the treatment of autistic children, Japanese internment during World War II, and not least, NASCAR culture.

I stayed over a second night in Turku and tagged along with a family who were on their way to a museum of contemporary art, Ars Nova. I was mainly interested in their company, plus it was nice to stretch my legs, and there was the attraction of dinner afterwards. On our way to the museum, we walked past Turku’s venerable Lutheran Cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop of Finland that has served as the city’s corporate logo for roughly 700 years.

Our path led underneath the cathedral spire and down the hill to the river Aura below. In just a few minutes, we were at our destination, which turned out to be something of an Upstairs/Downstairs affair. Upstairs is the museum of new art, which was more interesting and less intimidating than I had feared. But the real surprise lay in the basement.

There, one discovers Aboa Vetus, or Old Åbo, which was the name of this medieval town when it was trading with the Hanseatic League and serving as a spearhead of Germanic and Swedish culture on Christendom’s northern frontier. Aboa Vetus is not just a museum with the standard exhibits and labels and dioramas, but a working archaeological site. Let me hasten to say that I have visited a number of archaeological sites that welcome guests and promise a window on the past. I have been disappointed by most. And I have never been to a museum that succeeds so completely in delivering on that promise as Aboa Vetus.

In 1994, more or less by accident, it was discovered that a busy block of the medieval town, including streets and shops and part of a convent, lay under the art museum’s floor. Researchers were aided by detailed and accurate medieval and early modern maps. Once they knew there was something down there, they had a good idea what it was. And with plenty of sweat equity, they found most of what they were looking for and more. Together, the artifacts dredged up—coins and tools and jewelry, and some skeletons, human and feline—constitute an extraordinary time capsule, one that can be unpacked like a matryoshka doll, and one that contains quite a lot of urban history.

Aboa Vetus is thus not just a collection of display cases. You can literally walk the streets and cellars of the medieval town. And while the term “multi-media” is usually thrown around pretty loosely, it really means something here. There are the streets, stairways, walls, gates, and lintels themselves. Then there are explanatory films that exploit all the bells and whistles of “virtual reality.” Blown-up maps apply a cartographical dimension to the archaeological evidence underfoot. There is a sound track. There is a narrative line that recruits a fictional family to breath life into the old stones. None of these would be terribly compelling alone. But the total package adds up to quite a moving experience.

For me, the most impressive part of Aboa Vetus is the constant presence in the maps and other images of the cathedral that stands nearby still, and which, later that evening, we passed again as we made our way back to the university guesthouse. What Aboa Vetus helps us to remember is that the cathedral in Turku was originally a Roman Catholic institution assigned the mission of wresting this part of the world from Thor, a project that took many centuries. Also, Turku’s monastery and convent remind us that Roman Catholicism was no monolith. Rather, it was a congeries of religious orders, of both laity and clergy, that pulled in many different directions while pressure also was applied from the East—by Constantinople, and also by Islam. In Turku, as almost nowhere else, we are reminded that Scandinavia has a pre-Lutheran history.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Aboa Vetus website.

International Thanksgiving 2006

2006-11-28T10:36:00.000+02:00

I had not expected to have a Thanksgiving this year, and the day itself passed uneventfully. But I was invited to a real American Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday night, where a lively group of Finns, Brits, and Russians gathered for turkey with all the trimmings: stuffing, potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, corn, peas, Finnish cranberries, and four pies—two apple, two pumpkin. As the American, or maybe just as the most senior citizen, I was allowed to carve the bird.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday by far, not just because of the feast but also because of the requirement that we count our blessings. It is “meet and right so to do,” as we Episcopalians are wont to say. I have always thought that America could be a little more aggressive in exporting this fetching holiday. Then again, maybe the idea of marketing a tribute to humility is way too oxymoronic. Anyway, I noticed that everyone at the event on Saturday night seemed to understand the spirit of the occasion, so maybe Thanksgiving is catching on internationally without our making much of an effort.

Children, most of them bilingual or trilingual, loomed large at this Thanksgiving feast. They wouldn’t have sat still for a photo, so you’ll have to settle for the grown-ups, pictured above. A fine time was had by all, particularly by this innocent abroad.

What's Showing at Kunsthalle Helsinki

2006-11-23T10:12:00.000+02:00

I live in one of the world’s great museum cities, which is I why a strict accounting of the number of hours per week, or month, or year, I manage to log in the museums of Washington, D.C., would be extremely embarrassing. The problem is that the regular round of errands and chores somehow fills every minute of every day.

As a Fulbrighter in Finland, however, I have plenty of time, after fulfilling my duties as teacher, housekeeper, and self-improvement faddist, to hit the museum trail, and I have been taking careful notes.

This is the second installment of a series on museums in Finland.

You still have time, but you’d better hurry, if you want to see the exhibition on the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen at Kunsthalle Helsinki, Nervanderinkatu 3. On 12 December, it’s “wheels up,” as the show, called “Shaping the Future,” moves to Oslo and Brussels, and then to the United States.

It’s well worth a visit, though you could wait for it to come to us. Saarinen is not a favorite of mine, though like most Washingtonians I have learned to appreciate the charms of Dulles International Airport, particularly the singular swoosh of Saarinen’s dramatic terminal (see photo above). Over the years the elegance of Saarinen’s original design has been compromised in various ways, particularly in the 1980s with the introduction of the clunky “mobile lounges”—part moon rover, part Edsel—that transport passengers out to the mid-field concourses and back. The mobile lounges finally are being replaced by an underground train shuttle service that is very much in vogue at major airports these days. My guess is that the mobile lounges will find a new home at the Air and Space Museum, where they could be exhibited along with a Concorde, in a gallery called “Where the Future Went to Die.”

Airports were one of Saarinen’s specialties, he being very much a man of his times. The exhibit does an excellent job—mainly just by showing photographs of the man and his buildings and renderings, many of the last culled from the archives of Yale University—of recapturing the spirit of the 1950s and early ‘60s, the period just prior to the Kennedy assassination and everything connoted by the word, “Vietnam.”

Saarinen was the son of the Finnish architect who built, among other things, the Helsinki railway station, a blend of the functionalist ethic with whatever frayed remnants of romantic nationalism and Art Nouveau managed to survive the Great War. The Eero Saarinen revealed by this exhibit was a child of privilege—of Cranbrook and Yale, and then of Madison Avenue. He displayed talent at an early age, naturally enough, and also a strong need to establish his own place in the world, vis-à-vis the pater. There are moments in the exhibit when one can’t help but cry out, Freud lives! In New York, anyway, the era of post-war prosperity was also an age of angst and therapy. That may not have been the case in Gopher Prairie, but then it was one of the legacies of the 1950s that Gopher Prairie no longer counted for much.

It could be argued that Saarinen’s corporate campuses and university research parks foreshadowed the end of industrialism and the triumph of technocracy over liberal learning. The photos of the man at work—in white shirt and tie, sometimes with a pipe or cigar, almost always with cronies in tow—are intriguing, though it’s hard to say exactly what they reveal. They could pass for out-takes from a movie like Cash McCall--or maybe, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Shags Doris Day under the Gateway Arch. Above all, there is the image of Saarinen looking out from the cover of Time magazine, but now we’re not in Hollywood anymore, Toto, we’re back in the “real world.” The corporate Eero, working long hours, entering competitions, trying to satisfy demanding clients, attending yet another cocktail party, was constantly burnishing the image he wished to project—a preoccupation that we would now call “branding.” His output is remarkable when one considers that he was only fifty-one when he died suddenly of a brain tumor.

Those of us who are creatures of the world that Saarinen and his contemporaries built need to come to terms with these images. I’m still working on it. Visit “Shaping the Future” when it comes to a gallery at an airport near you. Then, on your way home, stop at a newsstand and pick up a copy of the latest issue of Metropolis magazine to see for yourself the long reach of the “long” 1950s.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Museum of Finnish Architecture.

Immigrants and Teachers

2006-11-22T10:07:00.000+02:00

Yesterday's Helsingin Sanomat, international edition, had a story on the Finnish government's efforts to recruit immigrants to serve as school teachers. "Increasing numbers of Finnish residents with foreign backgrounds are to be trained as teachers. The University of Helsinki is doubling the quota for new students to be taken into the multicultural class teacher training programme next year. A similar scheme is also under consideration to recruit more immigrants to become kindergarten teachers." Click on the title of this post above to go directly to the story.

The story coincides with my becoming introduced to some people in Oulu who have been working overtime to address the needs of immigrants in this community, and also to try to encourage inter-cultural communication of various kinds. The driving force behind this project is Jacob Matthan, to whom you can be introduced through the blog of the group called CHAFF (the Chamber of Assistance for Finns and Foreigners). Jacob likes to refer to himself as a "Findian," which gives you some sense of the spirit in which he has undertaken this serious work. See the link to Oulu CHAFF over on the right-hand side of this page.

What's Showing at the Ateneum

2006-11-21T10:01:00.000+02:00

I live in one of the world’s great museum cities, which is I why a strict accounting of the number of hours per week, or month, or year, I manage to log in the museums of Washington, D.C., would be profoundly embarrassing. The problem is that the regular round of errands and chores somehow fills every minute of every day.

As a Fulbrighter in Finland, however, I have plenty of time, after fulfilling my duties as teacher, housekeeper, and self-improvement faddist, to hit the museum trail, and I have been taking careful notes.

This is the first installment of a series on museums in Finland.

While I was in Helsinki last week, I was encouraged by a fellow Fulbrighter to visit the Finnish National Gallery, also called the Ateneum. The collection, consisting of some 17,500 works of art, is housed in a late 19th century palazzo situated directly across the street from the main railway station, an Eliel Saarinen shed that has been a city landmark ever since its completion at the end of World War I.

Let me confess up front that I generally prefer railway stations to museums, and that if forced to choose only from a list of museums, I would always select the one specializing in urban history over those devoted to art, per se. In D.C., for example, I will, ceteris paribus, gravitate toward the National Building Museum. In Helsinki, my default destination is the City Museum on Sofiankatu, which, by the way, has a very interesting model of one of Saarinen’s planned town extensions. It’s worth a look.

The argument that persuaded me to visit the Ateneum had to do with a special exhibition of works assembled by a Stockholm-based museum administrator and curator named Pontus Hultén. Here’s a link: http://www.ateneum.fi/default.asp?docId=14926. I had never heard of Hultén, but it turns out that he was a devotee and promoter of Marcel Duchamp and subsequently of a number of avant-garde artists, including Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Niki de Saint Phalle, who have long since ascended to the modernist hall of fame. One of the interesting things about Hultén is that he did not systematically collect art. He was, evidently, a charismatic fellow who inspired artists to give him things, which just sort of accumulated. Andy Warhol also seems to have been one of his pals.

I don’t know how many Warhols are in the permanent collection of the Hultén collection over in Tukholma, but there are two on loan to the Ateneum, one a relatively uninteresting self-portrait, the other Warhol’s oddly affecting portrait of Chairman Mao, or more precisely, Warhol’s gloss on the official PRC icon—I guess you could call it the “Gilbert Stuart” Mao. (I have borrowed the expression “oddly affecting” from a music review I read years ago that described Neil Young’s voice as “oddly affecting,” when it was clear that what the reviewer really meant was untrained, unsteady, generally not worth much, and yet…. Somehow, I don’t think Neil cares about such reviews when he cashes his royalty checks. Neither did Andy.)

Anyway, I gaped at the works in the Hultén exhibition, some of which are quite humorous, and several of which are portraits of Hultén. It took about a half-hour to take in the Hultén show, which left me wondering how I was going to get my 8 euros worth out of the Ateneum.

I needn’t have worried. I wandered through the other rooms and was reminded straight away that Finland is, by European standards, a very young nation, and an even younger independent state. The oldest work in the collection dates from about 1750, when it was a colony of Sweden. According to the Ateneum’s English-language guidebook, the eighteenth century “is best represented by Isak Wacklin’s (1720-1758) portraits.” I never had heard of Wacklin, but I found his work in the Rococo style to be subdued and urbane. I didn’t quite get my fill of Wacklin.

Then I discovered Albert Edelfelt. I had never heard of Edelfelt either, which completes my personal Trifecta of Artistic Ignorance. Edelfelt (1854-1905) was only “the most esteemed Finnish artist abroad, and his foreign contacts influenced the development of art life in Finland. The best known paintings by Edelfelt include the historical painting Queen Bianca, 1877, and the outdoor scene A Child’s Funeral, 1879. From the Luxembourg Gardens, 1887, tells of Edelfelt’s close contacts with France.”

Putting aside the issue of foreign “contacts,” I found Queen Bianca to be a profoundly humbling work of art. The Queen is shown bouncing her young son on her knee. Perhaps there is more to the story, but that is all the narrative I can detect here, and it is more than enough. With extraordinary technical skill, Edelfelt has managed to produce, not a queen, and not a secular Madonna and Child, but what seems to me a faithful representation of the intensity of the mother-son relationship. How it is possible for an artist to capture so much human emotion and hold it on a humble canvass is quite beyond me, and always will be. And then there are the folds of her dress!

To characterize A Child’s Funeral as a mere “outdoor scene” is surely unjust. It is a heart-rending account of a family in a rowboat carrying a small casket out to sea. The dead child’s sister clutches a small bouquet in a hand that has gone pathetically limp. I have to believe that even those who genuinely abhor sentimentalism would be moved by this painting. A Child’s Funeral is an unsparing depiction of grief, and also of duty, which is etched in the faces of the rowers. Edelfelt had a gift for fashioning convincing faces.

And feet. While studying these paintings, I found myself thinking of Edelfelt’s contemporary, Winslow Homer, and wondering whether he knew Edelfelt’s work. Edelfelt's angular boys, teetering precariously on rocks, elbows all akimbo, to launch their toy boats, are entirely convincing. The feet clasp the rocks as best they can, within the limits of the human anatomy. I am aware that Edelfelt’s art represents precisely the kind of bourgeois claptrap that dismayed the great Impressionists of the late nineteenth century, but those of us who never advanced beyond stick figures must stand in awe of this level of technical skill.

The Hultén exhibit is on display through 10 December 2006. For Wacklin and Edelfelt, there is no particular hurry. They are part of the permanent collection of the Ateneum.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Finnish National Gallery.

Never Mind

2006-11-20T09:33:00.000+02:00

Last week I tossed a few bouquets in the direction of VR. On the basis of my weekend trip to Helsinki and back, I continue to think well of the Finnish railways. Train travel here is comfortable, convenient, and in my experience reliable, albeit expensive. I also wrote some ignorant twaddle to the effect that people are quiet and considerate on the trains. Those moronic statements I hereby retract.

My trip to Helsinki on the Pendolino train 60 started uneventfully. But at some point a woman boarded the train and deposited herself in the seat directly behind me. As soon as she got settled, she pulled out her cell phone and began to place calls, one after another. She must have called everyone she has ever met. Although my rudimentary knowledge of the language sheltered me from the actual content of those conversations, I could tell that they were banal in the extreme. Each started the same way—basically, “I am on the train.” From that point I was in over my head, linguistically speaking, but that didn’t in any way soften the blows. I held my head in my hands, covering my ears. I repaired to the restaurant car for a beer, but you can nurse a beer only so long. I gave her the evil eye. She turned up the volume, which I hadn’t thought possible. I suspect that even casual readers of this blog have discerned that I do not handle torture well. After two hours of unrelenting assault, I would have confessed to any heinous crime to get her to stop.

Misery loves company, but I didn’t have any. Much to my consternation, my fellow passengers seemed oblivious. I received no discreet looks conveying sympathy, no silent commiseration. Perhaps they were all deaf? Or stoical to a fault, at the very least. Or, it occurred to me after a while, perhaps each was contemplating murder, and was therefore maintaining an angelic mien to deflect suspicion. That was it, I decided, and immediately I assumed the role of silent co-conspirator. But then it occurred to me that they might or might not be plotting against the squawk box operating at full throttle behind me. Their intended victim could with equal justice be the source of constant groaning just a few inches away.

As I am writing this on Monday morning, back in balmy (+5), rainy Oulu, you can see that I managed to slip the noose while shedding my illusions about the Finns and their kännykkä. But I'm told there are 10,000 Nokia employees in Oulu, and each has something to answer for today.

Comparative Medicine

2006-11-16T09:04:00.000+02:00

I will knock on a nearby birch tree while saying this, but I have enjoyed pretty decent health through most of my life, a circumstance that I attribute more to genetic endowment or fate than to anything else. Even so, I have had several opportunities to study health care in comparative perspective. Here is a brief report.

About ten years ago, I fell ill on a trip to Scotland. As soon as we arrived in St. Andrews, I staggered into a “surgery,” or clinic. It had a musty air and looked as if it had been furnished in the early 1950s, but I tried hard not to judge it on those grounds.

Except for the fact that I had none of the papers that the receptionist asked me to produce, I had no trouble getting in to see a physician, who determined that I was suffering from a fairly rare malady that had to be treated with a powerful drug that sometimes interacts badly with common medications. Thus, he had to identify the drugs I was already taking. That proved to be quite difficult, since the names of prescription medicines vary considerably from country to country. He had to look up all of my meds in a reference book with extensive cross-referencing, and then check on the side-effects. He explained his diagnosis, the prescribed treatment, and the prognosis. He was wonderfully articulate in the way that only the Brits can be.

The thing is, I had always thought of the medical profession as thoroughly international—as universal as science itself—and so was astounded to see for myself that it is in certain respects profoundly national. That discovery was reinforced by something else that impressed me, and that was that the brilliant physician who cured me of a serious disease was absolutely flummoxed by the question of how much I should be charged for services expertly rendered.

At first he insisted that it simply was not possible for him to present me with a bill. We do not bill our patients. We would not know how. It really is quite impossible. I put up a fuss. Surely your services can be reduced to some kind of hourly rate that can simply be applied to my case. In principle, yes, he conceded, but that does not solve the problem of how, exactly, we are to issue you a bill. We are wanting a form for that. There would be no way of accounting for it in the ledgers. In the end, he pulled a number of the air, and I paid it. As I recall it was around 35 pounds. It was the best 35 pounds I ever spent, and I have had a soft spot in my heart for socialized medicine ever since. A few years later, when I contracted the flu during an extended stay in London, I again had a very positive experience.

(Permit me to wander into dentistry for a moment. A year or so ago I made the acquaintance of some distant relatives from the Republic of Slovakia. The daughter of my second cousin won the green card lottery and has been in the United States with her family for some time. I met them in Atlanta. They are now living near Detroit. Her husband, who used to work in a bank in Slovakia, and is a construction worker here, told me that he had been having dental problems, and that he had gone to see an Atlanta dentist for an estimate, which came to over a thousand dollars. He determined that it would be cheaper to fly back to the Slovak Republic and have the dentist in his village do the work, which would be covered by the state health insurance plan. And that’s what he did.)

When I first started taking the bus to the University of Oulu this fall, I noticed an office called Medivire (four syllables, each ending with a vowel) that looked suspiciously like a clinic. I filed it away for future reference. As the (cue Carl Sagan here) billions and billions of regular readers of this blog know, I have been sick for over two weeks. It does not seem to be anything serious, only a sinus infection that causes runny eyes, laryngitis, and fatigue. Last Monday, 6 November, one of my colleagues said I looked like death warmed over, or words to that effect. That was fairly persuasive.

I promptly deposited myself on the Medivire doorstep. Given my appearance, I had no trouble securing an appointment for later the same day. The physician, who was very young but seemed able, gave me a prescription for antibiotics and a decongestant. The interesting thing is that although I once again had none of the papers that patients customarily produce when they are treated by physicians, Medivire had no trouble determining how much I should be charged. Two days later, I received, via snail mail, a bill for 36.15 euros. A bargain, I thought. The invoice included Medivire’s account numbers with three Finnish banks—Nordea, Aktia, and Sampo. I went on-line and arranged for the bill to be paid directly from my own Nordea account. Later, I Googled Medivire and found a story about the company’s acquisition of another healthcare company, called Engel Care Services. The article then provided a little background:

When Medivire was privatised in 2000, the state became a minimum shareholder and MB Funds the main stakeholder. Now the state has surrendered its stake in the organisation. MB Funds owns 82% of the company, Ilmarinen 10% and the company's active management 8%. "Medivire's business is now set to see good growth and the company has great potential for the development of both its health and care services. After the business expanded and capitalised, it was only natural that the state should surrender its stake in the company," says (Hannu) Puhakka (identified as a partner in MB Funds).

This would seem to go a long way toward explaining why Medivire knows how to issue a bill for services rendered.

My prescriptions also seemed to me modestly priced. I had them filled at a pharmacy—apteekki—that same day for 26.23 euros. I took the medicine faithfully, as directed, until I ran out on Monday of this week. While my condition has vastly improved, I cannot say that I have been completely cured. Since Monday I have noticed that my eyes are getting runnier and my voice scratchier. Because I am due to lecture at the University of Helsinki on Friday (I am writing this on Wednesday, 15 November), I went back to Medivire this morning, looked pitiful again, and talked things over with the receptionist. “The medicine was working,” I explained. “It’s just that it ran out before I was completely recovered. My eyes are still itchy, and they run at night. And I’m still having trouble talking. So I need a refill.”

“How long have you been ill?” She asked.

“Two weeks,” said I.

“That’s a long time. I think you should see a doctor,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” I said. “I think I just need to stay on the same regimen for another week. The longer I’m without medication, the more ground I'll lose, and the longer it will take to knock the thing out for good.” She looked dubious. “I’m not resisting another examination,” I continued. “Whatever we have to do to get a refill, that’s what I want to do, and I want to do it before I leave for Helsinki tomorrow.”

“I think you’d better see a doctor,” she said again. And then, since the physician I had seen earlier was booked through the end of the week, she proposed that I see one of his colleagues. I said fine, and she set me up for 3:00 in the afternoon.

I took my seat in the waiting room at 2:55, and promptly at 3:00 I was summoned by physician #2 into his examining room. I explained the situation to him. “I feel great compared to the way I felt a week ago, but we didn’t quite knock it out,” I said. “I wake up in the middle of the night, and my eyes are kind of glued shut. My voice is still a little froggy, and I think all I need is a refill.”

He looked at my throat and pronounced it “not too bad.” (I was reminded that by Finnish standards Pavarotti is "not too bad" a tenor.) Then he checked my sinuses, I think with a Doppler device, and determined that while my right passages were clear, the ones on the left were clogged. He signed the original form in a new place and explained that it can be used for up to three refills. But clearly, I would have to undergo an “examination” each time.

When I checked out I was assured that Medivire would send me another bill, presumably for 36.50 euros, and I will cheerfully pay that one, too, through Nordea’s online bill payment service. Let the record show that I am perfectly satisfied with the medical attention I received, and I can’t complain about the price.

My experience with the healthcare system in the UK is a decade old, so I’m not sure where they’re at, as we used to say back in the ‘60s, with respect to privatization. As for the Finnish medical profession, I think it’s fair to say that they’ve got the hang of it.

By the way, that fellow up top is Elias Lönnrot, the physician who went round Karelia collecting folklore that eventually found its way into the Kalevala, the national folk epic beloved of the Finns.

To the Finland Station

2006-11-15T10:24:00.000+02:00

The Finns have an excellent railway system, which for some reason is known as VR (a link to the VR website is embedded in the title above). I am writing these words on the Pendolino train 53 as it makes its way northward, at speeds of 135-140 kilometers per hour, from Tampere to Oulu. Those are not TGV speeds, but it's still pretty fast, and even then the journey takes about four and a half hours. My train left Tampere five minutes late, but I expect we will arrive at Oulu precisely on time. One of the reasons that train service has not deteriorated in Finland the way that it has in many countries is that the government regards it as an important means of promoting national unity as well as regional growth.

I am not particularly fond of flying, and so I patronize the railways whenever possible. I am productive on the train, and trains are simply more comfortable—even in the U.S.A. Train travel in Finland is not cheap, however. My round-trip ticket from Oulu to Jyväskylä cost 120 euros.

One thing that the prospective rider needs to keep in mind is that while Finnish trains are not really crowded, it is prudent to purchase your ticket in advance. You will be asked what kind of seat you want. There is of course the aisle/window issue; I am a window person. But there also are other considerations. If you plan to use a laptop, you might wish to request a seat located in front of a fold-out worktable and adjacent to a power source. Otherwise, your work time will be limited to how much life there is in your battery. Also, keep in mind that there are some singletons—seats all by themselves, usually located near the entrance of a car, or vaunu. At the moment, I am seated in such a seat because the travel agent at Stockmann thoughtfully assigned me to one. I have a little more leg room, and no next-door neighbor.

VR offers special services for business passengers, but I have noticed that the company scrupulously avoids using the discourse of “class.” Class distinctions run very much against the grain in this decidedly egalitarian society. There are, for example, no honor rolls in the schools, or dean’s lists at the university. I have no idea what kind of an increment one would have to pay for the privilege of riding as a business passenger on the train. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was quite substantial.

Be sure to arrive at the station in plenty of time; your train is not likely to be late. Check the big board to see what track it will be departing from, and then consult your ticket for your coach and seat assignment. My comfy solitaire is in vaunu 8, ikkunapaikka 37. Next, look for the oversized poster that dissects all the trains regularly serving your station. The trains are laid out like so many cadavers, and if you mind the letter codes you will know exactly where to stand on the platform to board your particular vaunu, meaning that you won’t have to join the conga line of passengers who got on at the wrong place because they didn’t bother to do their homework. There is nothing particularly Finnish about any of this (though the Finns are unique in still using the broad gauge they inherited from imperial Russia). Most of it is par for the European course. Still, there is an element of precision here that takes some getting used to—for regular Amtrak customers, particularly.

Finally, the Finns are a quiet people and this adds to the appeal of train travel. When I first arrived in Helsinki, I was told by one of my Fulbrighter colleagues to note how Finnish motorists refrain from using their horns. It’s true. In my apartment house, which has fairly thin walls and is inhabited by a number of university students, I have not been kept awake, even once, by a wild party or a boisterous drunk, even though there is no dearth of either parties or drunks around here.

And the Finns are a quiet people in spite of their Nokia addiction. They are not above chattering on the kännykää in the train, but their conversations tend to be fairly short, and conducted at a polite volume. Family members and friends traveling together will converse, but very rarely does it constitute a distraction for us bookish types. For the most part, train passengers pass the journey in silence. That’s why, unlike Amtrak, there is no need for a designated “quiet car.” They’re all pretty quiet.

Snow Big Deal

2006-11-14T10:17:00.000+02:00

Friday, October 27, the day that Jane and I rode the Pendolino train north from Helsinki, was the day Oulu was hit by a major snowstorm, which dropped at least 10 centimeters in all. It was our first major snowfall, and it wasn’t clear what we should expect at that point. Some said that the weather would likely warm up. Others predicted that the ground would stay covered until April. The attitude here is “let ‘er rip.” There are no weather wimps in Finland. On the contrary, people take pride in enduring whatever Mother Nature dishes out.

During the subsequent two weeks, temperatures have been consistently around 10 degrees below zero, dipping down to -15 at one point. For a couple of days, the mercury hovered around zero, but it wasn’t quite warm enough to melt anything. In the meantime, we have received 4 or 5 centimeters of fresh snow to replace the volume lost to natural compacting. I have been paying attention to snow management techniques, and I am struck by several things.

My main experience with winter has been in the American Midwest, where the winters are hard, but different from winters here. In Finland, everyone seems to agree that the snow is somehow drier and therefore less slippery. People say that it’s the dry snow that allows for winter biking.

Also, the typical pattern in the Midwest is for temperatures to oscillate between freezing and thawing. When it warms up, water makes its way underground. Then it freezes and cracks the pavement. Then it does the same thing all over again. This is why road conditions loom so large in Midwestern cocktail party conversations. In Cleveland, people curse the “chuckholes,” in Pittsburgh, the “potholes,” but they amount to the same thing.

I have a feeling this freezing and thawing syndrome is just not a salient issue in Finland. We don’t know yet how this winter will unfold, but it seems likely that the ground will stay covered as temperatures drop, and that any damage caused by thawing and re-freezing is likely to be minimal. There is, in addition, an important difference in street architecture. Here, as I have noted in an earlier post, paving stones are used extensively, and they would seem to be less vulnerable than asphalt to cracking up.

But in addition to that, there is the issue of attitude. When it snows at home, I run out to shovel, and I understand my duty as the removal of all snow from the sidewalks under my jurisdiction. I prefer not to leave any snow on the ground, because it can freeze and turn to treacherous ice. Sometimes, after clearing the snow, if I suspect that it is likely to snow some more, I will drop a layer of rock salt, or the synthetic equivalent, to keep everything moist, which allows for easy removal of new snow. Though my neighbors may be more or less fastidious, my sense is that all of us conceive of the job in roughly the same terms.

In Finland, by contrast, it seems to be assumed that a layer of snow and ice will always remain under foot. That layer, amounting to 2 centimeters or more, is treated with gravel to improve traction. But there is no attempt to remove the foundation, as it were. I have noticed a handful of exceptions. A few of the merchants in the city center have completely cleared the walkways in front of their shops. Because of the paving stones, this must have been very difficult. I have detected no use of rock salt, or any other de-icing agent, which makes me think that they might be illegal in Finland. But that’s just a guess.

I suspect that the real variable is, as I have said, attitude. In the States, we think that complete removal of the snow is not wholly unrealistic. In Oulu, I think it is assumed that snow and ice are among the elements with which one must learn to live—in the way that, as John Brinckerhoff Jackson taught us many years ago, people who live in adobe houses or thatched huts must not expect the walls or the roof to completely succeed in keeping nature at bay. On the contrary, they must expect nature to insinuate herself, to the point that the walls or roofs will need frequent repair, or even replacement. In reading about Finland, one finds frequent reference to the Finnish love of nature—of forest, lakes, and outdoor activities. I would submit that this is reflected in their instinct to manage the snow, rather than trying to make it go away.

I have been concerned up till now primarily with sidewalks and bike paths, but the street crews seem to employ the same strategy, except perhaps on expressways. Crews responded promptly to the first storm, and it did not take long for them to have the city streets and sidewalks, and even driveways and parking lots, plowed out. They also have been attentive to new snowfalls. But again, they have not at any point attempted to plow all the way down to the pavement. Snow removal in Finland is a little like the Middle Eastern approach to shaving.

One of the reasons that people here take snow in stride is that they use the right equipment. I noticed from the first that Finnish cars are equipped with studded tires. My experience with studded tires is limited to the 1960s and early ‘70s, back in Pennsylvania. That is because at some point, when it was observed that studded tires were chewing up the roads, they were banned. In Finland, by contrast, studded tires are mandated for six months of the year, and they are proscribed for the other six months. The U.S. Department of State summarizes the challenges of winter driving in Finland as follows, in prose that manages to be at once bureaucratic and comic:

Driving in Finland during the winter months can be hazardous. Daylight hours are very short and one should be comfortable with driving in darkness. Icy road conditions are common. If driving in Finland, the vehicle must be winterized with studded snow tires, and engine heaters are strongly recommended. When driving at night, drivers must be alert to moose wandering onto major roadways.

When you’re willing to coexist with nature, it’s just one durned thing after another, init?

P.S. In the photo up top, taken shortly after sunrise, those are University of Jyväskylä buildings on the other side of the frozen lake. Access is by way of the stunning suspension footbridge. This, by the way, is a new part of the university, not the famous campus designed by Alvar Aalto, which is in another part of the city.

Thought for the Day

2006-11-10T11:45:00.000+02:00

In 1990, Brendan Gill (1914-1997), architecture writer for The New Yorker, wrote, “The three most beautiful cities in the world are Paris; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Pittsburgh. If Pittsburgh were situated somewhere in the heart of Europe, tourists would eagerly journey hundreds of miles out of their way to visit it.”

Click on the title of this post to be whisked away to the website of the Greater Pittsburgh Sister Cities Association. I'm trying to persuade one of my students to prepare a paper nominating a city in Finland to be Pittsburgh's sixteenth sister city.

Hyvää Matkaa!

2006-11-09T11:23:00.000+02:00

Saturday was one of those days. Actually, it’s been a pretty trying week or so for your friendly neighborhood Fulbrighter. I started to realize I was getting sick in the middle of my seminar last Tuesday afternoon. First it was my throat. Then there were the sneezing fits, the aches, and the coughing. Did I mention the chills and fever? Yes, there was that, too. By the time I saw Jane off at the airport on Thursday morning, I had such a bad case of laryngitis I couldn’t even say a proper good-bye. That afternoon, I had to cancel my seminar. I got the impression that the students, all three of them, tough Finns that they are, would survive the devastating news.

Usually, even when you’re sick, you feel better in the morning and have reason for optimism at the beginning of a new day. Not this time. I felt wretched from the moment I awoke. On Friday—that would be 3 November—acting on pure instinct, I got up in the middle of the night and turned off the humidifier I’ve been running regularly to keep myself well. I had a hunch: night after night, it’s been re-infecting me with the same evil bug. (Sorry for the medical lingo; you humanists out there will just have to suspend disbelief here.)

The next morning I felt a little better, which I thought was powerful evidence in support of the Humidifier from Hell Hypothesis. I got up at 6:30, made myself some fried eggs and toast, wolfed them down at the kitchen counter in 20 seconds flat, bundled up and headed off—in pitch darkness, mind you—for the bus stop. On my bike.

That’s right. I hadn’t been riding my bike while Jane was here, but this morning, I asked myself the musical question, What Would Jussi Do? And I decided that yes, Jussi would ride his bike to the bus stop, never mind that it was minus 15 degrees Celsius (that’s plus 5 in American degrees) with 10 centimeters (maybe six inches) of snow on the ground. I was right. En route, a half-dozen cyclists, scrupulously ignoring my wobbling and wheezing, passed me like I was standing still. Snow-biking, by the way, proved to be far less treacherous than I’d imagined. It was really quite uneventful. I didn’t skid once. The worst part is the wind on your face, which I cleverly minimized by keeping my speed down. Hahaha.

Anyway, I got to the bus stop in short order. There, I checked the clock and the electronic message board that is supposed to track the incoming buses. Unfortunately, the message board had unhelpfully read Hyvää Matkaa (Have a good trip) for all of the previous week. So I just hunkered down. Remembering that fewer buses run on Saturdays, I double-checked the schedule that I carry in my back-pack. Sure enough, even if I had just missed the #4 bus due at my stop (Merikoskenkatu) at 7:55, there should be a #6 bus at 8:25. Not the end of the world. Even then, however, I noticed something unusual, and that was that I was all alone. Merikoskenkatu ordinarily is a pretty lively place, and 8:00 in the morning is not early by Finnish standards. I mean, the sun was practically up.

So there I was, starting to feel a little forlorn, when, as luck would have it, I was approached by a young Finnish man, drunk as a skunk. Let me hasten to say that this was not particularly alarming. Drunks in Finland are nowhere near as belligerent as red-blooded American drunks. Still, this fellow was not one of those young men who walk through town cradling a 10-pack of Karjala that has just been breached. This was a guy who had been partying all night, whose Karjala 10-pack was ancient history, and who had just popped into the nearby R-Kioski to buy several hefty-looking bottles of Karhu—hair of the dog, or bear, in this case. Karhu is Finnish for bear. Bear beer.

Anyway, as he approached, I thought to myself again, What Would Jussi Do? But then I realized that this time I had an advantage over Jussi, who would naturally address the drunk in Finnish, whereas I could speak to him in English, making it apparent right off that I would not be a very compatible breakfast companion. I had another thought—full disclosure time—and that was that this fellow might provide me with some good material for my blog. It’s come to that. Yes, I know it’s sick.

So, here he comes, lurching in my direction, with his entirely predictable question about the buses heading up Kemintie (the road to the city of Kemi). “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen any Kemintie buses, and I don’t speak Finnish,” I croaked. It was the first time I had said anything all day, which reminded me of my laryngitis.

“No problem,” he cheerfully replied, much to my chagrin. “I have walked three bloody kilometers waiting for one of those buses to come along.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m waiting for the 4 or the 6. On weekdays I can also take the 5 or the 7, but the 5 doesn’t run at all on the weekends, and the 7 doesn’t run this early on Saturday.” Confuse ‘em with facts, I always say.

“Well, but, that is true for, how you would say, regular Saturdays. But today is some kind of fucking holy day.” (Yes, I know this is a Family Blog, but artistic authenticity trumps that sometimes. You need to hear his voice, just as I did. You can't have your Huck Finn without your “Nigger Jim.”) “They will cancel many buses,” he continued. “That is why I have been walking, you see.”

A holy day? I hadn’t heard about that. “What do you mean, a holy day?” He meant holiday, of course.

“I do not know. Someone said something about holy day at party. They said there would not be many buses, and that I might have to walk home.” And that’s when I noticed that he was wearing a thin jacket and no gloves. I also noticed that he had a wry smile and may not have been quite as drunk as I had supposed. Then again, he also had an alarming amount of snot in his moustache and food in his beard.

“Your bus might not be coming at all,” he said, sympathetically. “How long you been here?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

“Seen any buses?”

“Not a single one. City buses, I mean. There have been a few long-distance buses, one bound for Kuusamo, I noticed.”

“Kussamo! Now there would be adventure for you. You made big mistake letting that bus go by. It might be the last one to come along here for awhile.” I could tell he was starting to settle in, while I wondered exactly what kind of adventures might be had in Kuusamo. It's over by the Russian border.

“You might be right,” I conceded. “Your English is very good. Did you learn it in school?”

“Nah. I learned it from my Australian friends. We work together at hospital, keskusta.”

“What do you do?” I asked, imagining that he was on the custodial staff.

“I am nurse. We work long shifts, and then we get off for few days. We get, how you would say, vacation?”

“Bingo. That’s the magic word, vacation. So, you’re on vacation right now?” I couldn’t help wondering whether he worked in the pneumonia ward.

“Yes. And I do not work again until Monday. Plenty of time for more party.” With a friendly grin, he hoisted his Karhu in my direction and opened his coat to show me that he had two more bears queued up in his inside pocket. “This is good part about cold weather,” he reported. “You don’t have no trouble keeping your beers cold. Though this weather is not yet cold. This is nothing,” he warned, shaking his head and finger for emphasis. “Nothing! Just wait.”

I had heard that before, and I’m sure that it’s true. It was about this time that he started to get a little feisty, though still in a good-natured way. “You know, these signs,” he said, pointing to the electronic message board above our heads, “they never work. Look at this: ‘Hyvää Matkaa.’ Have a good trip. Have a pleasant journey. Bon voyage.” He was translating to make sure I understood the point of his mockery. “Why do I need bus company to tell me to have good fucking trip. I need bus company to tell me when fucking Kemintie bus is coming to take me home. I don’t need no Hyvää fucking Matkaa.” Yes, now I could see the influence of his Aussie “mates.”

“What do you expect them to do?” I asked in my frog voice, “post an announcement that ‘This sign has been rendered useless by incompetent technical support staff’”?

“Why could they not just say ‘Out of Order’?”

Good question. Ordinarily, I would have been on his side. But for some reason I was feeling a little defensive on behalf of the bus company, perhaps because the buses work wonderfully, even if the signage is not always reliable. “Because civilization depends on face-saving euphemisms. These signs worked until last week,” I offered, lamely. “When we turned the clocks back an hour, that’s when they went on the fritz.”

He let out a roar that must have awakened everyone in the kerrostalo at our backs. “You mean, software engineers who programmed these signs forgot to make it possible to re-set internal clocks.” Again, he laughed loudly and long. Little tears formed around the corners of his eyes, and he wiped them with red fingers.

Though severely in his cups, this fellow was actually pretty good company for 45 minutes or so. We talked about travel. He asked about the United States, and he refrained from asking the question I have heard so often over here, which boils down to "How could a nice boy like you be from the Land of Bush and Cheney?" I was very grateful for that. He said impressive things about his work as a nurse, things that seemed entirely incongruous with the figure of the sorry drunk standing before me. At one point, I was tempted to ask him about my laryngitis, but then I had this vision of myself on a gurney trying to explain to an emergency room physician why I had asked a drunk at a bus stop what I should take for my sore throat. I finally gave up on the buses and told my comrade that I was going back to bed. It was not as hard to extricate myself as I had feared it might be. I was glad when he announced that he would be shoving off as well, and even gladder when I noticed that he set off in the direction of Kemintie. As I mounted my rickety bike, I heard him roar from afar, Hyvää Matkaa! I tried to reply, but between the laryngitis and my laughter, nothing came out.

I went back to my flat, crashed for about three hours, woke up, prepared some piping hot soup (Knorr carrot and coriander), which I consumed, along with a rye cracker and cheese, for lounas. And then I dressed and set out on the day’s errands, the most important of which was to stock up on groceries and prepared food. My refrigerator was almost completely empty, except for three nakki (mellow little wieners). By now it was nearly noon, and it had turned sunny and beautiful, though it was almost as cold as before (minus 9). This time I left the bike in its rack, so I would have both hands free to carry home my groceries, and along the way I sucked on a pellet of concentrated menthol called Lofthouse’s Fisherman’s Friend. As I headed confidently over the footbridge toward the city center, I saw two lunatics, a man and a woman, crawling out of the river, which has now iced over except for a few spots frequented by either mallards or ice swimmers.

I made my way to Stockmann, only to find that they were closed for the stealth “holy day” that was foiling my plans at every turn. The worst was yet to come. Next door, Alko—closed until Monday. On my forlorn trek home, I stopped at R-Kioski to buy two bottles of Karhu to go with my nakki. As I crossed back over the footbridge, I saw yet another person in a swimsuit scampering toward the clubhouse. It made me think how eagerly I was awaiting my regular Saturday afternoon sauna, which I was by now counting on as a sure cure. The desperate always grasp at straws.

However unlikely it might be, I hope that somehow my Finnish bus-stop companion will find his way to this blog, because I would like to buy him a cup of strong, black coffee, which I should have done on Saturday morning, when he really needed it. And in a few days, perhaps, I will be able to wish him a full-throated Hyvää Matkaa!

Save the Albino Bambi

2006-11-07T10:33:00.000+02:00

Save the albino Bambi! This just in from fulbrighterinfinland’s correspondent in Germany. (Click on the Title above for a link to Der Spiegel.)

Ouluun Kouluun (continued)

2006-11-05T12:48:00.000+02:00

Adjacent to the university is a high-tech center, or research park, that is commonly referred to as Technopolis. Like the university, it has a very high profile in this part of the world. So, there are two vibrant R&D centers on the northern periphery of Oulu. Both feature regional development and an “applied” ethos as part of their institutional missions.

Another regional resource, the airport—Oulun Lentoasema—is situated approximately 15 kilometers south and slightly to the west of the city center. The regional bus service, Koskilinjat Oy, recognizes the interdependence of city center, airport, and research park, with the #19 bus line. Still, it is curious that regular bus passes cannot be used for travel to or from the airport, and for some reason the #19 bus manages to skirt the central railway station, rautatieasema.

Here is a modest proposal for the future, submitted with the brazen confidence of a stranger who knows next to nothing about how the region works economically and socially. But let’s assume that the projections for future growth hold up, and that Oulu becomes an ever more prominent node of development for the entire north of Finland. Let’s assume the persistence of widespread consensus on the value of retaining Oulu’s dense and vital urban core, which depends on public transport, and which in turn inhibits sprawl. Let’s assume, finally, what it might not be at all safe to assume, which is that the Baltic Sea will stay put instead of inundating the city and much of Ostrobothnia as a result of global warning. If that happens, of course, all bets are off. But assuming that it doesn’t happen….

It could be time for Oulu to start thinking about a tram line. A tram linking the various high-tech nodes of the region would logically begin at the airport and end at the Linnanmaa campus and research park. It could roughly follow the route of the #19 bus, north through the city center on Isokatu, and south on Torikatu, though ideally it would build in a little hiccup, on both northbound and southbound routes, to incorporate the railway station. Outside the city center, the tram line could hug the main motorways, or it could exploit the fact that a very large amount of land currently is given over to bike trails and pedestrian paths. That would naturally generate NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) appeals, of course. It would help if the tram line replaced only the #19 bus, and if existing buses continued to run through neighborhoods presently served.

It would make sense if the tram had very few scheduled stops outside the city center. And that in turn would allow for some radical thinking about the optimal route. One can’t help but wonder, for example, what it would cost to build a tram causeway over the bay (Kempeleenlahti) that separates the city center from the airport at Oulunsalo. What a spectacular site that would be for a Santiago Calatrava suspension bridge!

A Doubting Thomas might ask, What about those ugly overhead "streetcar" wires? Well, modern technology appears to be closing in on a solution that meets modern safety standards. It’s called a ground-level power supply, or APS. See the short article in Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-level_power_supply. Or the longer piece here: http://web.archive.org/web/20041017010645/http:/www.lrta.org/dd011.html.

A potential problem may be posed by all the snow that nature dumps on the north of Finland. It’s easy to imagine how that could play havoc with the ground-level current. All of the websites devoted to the subject are suspiciously silent on the subject, and Bordeaux, the poster child for APS (see photo above), enjoys a climate very different from Oulu’s. Does anyone out there in this corner of the blogosphere know how big a problem heavy snow would pose for a ground-level powered tram? The person who taught me about recycling asphalt, perhaps? Kiitos!

Ouluun Kouluun

2006-11-03T10:00:00.000+02:00

A colleague in the history department writes that “There is an old saying in Finnish, ‘Ouluun Kouluun,’ which roughly means, ‘go to a school, go to Oulu’.” My colleague points out that while the jingle plays on the city’s centuries-long reputation as a center for schooling, “the University of Oulu was established as late as 1958, as the most northern university in the world.”

Oulu University also is credited with being the first “campus university” in Finland. That is a reference to the fact that the university built from scratch on reclaimed swamp land, in an area called Linnanmaa, some five kilometers north of the city. No doubt the cost of land was a key consideration in abandoning the city center, where the university retains a foothold with its medical school, architecture school, and some dormitory complexes. (The Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia has a very interesting exhibit, complete with Che Guevara poster, on student housing in Oulu.)

The Linnanmaa campus was designed, with plenty of room for expansion, by Kari Virta, and Virta and his firm have been involved one way or another in most of the work that has been done since. The first buildings (see photo, above) went up in the late 1960s. Dormitories have been built from time to time both in Linnanmaa and in the city center. Over time the Linanmaa plan has unfolded in “phases.” The City of Oulu website has some nice photos here: http://pohjois-suomi.safa.fi/sights/oui.html

New modules have been designed to conform to older ones, so that the pieces fit together a little like Legos. In fact, the Lego image conveys pretty well the overall design aesthetic. Given the weather in this corner of the world, it makes sense for modular units to attach to one another in such a way as to allow traffic to flow through long internal corridors. These passageways are so long, in fact, that the custodians, or "porters," recognizable by their dark blue dress shirts and black ties, travel about on scooters.

The aesthetics, and even the politics, of this kind of university campus have been and will continue to be vigorously debated. As a disciple of Jane Jacobs, who inveighed against universities that turn their backs on the city or build barricades to keep it out (the University of Chicago and Columbia University in particular drew her ire), I think of the ideal university as one that connects seamlessly to the city, and that sprawly suburban “campuses” send an unfortunate message about the role of the university in public life. That said, there is no undoing what has been wrought here, and there is no question but that over the past few decades this university has contributed more than its fair share to making Greater Oulu the vital metropole of the north of Finland, just as was intended. The paper I referred to at the outset of this post is devoted to telling this story, and it does so in a very compelling way.

The Pittsburgh-Oulu Axis

2006-11-02T12:45:00.000+02:00

My course on The North American City is now history, so to speak. In the course of the first half-semester, or “quarter,” I developed an email list of 45 students who attended one or more lectures. But since students do not “register” for courses, I never knew exactly how many students were "taking" my course, and all the coming and going made it very difficult to plan—even to know how many photocopies to make (and photocopies are important because students don’t buy textbooks). In the end, I had 24 students sit for the exam, with one more scheduled to take it on one of the days reserved for make-up exams or for people who have previously failed a test. These days are called Rästitenttipäivät.

Now my Pittsburgh seminar has begun. At the first meeting I had a grand total of five students, two of them alumni of the lecture course. The main project will be a formal seminar paper. Due in final form at the end of the semester, it also will form the basis of a major oral presentation. The class meets a total of twelve times, so it looks as if I will be responsible for presenting the material for seven sessions. Like everything else, that is subject to change, however.

This time I have been a little more clever in designing my course. Instead of relying on photocopies, I have constructed a syllabus that is 100% web-based. To do this I leaned heavily on the Digital Research Library of the University of Pittsburgh, a fully searchable archive of 521 books, plus maps, photographs and other images. And like the Digital Research Library, my syllabus is based on primary and secondary sources that are no longer protected by copyright. I plan to provide additional bibliographic advice, and in many cases, photocopies of current scholarly articles or book chapters, once seminar paper topics have been defined.

Along the way, I have discovered some truly remarkable digital resources bearing on the history of Pittsburgh. One in particular functions as a kind of an intellectual boomerang, taking me all the way to western Pennsylvania, and then back again to Oulu. Here’s the story.

A major Pittsburgh landmark is the University of Pittsburgh’s “Cathedral of Learning.” It is said to be the second tallest (after the University of Moscow) university building in the world, and it is an icon in part because of the way it rises more or less by itself in the cultural district of Oakland. A gothic skyscraper, we learn from Franklin Toker’s great book about Pittsburgh architecture that it is the work of architect Charles Z. Klauder, and it was the brainchild of Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman. It was constructed during the 1930s. Contentious issue have arisen in recent years about whether central air conditioning should be installed, about the question of cleaning (blocked so far by the preservationists, who argue that soot is an important part of Pittsburgh's industrial heritage), about illumination (the lights still come on at night, according to Wikipedia), and about the threat of terrorist attacks (bollards recently have been installed around the building's perimeter).

The Cathedral of Learning is more than just a much-loved symbol of the city. It is a heavily used educational building. It houses faculty offices, classrooms, a theater, and a computer laboratory. And on the first and third floors, there are 26 “Nationality Rooms” that pay homage to Pittsburgh’s unusually rich and diverse ethnic heritage. Some of the nationality rooms—the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav Rooms, for example—have been overtaken by history, which arguably makes them more interesting than ever. Fully 24 of the Nationality Rooms are working classrooms; two are for display only.

Wikipedia reports that a typical room “on the 1st floor (those built between 1938 and the 1960s) took between three and ten years to complete, and cost the equivalent of $300,000 USD in 2006 dollars. More recent rooms have cost in the range of $500,000 USD.” The Nationality Rooms have their own website, where we learn that there are eight new rooms being planned at the present time, including a Finnish Room. A fund-raising campaign is underway. Meanwhile, the Finlandia Foundation, Pittsburgh Chapter, and the Finnish Committee of the University of Pittsburgh have sponsored a competition for the room's design.

The winning entry was submitted by Mika Gröndahl, an architecture student from the University of Oulu. Here is a link to his submission, which is called the Big Dipper: http://www.pittsburghfinns.org/TheBigDipper.pdf. It strikes me as a little reminiscent of a Finnish sauna. The second-place winners were “a design team comprised of Eero Lunden, Heikki Muntola, Olli Saarikoski, and Eero Tapio from Oulu University for their Carelian inspired submission titled Piilu.” The entry that finished third was submitted by a team from Tampere University of Technology.

I propose that we hoist a noggin in honor of the three winning entries, the Oulun Yliopisto architecture school, and the proposition that you should never bet against a Finnish sauna. Kippis!

Hyvää ruokaa Oulussa, part two

2006-11-02T12:00:00.000+02:00

Well, my Fulbright experience in Finland is half over, and I can say that so far I bear responsibility for nary an international incident. Of course, that could change if Jacques Chirac ever discovers this blog.

In the meantime, let’s turn to the Good Eats in Oulu Sweepstakes for October. Third place goes to Pikku Thai, centrally located on Pakkahuoneenkatu. I love Thai food with a passion, and so Pikku Thai would have had to really mess up not to make my all-star team. I have been there three times, and they haven’t failed me yet. This month’s award is given in honor of their chicken with green curry sauce, which was offered as a daily special at one point early in the month. The special always comes with an excellent spring roll and a vinegary little salad that nicely complements a sweet duck sauce. The steamed rice is not gummy, and it is very, very tasty. Their portions are little on the small side, which is not an altogether bad thing, especially when the special includes vanilla ice cream topped with either toffee or chocolate sauce. I could dock them for keeping their red wine in the fridge, but that would be churlish. The special is a bargain at 12.50, and even with two glasses of that chilled red wine, my total ran to just 21 euros.

The second place winner for October is Istanbul Oriental at Kauppurienkatu 11, directly across from Stockmann and next door to Winger (see “Hottest Wings, Coldest Beer, Soft Ice,” over there in the archives under October 3, 2006). I have had my eye on Istanbul Oriental for a long time, but I was not making much progress with the menu at the front door, given that it is a detailed Finnish-language account of Middle Eastern food. I screwed up my courage and went in one Friday night, and then I stood in the doorway and admired the polished brass décor for about ten minutes while they tried to find me a table. I was impressed that instead of shoehorning me in, they offered to reserve a table for the next night instead. I said sure.

I ordered the prawn shish-kebab. I had an appetizer of yogurt, cucumber, dill, tons of garlic, with truly fabulous fresh bread. The prawns were large, numerous, and very tasty, and the vegetables were fresh and well seasoned. With one glass of wine and Turkish coffee at the end, the total damage was 45.50 euros, which qualifies as a big splurge, to be sure. But I have no regrets. Istanbul Oriental obviously is a very popular place. The service was as outstanding as the food. Here’s a link to their website: http://www.istanbuloriental.fi/

For the second month in succession, the Russian restaurant Zakuska makes the finals, and this time it finishes at the very top of the heap. I took Jane on her last night in Oulu, so okay, Zakuska had the romantic edge on the competition. We enjoyed the meal, the décor, and the relaxed atmosphere. (See photo up top.)

Plus, we had a little lesson in the linguistic generational gap that prevails here. We were surrounded by 14 other customers—we counted—including a large table of Nokia employees. Every one—literally—was chattering away in English. While one of the two middle-aged waitresses spoke English well, the other’s English was as rudimentary as my Finnish. Eventually, I was able to get a pitcher of water from her.

I ordered the flambéed brandy tournados, which came with potatoes parisienne, a red wine sauce, and mushrooms. My bride ordered the fish (mainly salmon) and crustacean (mainly shrimp) kebabs, billed as a Ukrainian dish, which came with fried rice and herbal butter with sour cream that was laced with pink peppercorns. She loves pink peppercorns. Both entrees arrived with red cabbage and julienned carrots mixed with at least one other root vegetable, which must have been either parsnips or turnips. We couldn’t decide. The home-made bread was excellent. The total damage—with a decent bottle of valpolicella—came to just under 90 euros for two. I was so pleased I used the change from two fifties to spring for a taxi to convey us back to the flat, thus sparing us a long walk through the cold and dark. For those of you keeping score at home, it was minus 10 degrees Celsius last night. Both of us bought wool sweaters during her stay here. Jane bought hers at the crafts market in Tallinn. I bought mine at Stockmann.

It's raining snow in Northern Ostrobothnia

2006-10-31T08:45:00.000+02:00

Jane and I returned to Oulu on Friday, October 27, on the Pendolino train 45 from Helsinki. We started out in heavy rain, and within a few hours (it's about a six-hour trip) we were being propelled by a snowstorm that swept through the region and dropped about 10 centimeters of snow. In Finnish, the verb for "to snow" is sataa lunta, which (I think) literally means "to rain snow." The locals welcome the snow because it brightens things up. They say it is likely to melt, but some years it just accumulates through the winter, which doesn't even start officially for a couple of months.

So, this is serious business. The snow is lovely, but treacherous. I have trouble walking on it, but the stalwart Finns continue to ride their bikes, undaunted. There are more polar walkers out these days, and I suppose some people have started to wax their cross-country skis.

On Sunday afternoon we walked through Ainola Park (see photo above) to the Northern Ostrobothnia Museum (Pohjois-Pohjanmaan museo). There are a number of interesting exhibits, including one on Sámi culture, but for me the main attractions have to do with the history of Oulu. One is a digital exhibit of historic maps. Changes in the physical city are quite well documented, and extremely well presented with digital images and overlays. And urban form reflects changing political circumstances, as a Swedish tar-exporting town later gave way to a Russian provincial capital. Through the years there were a number of major fires, each followed by an attempt to regularize the street grid and provide room for rebuilding and expansion.

The second main attraction for anyone interested in the history of city planning is a huge three-dimensional model of the city as it existed in 1938. It is so big that they have installed a remote-controlled camera that can zoom in for aerial views of any district. As it turns out, the model helps reveal the extent of the damage wrought by the long war years, and also the extent of post-war reconstruction work.

My suspicions about the Alvar Aalto ground plan for Toivoniemi were pretty much on the mark. This was land reclaimed from the river when a new channel was dug for the Merikosken power station. The nearby neighborhood of Tuira was completely refashioned after the war. It looks as if there were no high-rise blocks of flats in Tuira prior to the war. Now there is almost nothing else. This is a great resource for teaching urban history. I wish I had known about it in time to incorporate it into my syllabus.

Click on the title of this post to be redirected to the Northern Ostrobothnia Museum.

Che Guevara in Estonia

2006-10-28T14:01:00.000+03:00

During the mid-semester break, Jane and I took Silja Line’s SuperSeaCat ferry over to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. At the end of World War II, Tallinn was bombarded by the Red Army, but compared with other central and eastern European capitals, it has suffered relatively little over the centuries. And so it boasts one of Europe’s most celebrated medieval cores. Spires, pinnacles, and onion domes render it a kind of San Gimignano north—or “urban pin-cushion,” to steal a nice line from Lewis Mumford.

Dutiful tourists that we are, we subjected ourselves to the standard forced march from pilgrimage church to crenellated tower to town hall and market square and back. All of this urban tissue is contained within a pre-gunpowder (i.e., tall and thin) wall that includes some intact gates and galleys, punctuated here and there by baroque-era fortifications, some of the bastions having long since been converted to parkland.

The Tallinn City Museum (Tallinna Linnamuuseum) depicts the city’s history “from the thirteenth century up to re-independence.” Ads assure the prospective patron that “Explanations in English have been provided in all the halls.” Tallinn was the northernmost member of the Hanseatic League, and so the city has had an international character for many centuries. Some say that the name Tallinn, or Tallinna, dates from the period of Danish domination (13th and early 14th centuries), though others insist the word is Estonian. Through most of its history the city has been known by its German name, Reval. The Estonian language is related to Finnish, though therein lies a tale.

We found it easy to get by on English alone, as nearly all merchants and hospitality workers seem to have at least some English. But we got the impression that the natives were somewhat miffed when we attempted to start a conversation with a standard Finnish opening, such as hyvää huomenta (good morning). A little Finnish at the end of a conversation was received in a decidedly different spirit. At the end of one exchange in English, for example, I began to take my leave. Kiitos, I said, hei hei. (Thank you. Bye-bye.) The merchant, solemn only moments before, repeated my words with a hearty, good-natured laugh. Kiitos. Hei hei. What could be more hilarious, he seemed to say. My suspicion is that Estonians don't like the idea that Estonian is a dialect of Finnish, which might be implied by some visiting Finns who expect the Estonians to know their language. Finns should perhaps tread lightly in Estonia—at least until everyone in both countries speaks fluent English. It won't be long.

While Tallinn appears to be a major tourist destination in the making—kind of a medieval Williamsburg—there are some distinctly non-medieval touches that add to the poignancy of the built environment. There are, for example, some of the more tawdry manifestations of a new capitalist economy. While we did not see a red-light district a la Amsterdam, there are enough strip shows and bars that the tourist bureau feels obliged to offer a discouraging word to those (namely, the English) who might think that Tallinn would be a good place to spend a weekend drinking and whoring with one’s mates. On a more mundane level, there are places such as Hell Hunt, which bills itself as Estonia’s first pub (“est. 1993”), and the Texas Honky Tonk Cantina. Tourists spending euros and U.S. dollars find many bargains in Estonia, where the locals eke out a living with their moribund kroner. We were told that some residents of Helsinki take the ferry to Tallinn just to buy booze.

The rawness of emerging capitalism in a former east-bloc country is underscored by the stark generational contrast provided by legions of young people with nose studs and tattoos sharing the streets of the old town with babushkas exercising their rosaries. The older generation is likely to speak some Russian. Young people almost certainly will speak at least some English. Meanwhile, the older generation of ethnic Russians in Tallinn, who may have never learned to speak Estonian, must watch helplessly as their heirs become more assimilated (i.e., less Russian) and more cosmopolitan by the day.

The signs of change are everywhere. At present, Tallinn is a city of scaffolding. The new president of Estonia, the 53-year-old Toomas Hendrik Ilves, grew up in the United States, where he earned psychology degrees from Columbia and Penn. According to the tourist bureau, he is fond of bow ties.

Running against the grain of rampant capitalism and post-modernity is the occasional element of exotica. Consider, for example, the Museum of Occupation and of the Fight for Freedom, which covers the “difficult period” during which Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany and then, along with the other Soviet socialist republics, ground beneath the iron heal of the U.S.S.R.

At Pagari 1 is the former headquarters of the KGB. The complimentary guide book called Tallinn in Your Pocket notes, “Look for the building with the bricked-up cellar windows.” The plaque there reads, “This building housed the headquarters of the organ of repression of the Soviet occupational power. Here began the road to suffering for thousands of Estonians.”

Then there is the Bronze Soldier in front of the National Library. This monument, which dates from 1947, officially commemorates Soviet soldiers killed in World War II, but it has become identified with the occupation, and so it is the focal point for political rallies, “especially by Estonian extremists who want to see it removed.”

In this particular context, what are we to make of the Che Guevara stencil that we saw on an old town sidewalk? It was fresh. It’s hard to think that the Che icon can be taken literally, but then, how is one to take it? And what might have been the motives of the sidewalk spray-paint artist?

Earmarking

2006-10-26T17:29:00.000+03:00

I get the impression that I am generally regarded as an “at-large” member of the humanities faculty at the University of Oulu. That’s okay with me, but at some point someone must have asked, where, exactly, are we going to put this guy? I suspect there was no space available either in English—which is, mind you, still a foreign language here—or history. In some ways it might have been most natural for me to make my nest with the geographers. They comprise about three-quarters of the population of my North American City class, except that geography is not a humanities discipline at Oulun yliopisto. The geographers’ digs are over yonder with the real scientists.

So, I have an office in the anthropology department. More precisely, I am camping out in the Giellagas Institute, which is a multi-disciplinary center for the study of Sámi culture. The Sámi are the people whom—back in the seventh grade, in Meadville, Pennsylvania—we used to call Laplanders. I remember that. Thank you, Mr. Nace. (Speaking of great teachers, the wonders of Wikipedia never cease. Today I learned that Laplander also is “another name for the Volvo L-3314 series.”)

Anyway, I settled in as gently as I could, and I have tried not to rock the Giellagas kayak. The sign on my door says that I occupy a tutkijanhuone, which means “research room,” I think. My name is on the door as well, so I suppose I should be doing research in here, instead of managing my blog. Academic freedom is grand, init?

One day there came a gentle rapping at my door. “Joo,” I said, just as nonchalantly as premeditation will allow. It turned out to be a colleague from down the hall who wanted to know if I would care to borrow a book that he had co-edited and co-written. It's an overview of Sámi culture, written—mainly in English—as part of a celebration linked to the opening of a museum in Inari, a major center of Sámi culture in the far north of Finland. I said sure, why not, thinking that it might help me decide whether to point myself in the direction of the Arctic Circle and Rovaniemi—the Santa Claus city—at the end of the semester, when I will have a few days to kill before heading back to Helsinki for my flight home.

As it happens, my office neighbor is a leading authority on Sámi culture. And the book that he lent me—Jukka Pennanen and Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi, Siiddastallan: From Lapp Communities to Modern Sámi Life (Inari: Inari Sámi Institute, Number 5, 2002)—is chock-a-block with fascinating information about the Sámi. For example, the subject of reindeer herding, interesting in itself, leads in turn to earmarking, which is not just a cultural practice but also—who knew?—a living language.

When I say earmarking, I’m not talking about pork legislatively directed to favored constituents. No, I mean the marking of ears. Each Sámi herder has his or her own brand, as it were, which linguists call a “signature.” Though the “alphabet” of knife cuts would seem to be limited, the signatures form very intricate patterns, which are considered the “words” of the earmarking language.

“The child of a herding family receives his/her personal earmark at birth….” During the pre-school years, the children are given “the tools needed for marking calves: a lasso and a marking knife.” The earmarks assigned to children usually are derived from those of the parents. “Each reindeer owner develops a unique ‘handwriting’ by which one can recognize the reindeer he/she has marked. This distinctive handwriting starts to evolve already in early childhood.”

This is demonstrated in the book with an illustration that can only be called a “family tree” of earmarks. In the standard notation system marks are depicted within an almond-shaped frame, right ear on the right side, left ear on the left. Right and left are not mirror images of one another; that is to say, markings are asymmetrical. “The right ear seems to maintain the marking basis of a family more clearly than the left one.”

Reindeer earmarking is, of course, subject to government regulation. “According to the pertinent statute, “an earmark can cut away up to a third of the ear’s length and a third of its width. Certain cuts, however, cannot be combined on the same ear.” The author of this particular essay, Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi, goes on to say that Sámi herders don’t need the legislation to tell them what combinations of cuts will cause the ear to “fall off, dangle or droop, or be prone to accidental damage.” They know from experience. But I’m sure they think it was nice of the government to codify it for them anyway.

I have been all over the World Wide Web, and I cannot find a digital repository of earmarks to use as a quarry for examples to attach to this post. Trust me. These things are sensational. They are vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian or Maya hieroglyphs. And like the Inca khipu, this living language is written and read manually as well as visually. The other day, I learned from a colleague here that English has a word that means “of or relating to the sense of touch; tactile.” That word is “haptic,” and I am very glad to know it, because in earmarking, “The hand and fingers are surely as important as the eyes and visual perception, both in marking reindeer and in recognizing the mark. The importance of the hand and fingers in recognizing earmarks arises especially in cases where the earmark has not been made clearly enough. The surest way to recognize an unclear earmark is to feel it with one’s fingers.”

Earmarking, like calligraphy, also is considered an art form. “A well-chosen earmark can be recognized from far away and is easy to distinguish from other earmarks, and it also contains features that are purely aesthetic.”

But the overriding considerations are practical. It is important to choose an earmark that cannot easily be “turned into another mark by making additional cuts in the ear.” If an earmark proves to be unsatisfactory, for whatever reason, a herder can apply for a new one, retaining the rights to the old one for eight years, “during which time one is supposed to get rid of the reindeer with the old mark.”

Earmarks can be inherited, purchased, or given away. “An earmark can also be pawned for a loan, though this is a rare occurrence. And finally, earmarks can also change hands through bartering.”

The tradition of earmarking—and Sámi culture generally—is endangered, and if I understand the message of this book, what may prove to be the camel’s nose under the tent is the humble snowmobile. And that is why the documentation of earmarking—the practice, and also the language—forms part of the mission of the Giellagas Institute.

Exactly how far north of Rovaniemi is Inari? I wonder.

Rounding up the usual suspects

2006-10-26T17:25:00.000+03:00

I thought y’all might be interested in our Survival Finnish class—a very congenial, if motley, crew.

From left to right: Arindam, (India), Lee (England), Brucia (Belgium), Mark (Australia), Krista (Canada), Milla (our vivacious teacher), Inge (China), Alona (Russia), Stanislav (Ukraine).

Missing in Inaction: Ken (doing his Dr. Evil impression behind the camera, USA), Andy the Goalie (Canada)

Alvar Aalto

2006-10-24T08:31:00.000+03:00

The Fulbright program here in Finland encourages mentoring through “big brother” kinds of relationships. Unfortunately, there was no one up here in the remote north to assign to me. So, my Fulbright buddy is in far-away Jyväskylä. That’s okay, because we maintain regular email contact, and he has invited me to visit, which is great because Jyväskylä has been on my list of places to see from the start.

That’s because of Alvar Aalto, the architect sometimes referred to as the Finnish Frank Lloyd Wright. I’ve been reading up on Aalto, and I think I understand why some people question the aptness of that comparison. Most of them regard it as demeaning to Aalto. His roots were in the south-central part of the country, and he did a great deal of work in and around Jyväskylä. The Alvar Aalto Museum—it’s in an Aalto building—is there, and the local university boasts a number of his buildings. Jyväskylä is a major pilgrimage destination for architecture buffs, even though Aalto’s work can be found all over the country.

For that we have mainly the Germans to thank, for they torched many of Finland’s cities as they withdrew from the country at the end of what Finns call the “continuation war.” Some cities were devastated. For example, Rovaniemi, the Santa Claus city a couple of hours north of Oulu by train, was left in ruins and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Aalto drew up a city plan in the form of reindeer antlers. It sounds ridiculous to me, but I will try to suspend disbelief until I see it for myself after the semester ends.

The damage done to Oulu seems to have been severe, but not on the level of Rovaniemi. I have learned that in 1943-47, Aalto was brought in to design, or re-design, the part of Oulu that lies along the river bank adjacent to my neighborhood, Tuira. The river itself seems to have been reconstructed on several occasions.

Nineteenth-century lithographs reveal serious whitewater in the rapids (koski) at this spot. At some point a new channel was dug to bring the river through a power station that I walk or bike past twice a day. What’s left of the rest of the river flows through what I suspect is the original channel. There is parkland on every side. There is even a beach where, any day of the week, lunatics can be seen swimming. There is an island near the north shore and adjacent to the power plant. I don’t know if this island has always been there, or if it was fashioned at the same time that the power plant was constructed, which was in 1948. I also don’t know the extent to which Aalto was involved in all this.

But all the sources I have seen agree that he designed the “general plan” for a residential area, called Toivoniemi, on the island with the power plant. Toivoniemi is an International Style “park” punctuated with ‘50s-era residential towers, rather nice ones, it seems to me, though none is attributable to Aalto. I get the impression he was responsbible only for the landscape. And perhaps part of the riverscape.

On the day that I arrived in Oulu, I was met at the airport and driven to my flat. The city looked pretty much as I had expected it to look, in part because it is completely flat, like a map. As we crossed the bridge over the Oulujuki approaching Tuira, I saw something I didn’t expect. There was a place in the river where a dozen fountains or more had been set to propel jets of water many meters high—a kind of water sculpture. At first I was struck by the sheer frivolousness of fountains in a river. Over time, as a pedestrian and bicyclist, they have grown on me. They would have cost something to install, of course, and operating the pumps consumes energy, but I would guess that lighting represents the major expense. Yes, the fountains are illuminated at night; it makes for a nice show. Think how many city residents and guests, over sixty years and counting, have derived pleasure from these simple fountains. Thank you, Mr. Aalto, if in fact you were responsible for this urban amenity. Now, bring on those urban reindeer antlers!

Click on the title of this post for a tour of the Alvar Aalto Museum.

Chatterpie

2006-10-23T15:10:00.000+03:00

In my family we are not maniacal bird watchers, but we do keep our feeders filled—well, Jane does—and we occasionally will grab a pair of binoculars to get a better look at a goldfinch or a pileated woodpecker. All in all, we are pretty casual in our bird-watching.

Still, I took note when I read in my Lonely Planet guide that the Liminganlahti Bird Sanctuary near Oulu “attracts more avian species than any other similar place in Finland. The wide bay is protected and funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).” During the “great bird migration” one can see several rare species, and up to 70 species in a single summer day. “Prominent species include the yellow-breasted bunting, a variety of wader, and the Ural Owl.” The operative word here is “summer.” I missed it.

You’d think that Oulu would derive some residual benefits from the “great bird migration.” I haven’t seen any. In the town center, and also on the university campus, the bird most in evidence is the magpie.

I have been reading about magpies. Everyone seems to agree that the second syllable comes from the Latin word, pica. The "mag" is more debatable. Wikipedia asserts that it is short for Margaret, and that magpie might be an allusion to nagging. Mag the nag. But then, Wikipedia backtracks, conceding that “It could have also been named after “Maggot” because it stole eggs and nestlings from other birds.” There is consensus, however, on the magpie’s penchant for “noisy chattering.” In Old English, it was sometimes called the chatterpie.

Setting the issue of Margaret and Maggie and Maggot to one side, I am prepared to acknowledge that it is not a particularly nice bird. Still, it is no nastier, and much handsomer, than the crow. And it is fairly tame; the magpie will let you get within a few feet. I came to appreciate the magpie when I was on sabbatical in London some eight years ago. I had never seen one before, and I did a double-take when I saw my first in a little garden off Russell Square. The attached photo, by the way, is from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They live out west in the States, which is why I had never seen one. There are also blue magpies in Finland. They’re not as good looking as the black-and-white ones. They are not even very blue, but more of a bluish gray. They hang around the campus as well.

Anyway, my office is up on the third floor of the humanities building at Oulun yliopisto. I’m told there are some 18,000 students at this university, but aside from a couple of small museums, there are very few diversions on this campus, which is a complex of heavyweight, good-enough-for-industry buildings in a sprawling research park some five kilometers north of the city. Since I keep long office hours (no internet connection at the flat), there are times when I could use some company. Most of the time I sit here staring at my computer screen. Once in a while, out of the corner of my eye, I’ll see a magpie strutting around on the roof of the building across the way—just hangin’ out, lookin’ good. I fancy the chatterpie has come round to keep me company. You could do worse.

Old Train

2006-10-19T09:37:00.000+03:00

One of the great things about being a Fulbrighter in Finland is that it simplifies the life wonderfully. I mean, you just don’t have that much stuff. George Carlin used to have a very funny routine about “stuff,” and how we ought to just pitch most of it, but we never do. Well, I’m living out of two suitcases, a laptop computer, and a backpack. In anticipation of this Spartan existence, I shipped a box of books over here on July 28. It was supposed to arrive on Labor Day. It arrived a month later. Of course I erred in shipping it, instead of swallowing hard and sending it Federal Express. But when I opened that box, I realized that I also had managed to send all the wrong stuff. I no longer needed most of the books in that box. Some of them I hadn‘t even missed.

Then there was John W. Reps’s The Making of Urban America, one of the classic texts in my field. I love this book, and it was the backbone of the first three weeks of my course on The North American City. But by the time I pulled Reps out of that box, he was ancient history, so to speak. And so it had the aspect, not of a beloved book, but of a heavy, oversized parcel that I was either going to have to ship or schlep all the way home. So I gave it to a student who has more need of it than I do at this point in my life. And I feel really, really good about that, though I am not ready just yet to start giving all my books away.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that packing is difficult, and that I made a lot of mistakes, mistakes I’m sure I would make again, and that’s the discouraging part. But I made one very good decision, on the basis of sheer whimsy, that has made me a happy camper. At the last minute, realizing that I had a few square millimeters of space in my backpack, I threw in an old Seldom Scene CD.

I’m going to assume that while hundreds of thousands of the faithful readers of this blog are following me all the way, there might be tens of thousands who might need a little background here. I am not the person best equipped to provide that background, but I will do the best I can. The Seldom Scene—sometimes with the definite article, sometimes without—is a Washington-based bluegrass group that has had a very loyal following for three decades and more. My bride and I very definitely are kenny-and-janey-come-latelies to this crowd, and we have been fellow travelers at best. But I think it is fair to say that the Seldom Scene is and always has been more urbane and eclectic than most bluegrass groups. And a little quirky. They ordinarily work with a dobro instead of a fiddle, and while they almost always have had guitarists, you get the impression they don't feel as if the guitar is indispensable. Gosh, I hope I am getting this right.

You know, I don’t believe the United States government has ever really tapped the diplomatic potential of bluegrass. There was a time when the State Department would send jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong around the world to build good will for America. I’m sure they did, too, by disseminating a distinctly American art form, one in which we should take pride, and one that there is no earthly reason to hoard. A bluegrass ambassador would do wonders for our image abroad. In my next life, I want to be the Bill Monroe professor of American studies at the University of Helsinki.

But I digress—again. Where were we? Seldom Scene. As I understand it, the name of the group derives from there having been key members at the outset who had daytime jobs and didn’t want to go on the road, which they easily could have done because they were so good. But in the event, they were “seldom seen.” The godfather of the group was John Duffey, a big man who played a little instrument, the mandolin, and sang tenor. For many years, the group has (have? Perkele!) been frequently spotted at the Birchmere, which is only about a mile and a half from our house in Alexandria—but in a much seedier neighborhood, let me put that on record.

Okay, now that we’ve settled that, let me get back to my good packing decision. At the last minute, I threw a Seldom Scene CD called Old Train into my backpack. And there it languished until last Saturday night, when I dragged it out and put it on the proverbial turntable. Since then I’ve been playing it over and over. I had been letting that CD languish on our kitchen counter, next to the Bose, for years, and for no good reason. I simply had too much stuff. Whenever I wanted to listen to some music, some other CD always had precedence. Many’s the time Bach’s St. John Passion trumped Seldom Scene. I’m not proud of that. Sometimes I would reach out for Old Train and end up with Steely Dan, or even the Eagles. I can’t tell you why.

But now that this CD has my full attention (it’s that or nothing), let me say that my grabbing instinct was inspired.

When you think bluegrass, you think traditional music, and that’s right as far as it goes. But under the capacious umbrella of “folk” music, Seldom Scene has always preferred to run with the gospel crowd, and that is a little unusual. They are very selective, however, and careful in their arrangements to capitalize on everything that is meritorious in that genre. Best of all, they have never allowed a scintilla of either sentimentality or condescension to creep into their performance of gospel music. Elvis, I hope you are doing the boogaloo in your grave on that particular note. There are a couple of gospel tunes on Old Train, at least one of which I have heard the Stanley Brothers perform, perhaps in that George Clooney movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I didn’t happen to throw in my backpack at the last minute, unfortunately.

Apart from the gospel tunes and the public domain folk music, the Seldom Scene always has had a weakness for Hank Williams. On Old Train, Hank is represented by Pan American, a marvelous choice. Several selections, most notably, Wait a Minute—I’ll have more to say about that, hetkinen, as we say in Finland—have been Seldom Scene standards for many years. Some people write songs specifically for Seldom Scene, compositions that pay homage to the group’s eclecticism. I’m sorry, I keep using that word, but there isn’t a better one, or any good synonym.

After I was really starting to appreciate this CD, I began to notice that several cuts contained something that shouldn’t be there. Sometimes a fiddle crept into the background. And sometimes one could hear a distinctly female voice, ordinarily a bluegrass no-no. Eventually, I realized I was going to have to put on my spectacles and read the liner notes, something I never do. It turns out that Old Train was recorded in 1974, and released as a CD in 1988. In terms of the performers, it is something of a mélange. There is a list of the group’s members on the cover, but because of the “guest artists,” the performers also are listed cut by cut. There are three constants. John Duffey, mandolin and vocals, gets top billing everywhere. Ben Eldridge, banjo, and Tom Gray, bass and vocals, are on every cut, but Eldridge is listed fourth, and Gray fifth, after John Starling, guitar and vocals, and Mike Auldridge, dobro and vocals, when they are performing. Starling, incidentally, was a surgeon on the side. Paul Craft, guitar, and Bob Williams, harmonica, are two of the four guest artists.

Now get this. The fiddling turns out to be the work of the illustrious Ricky Skaggs, who plays on the title cut and also on Old Crossroads. Skaggs also plays viola on Different Roads. And the female voice is that of Linda Ronstadt, who sings on Through the Bottom of the Glass and Old Crossroads. Ronstadt would then have been at the very pinnacle of her career, the era during which she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in her underwear every other week. But there she is on Old Train, down in agate type at the bottom of the pecking order for both of those cuts. Such was the stature, the authority, of the late John Duffey.

Google, you know, is absolutely amazing. I typed in “Linda Ronstadt underwear” and it took me directly to a gallery of the very photos I had in mind, from which I chose the one above, this being, after all, a Family Blog.

Well, I hope you’re having fun. I am. But there is a point here. Yes, stuff is overrated, and serendipity plays a role in packing decisions. But we know all that. The point I want to convey is that while one must acknowledge The Tie that Binds (the sub-title of one of the cuts from Old Train), one also needs to recognize when a tie needs to be loosened, if not severed. As fantastic as Seldom Scene was in 1974, when Linda Ronstadt was pleased to jam with them in a Washington recording studio, the group is even better today.

Ben Eldridge, the sole surviving common thread, is a master craftsman, the consummate professional who never shows off, even though you know he could. He has had thirty years since Old Train to refine his technique. And of course he is even better now. Seldom Scene still plays Wait a Minute. But now the harmonies seem even tighter, and more refined. Fred Travers plays a dobro that is divine, and his tenor is sweeter, less twangy than Duffey’s. Yes, I know that is heresy. Dudley Connell, guitar and vocals, and Lou Reid, mandolin and vocals, know enough not to try to duplicate Duffey, and so they play to their own manifold strengths. Ronnie Simpkins is the bassist now. Today’s group has continued the tradition of borrowing from other genres, and not just by “covering” songs that we already know and love. More typically, they will exhume a totally non-descript and unmourned corpse from someone else’s music crypt and turn it into a wonder with just a little judicious pruning or tweaking. Good as they were in 1974, nothing the group did then can come close to clearing the bar set by the current group with Bob Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather, or Bruce Springsteen’s One Step Up.

Once I had a historian friend, now deceased, who loathed sentimentality. He liked to say that “the good old days aren’t what they used to be, and never were.” I don’t know where he got that line, but ain’t it the truth.

Click on the title of this post to go to the official Seldom Scene website.

Intelligent Design, part two

2006-10-18T08:41:00.000+03:00

According to international studies, Finnish industry today is among the front rank for competitiveness: state-of-the-art information technology and high levels of innovation, combined with excellent research and education, create a strong competitive edge and a basis for industrial success now and in the future. In the 21st century, an increasingly important part of this overall competitiveness has been played by industrial design and the added value it confers: it is frequently what makes a product the first choice.
--Anne Stenros. Click on the title of this post to go to the source, Virtual Finland.

Last week, in a post called “Intelligent Design,” I celebrated the virtues of putting hooks on bath towels and drying racks in kitchen cupboards. Today we’re talking floors and doors.

I’ve had people here tell me that there was a time when wall-to-wall shag carpets were all the rage in Finland. It’s hard to know why. And it’s hard to imagine where they all went. Today it seems that every floor in Finland is covered with beautiful blond wood. These floors are lovingly maintained and protected in the heavy-use areas by either oriental carpets or less expensive woven wool rugs that have a modern look, a nappy texture, and a tweedy design. Think IKEA (EE-kay-yah, here).

In my kerrostalo, these rugs materialize on the weekends. In our courtyard, adjacent to the clotheslines and the little swing where the seniors perch on sunny days, is a metal contraption that looks like a jungle gym on steroids; it’s kind of bulky, and it‘s been twisted into an odd shape. I couldn’t imagine what it was until I saw people draping their rugs over the cross bars and wielding a big whisk to beat them to a fibrous pulp. Wall-to wall, shag carpets covered a multitude of sins, but the down side was that they were impossible to clean. The thing about wood floors is that they look great whether you’ve got them covered or not, and the throw rugs can be beaten clean.

(I write these words on a grey, blustery Sunday afternoon to the accompaniment of a man beating the snot out of a woolen runner. He must be, like me, a man without a rug whisk. He is using one of the long-handled brushes set out for us—in mid-September—to clean the snow off our shoes before coming indoors. It hasn’t snowed yet, though it has tried to once or twice. The point is that we are prepared.)

The other great thing about wood floors is that they give rise to and reinforce a very civilized domestic etiquette. I’m referring to the practice of removing your shoes when you enter a home—your own, or someone else’s. I found it hard to remember to do that at first, but now I am up to speed. It is a courtesy that acknowledges the special status of domestic space and contributes to the protection of a valuable floor. (It’s also one of many strange little ways in which Finnish civilization is ever so vaguely reminiscent of those of the Far East. It is said, for example, that the syntax of the Finnish language is very similar to that of Korean Hangul. On more than one occasion back in the States, when I reported that I would be a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Oulu, people asked whether I had ever been to Hawaii. No, I haven’t. Is there a Fulbright center there, I wonder?)

Then there are the doors. Finland has a lot of modernist buildings. For an American, “modernist” might conjure up visions of the Seagram Building, or maybe Pruitt-Igoe. For me, modernist architecture means any building with a “front door” that is not centrally located, and which consists of side-by-side glass doors, one of which is permanently out of commission, and you get to guess which one. And while a numbers cruncher might say that you have a 50-50 chance, you know better. (I have often thought that this principle leads to its logical conclusion at the post office at the Ariel Rios Building, 12th Street and Pennsylvania, N.W., Washington, D.C., though it is not a modernist building. Both of its side-by-side glass doors have been malfunctioning for approximately 21 of the 21 years that I have worked across the street, in another post office that failed. This, in case you couldn’t tell, is a major pet peeve of mine.)

But I digress. In Finland, the architecture is modernist, but the doors are completely un-American. One seldom encounters doors in tandem, so there is no need for the guessing game. You either push (työnnä), or you pull (vedä), and there is usually a sign with an unambiguous instruction. I can’t tell you why, because I am mechanically challenged, but these doors work. Every time. Unlike rickety American doors, these doors, and also the frames, are heavy. And yet, they’re easier to handle. I am inclined to think they use counter-weights or some other means of redistributing weight that would otherwise be passed on to the user. Finally, Finnish doors, or possibly European doors generally, seem to have more complex locking mechanisms that allow for elaborate security. Here at the University of Oulu our doors are locked every day at 4:00 in the afternoon. We have to flip a little lever to let ourselves out. Those of us with keys have access to our offices 24/7, but after 4:00 if you don’t have a key, you don’t get in.

Are we there yet? No, indeed, madam. We have not yet discussed the high-tech, color-coded “doorbell” that is affixed to many of the formidable doors—though not mine, perkele!—of faculty offices on this campus (see photo, above). Here is the code, parsed about as well as can be expected by a person who is struggling with Survival Finnish:

Sisälla (white) Within, I am in
Varattu (red) Engaged, Occupied
Odota (yellow) Wait
Sisään (green) Enter

People find these devices useful because they help them negotiate the boundary between public and private space. And I would submit that they allow the culture of the university (I am here, come and see me, let’s be friends) to seep through the contradictory vocabulary of industrial design (this is a fortress, the drawbridge is up, go away).

When I get home, I’m going to have one of these gizmos installed at the office—just as soon as I get a door.

Ruska

2006-10-18T08:06:00.000+03:00

We have just enjoyed a season that the Finns call ruska, which sounds like it might be related to the word for brown, ruskea. And that might make sense, except that at the height of ruska the foliage is all bright orange and red. By rights, this season should be called oranssinvärinen

But by the time you got it all out—oh-rahns-seen-va-ree-nehn—it’d be over. Ruska lasted about a week, about as long as it takes the Japanese cherry blossoms to do their thing down by the Jefferson Memorial. Last Saturday was gorgeous; we saw the sun for the first time in a month. And so I did some laundry and hung it out to dry, which cued the rain, naturally, and that brought down all the leaves. As I look out the window of my flat today, I see that the birch trees, which were full of orange leaves 48 hours ago, are now completely bare. Meanwhile, the leaves, one by one, are making their way into my asunto.

There is an article about ruska in the current issue of the student newspaper, Oulun Ylioppilaslehti. The writer, Samantha Eidenbach, reports that Finns enjoy going out into the forest during this season to pick berries and mushrooms, and they tend to head north, as far as Lapland, because the autumnal colors are more vibrant the farther north one goes. Ms. Eidenbach interviewed scientists about why that is so, and the answer is that “there is a greater quantity of colour chemicals in the plants of the Far North,” which sounds like a tautology to me, which is why I’m not a scientist. However, the same scientist is quoted to the effect that there is a new theory that red pigments “might be a signal to animals,” which is to say that “the colour might be so strong in the north to attract birds to berries before the long winter arrives.” I’ll confess that I’m skeptical about all this, having seen a few Blue Ridge autumns in my time. But I am a guest here, so I will suspend disbelief.

One thing is clear, when the Finns go in search of berries, they bring them back in quantity. The kauppatori, or main market area in the center of town, has little else on offer these days (see photo, above). I couldn’t resist buying some little cranberries; they are very tart. Cranberry in Finnish is karpalo, but since I haven’t learned how to form the plural yet, we’ll just leave it at that, even though I have many more than one. I have no idea what to do with them, aside from throwing them on my Cheerios.

Then there are the mushrooms, chanterelles. These are lovely, delicate things. I bought some at Stockmann’s and have used them to enhance omelettes and a spaghetti sauce that I have learned how to construct on a base of Ragu. Once again, Stockmann’s, the Center of the Ouluniverse, has saved the day. It has provided me with a way of celebrating the season that doesn’t involve tromping through the forest. (Written on Monday, 16 October.)

Aku Rules

2006-10-14T11:38:00.000+03:00

The divine Terese Catanzariti, dean emerita of foreign correspondents in Oulu, who set a standard of journalistic excellence never to be equaled in our lifetimes, once filed a dispatch about why Finns like Donald Duck and do not like Mickey Mouse. I wanted to attach it as a link, but now I am unable to find it on the internet. Bummer. It has gone the way of all pixels, I guess.

Catanzariti’s argument, as I recall, was that everything goes right for MM. People naturally defer to a guy who gets the job done without breaking a sweat. And that is precisely the reason that Finns can’t warm up him.

Donald—known here as Aku Ankka—is, by contrast, a clever, industrious, and good-natured but somewhat hapless fellow as likely to be tripped up by genuine evil or blind fate as by his nephews’ mischievousness. Life is more of a struggle for him. Now this is the kind of chap to whom a melancholy Finn can relate.

I was and am persuaded by Catanzariti’s argument, but I was not completely prepared for the dimensions of Aku Ankka’s celebrity here. You see people reading Aku Ankka paperbacks on the bus, in the kahvila, just about anywhere. I have my own supply of them in my flat.

My asunto came furnished. In fact, my landlord left many half-consumed products in the kitchen cupboards, pantry, and shower caddy, thinking that I would appreciate not having to run out right away to buy things like coffee filters and shampoo. He was right, I did and do appreciate that. I don’t mind living with his detritus. It’s a guy thing. Anyway, in the living room/bedroom, he emptied out all the drawers of the bureau save one, which I discovered was filled to the brim with Aku Ankka paperbacks, all of them dog-eared. My landlord is a very generous fellow.

But my language skills are nowhere near the level that would allow me to penetrate these things. I’ve tried—Aku Ankka in my right hand, sanakirja (dictionary) in my left—but it just isn't worth the effort. So, I’m afraid The Donald will rank right up there with pesäpallo and NASCAR as Finnish passions that I’ll probably never completely understand. I wonder how Treezycat did it.

Hyvää ruokaa Oulussa

2006-10-12T10:01:00.000+03:00

A year or so ago, French President Jacques Chirac managed to offend people in two countries at once by saying of England that “After Finland, it is the country with the worst food.” Then Silvio Berlusconi of Italy piled on. Or maybe it was he who started it; I don’t remember the exact sequence. Either way, people around here were pretty sore. As our guest columnist said in this space a few weeks back, Finns are proud that their food is straightforward and nutritious. It was not they who invented Slurpies and Biggie Fries.

I have eaten well in Oulu even though I’m on a limited budget. So, the presidential critique seems to me not only uncharitable and rude, but just plain wrong. And it occurred to me that this blog could perhaps help set things straight by celebrating the virtues of Finnish cuisine.

But that raises a rather sensitive point, which is that I haven’t quite figured out what Finnish cuisine is, for reasons that we’ll be exploring below. I thought about calling this post Fine Dining in Oulu, but that would have seemed rather a stretch, given my budget, not to mention the unpretentiousness of the Finnish national character, if I may resort to a concept that has gone the way of the dodo. So, let’s just call it Good Eats in Oulu—that’s a rough translation of the title—and let it go at that. We’ll just have to hope that Alton Brown doesn’t sue. Today, I’ll be reviewing my three favorite meals for the month of September, and we’ll work our way up from the level of the merely lofty to “the pinnacle of culinary achievement,” as they say on Iron Chef.

Third place goes to New Bombay, over by the central railway station, for their spicy chicken dish, kanakorma. New Bombay is a very appealing place, first recommended to me by my landlord. Meals come with a fresh salad, and a good one at that, though New Bombay conforms to the widespread Oulu practice of asking cabbage to do its lame impression of lettuce. That, I don’t understand. But entrees are served with a huge bowl of truly fabulous steamed rice. With all that starch, one needn’t order a naan, but I always do.

I have been back to New Bombay several times. I must say that I approve of their shrimp and vegetable curry, as well. The food is reasonably priced. You can get it mild, medium, or hot (go with the medium). The total damage for dinner is usually around 18 euros, and that’s with a naan and a glass of wine. You don’t need a reservation. The service is attentive, and the atmosphere is pleasant, even homey.

An aside: at New Bombay, as at most moderately priced restaurants in Finland, you just sit where you will, which is, to my way of thinking, infinitely preferable to being escorted to a vinyl table at Applebee’s or Cracker Barrel by a high-school girl masquerading as a maitre-d’. They won’t try to sell you bottled water here, because Finnish tap water is pure and tasty. And of course there is no tax on food. At the end of the meal, you don’t need to ask the wait staff to bring you your check: Saisinko laskun? You may, if you like. But the default method is just to stroll up to the counter whenever you’re ready, and there they will ring you up and say kiitos and hei hei. There is, finally—thanks be to God—no groveling for tips in Finland.

For me the only unresolved issue is, why is it New Bombay, and not Mumbai? I’ve noticed, too, that there are several “oriental” restaurants in Oulu, a sure sign that the local restauranteurs have not been reading their Edward Said.

But I digress. In second place this month is a wild duck dinner I enjoyed at Zakuska, on Hallituskatu in the city center. This is one of several Russian restaurants in Oulu. I’ll confess that I had been avoiding the place, mainly because it advertises in the brochures that are handed out to tourists. Always be wary of restaurants that depend on the tourist trade, rather than on a cadre of loyalists. I also was suspicious because it sits next to an Irish pub and along a strip of establishments that look more like bars than restaurants.

But I had a wonderful meal at Zakuska. Wild duck was the special that night, and the waitress encouraged me—though very gently—to give it a try. I always worry about duck being greasy, but this was just right, carefully prepared and beautifully served. Zakuska, like the wooden buildings in the city center, has a patina of Old World dignity, as well as a very skilled chef. My duck was served with red cabbage, fried potatoes and gravy, apples, something delicious that I didn’t recognize, and home-made bread. “What do you call this bread?” I asked the waitress. “It doesn’t have a name. We have a girl who bakes the bread. For a long time I used to do it myself.” A pitcher of tap water and a bread with no name. Charming.

Among European cuisines, the Russian—if one chooses not to challenge its European credentials—stands out for being well represented here. If the phone book can be trusted, there appears to be not a single restaurant with a French name in this city. No Chez André, no Maison Provençale. There are plenty of places with Italian names, but they are all pizza and kebab joints; pizza and kebabs have been joined at the hip in Finland. Russia alone has been accorded the status of a culinary mission. Why, I can’t say. Other Euro-cuisines are delivered by chains (such as Torero, a tapas place in the center of town) or by restaurants that prefer to do a little of this, a little of that, instead of trying to fill a distinctive niche.

And now, the drum roll, please. The winner of the grand prize for Good Eats in September is . . . Sokkeri-Jussi Kievari (see photo above), which is housed in an old wooden structure on Pikisaari Island, just far enough out in the harbor to have sat out the great fire of 1822. So, the setting and the ambience are hard to beat. And I’ll confess that right away I acquired a soft spot in my heart for “Sugar John” because someone else was picking up the tab. That always makes me a little dewy-eyed. I ordered the salmon, lohi. It was delicious.

That said, this is a blog, and so there must be, if not a full-blown rant, at least a caveat. In this case, the engine that launches the kvetch is the curious status of fish in Finland. This is a Baltic country with innumerable lakes and rivers. Fish is served pretty much everywhere, and yet I have not seen anything like what in the States we would call a “fish house.” You would think that Finland would have salmon houses or whitefish houses or herring houses or crayfish houses the way Maryland has crab joints. Why does it not?

After jettisoning the booster, the multi-stage kvetch proceeds to ask how, absent a particular recipe or approach, fish per se—or any other food group, for that matter—could be considered the culinary equivalent of Sibelius, or Alvar Aalto. It would be like saying that the national music is notes, or the national architecture is bricks. The salmon at Sokkeri-Jussi Kievari was outstanding, but what was distinctively Finnish about it? One thing is certain: it definitely was not French. Jacques Chirac would have gagged on it because it was not smothered in a sauce that began life as two cups of heavy cream. But what would it mean to assert that it was “Finnish”?

From the guidebooks, and even from language texts, I get the impression that if there were a distinctive Finnish cuisine, it might well be that of Karelia, that eastern land of the Kalevala that was more or less swallowed up by Russia in the course of the twentieth century. Karelia is extremely well represented in the national imagination, perhaps because historically it was relatively uncontaminated by Sweden. All across Finland, one can find karjalanpiirakoita, or Karelian pastries, which are a little like pierogi stuffed with rice or potatoes. Similarly, Karelian stew, karjalanpaisti, is available everywhere; it’s made with several kinds of meat.

A shrewd, albeit mean-spirited, reader might nominate the sweet little reindeer as the national dish. Distinctive as it is (like haggis in Scotland), I get the impression that there is no peculiarly Finnish approach to cooking the meat. For whatever reason, it doesn’t have a particularly high profile in restaurants. There are no “reindeer joints.” I have resolved to order poro the next time I visit Sokkeri-Juusi Kievari, but the world, I’m afraid, will have to wait for Donder and Blitzen find their Colonel Sanders or Frank Perdue.

Perhaps there simply is no such thing as Finnish cuisine. There would be nothing wrong with that. One time I asked an innkeeper in Amsterdam to recommend a restaurant where I could sample “Dutch food.” He directed me to an Indonesian rijsttafel. I’m sure he was having fun with me, but in truth the food was excellent. Yes, I know it’s not the same. For if Finland lacks a national cuisine, it also lacks an imperial cuisine to fall back on—though now that I think of it, there are those Russian restaurants, just as there is good roast beef to be had in New Delhi.

The third and last stage of this rocket—the one that gets us out of the earth’s gravitational field—is fueled by full disclosure: my lohi was, in a word, plain. Also, it was just a tad overdone. That is to say, it was not served on the rare side, and I have acquired—only recently, mind you—a taste for salmon that is pink in the middle.

The lohi at Sokkeri-Jussi Kievari made me a little homesick because it called to mind a long weekend spent in Portland, Oregon, almost exactly a year ago. In the Pacific Northwest, the wait staff will help you choose among Chinook, Coho, and Copper River sockeye salmon, each of which has its special virtues. They will grill it, poach it, smoke it, stuff it with dungeness crab, or serve it on a cedar plank, depending on the attributes of the given sub-species, and also on your preferences, if you have any. They will make it crawl on its belly like a reptile. They will turn the roe into pudding, if you please. The point is, they won’t offer you a single, generic “salmon,” and then trot out a fish that has been simply reeled in and thrown on a grill. The chefs in Portland and Seattle and Vancouver are constantly innovating because they’re obsessed with topping the competition down the street. Why are things here in Finland so much less intense? And why are diners not as demanding in the ravintola as they are at the opera? I have no idea. But any way you cut it, Jacques Chirac is still wrong, and that's all that matters.

And that’s the way it is. See you next month on Good Eats in Oulu. For now, so long, and

Hyvää ruokahalua!

KKK Super Market

2006-10-10T09:47:00.000+03:00

I was going to stop by this place to pick up a loaf of leipä on my way home from work, but my bed linen was in the laundry. Ba-da-bing! That's right, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The Soap Pig

2006-10-09T18:39:00.000+03:00

This past weekend was Oulu’s Irish Festival. I know there are people who prefer the air guitar competition or the garlic festival or the wife-carrying contest--all regular events here in Oulu--but I was really looking forward to hearing some Irish music. Then I learned that one of my mentors at the university plays the fiddle in a group that was scheduled to perform on Saturday night at the Nuku Center, keskusta. Nirvana, I thought to my self. No, not that Nirvana. This group is called The Soap Pig.

I put it on my list of things to do. Unfortunately, 7:00 on a Saturday night is not wonderful timing for me. I partake of The Mysterious Rites of Sauna at 5:00, and by the time I have recovered, it is hard to prepare dinner, consume it, clean up, and then get out of the flat in time to be anywhere by 7:00. I thought I was doing pretty well to be on my bike and heading across the footbridge at 7:05. (And I noticed, by the way, that it was already getting dark, an ominous development.)

I got to the Nuku center at 7:15, fully confident that I could talk my way into the concert. Trust me, I have done this before. This time, it was no dice. A very nice but firm centurioness told me in no uncertain terms that it is very distracting for the musicians to have late-comers stumbling and groping their way to their seats. I confessed that I am a serial stumbler, but I promised not to grope anyone in the process. And I explained that in the States, there's always at least one person who arrives late for the very purpose of stumbling and groping while his kännykä plays "Stars and Stripes Forever" at full volume. She smiled one of those enigmatic little Finnish smiles, but then she folded her arms across her chest. The place was jammed, she said, and there were virtually no seats left. “Virtually,” of course is one of those weasel words. It means that there actually are seats left, but you’d have to find them, and that brought us back full circle. Anyway, she said that after the group had played its set, The Soap Pig would be heading to a nearby pub to jam with other musicians. I should just find some way of killing the next hour and a half. I didn’t want to spell it out for her, but 9:00 encroaches rather seriously on my bed time.

On a scale of one to ten, I thought my sweet-talking rated about an 8.5, maybe more. I think she might have been willing to go to the senior prom with me, but there was no way she was letting me into that concert. Another lesson in the Finnish fixation with punctuality, and maybe also in sisu.

Click on the title of this post for a pertinent link.

Intelligent Design

2006-10-07T12:55:00.000+03:00

The Finnish asunto—private home—tends to be compact. Every square foot costs money up front, and any surplus space adds to heating costs. I’ve noticed that bathrooms in particular are small. In homes that are more upscale than mine, and even in moderately priced hotels, the bathrooms have heated floors. The bathroom in my flat will never give me a hotfoot, alas, but it has all the usual fixtures, plus a clothes washer underneath the sink and within easy reach of my shins. My bathroom literally does not have enough wall space to accommodate a towel rack.

No problem. Here, bathrooms don’t have towel racks, they have hooks. You can’t hang a standard issue bath towel from a hook, of course, and that’s why some smarty-pants designer came up with the little fabric loop that they sew unobtrusively onto the edge of bath and face towels, in the middle of one of the long sides. Towels so equipped don’t have to be draped over a bar. They can be hung from a hook, and they won’t fall on the floor. I know it’s not like inventing the wheel, or the snowmobile, but it’s a clever little gizmo responsible for an uptick in convenience and efficiency.

In addition to the towel hooks, my flat has a nifty little dishwasher. It sits underneath the refrigerator, which is a side-opening model about three-quarters the size of a red-blooded American fridge. The dishwasher is a Siemens, and it works well.

The really cool thing is not the dishwasher itself, but its partner, the drying rack, which is really a drying cupboard. It sits just above the sink, and that's where dishes are stashed after they’ve been washed. They drip dry up there, which would be a problem if this were an ordinary cupboard, but it’s not. It’s bottomless, which means that everything drips into the sink. But here’s the really neat part. After they’re dry, you don’t stack them up with their mates in a nearby compound where the zoning laws have prescribed that dishes go here, bowls there, cups and saucers over yonder. You just leave them where they are, which means skipping a whole step in the tedious process of cleaning up after a meal and setting up for the next one.

Clink on "Intelligent Design" above for a link to Virtual Finland's biography of Alvar Aalto, creator of the chair in the photo; it's called the Paimio Chair.

The Mysterious Rites of Sauna, Part Two

2006-10-06T09:27:00.000+03:00

A number of you—five, to be exact—expressed interest in The Mysterious Rites of Sauna, Part One. A slim majority said they were looking forward to the next installment. So was I.

But a funny thing happened with my weekly pilgrimage to the Nordic caldarium. Now that I know not to expect transcendental enlightenment, the spiritual journey has devolved into a routine—a pleasant routine, but a routine nonetheless. I know to bring my little alarm clock with me, and to deposit my house key at the last station of the cross, the door handle just outside the inner sanctum. I have resigned myself to never laying eyes on Quasimodo, or the Vestal Virgin, or the Tooth Fairy, or whoever it is who attends the sacred flame. Some weeks I find that he or she (hän) has set out the water bucket (kiulu) and ladle (kauha, or kippo) in advance; other weeks I am left to prepare the sacraments for myself. I have learned to do so. I know that I need to bring my own birch branches for self-flagellation. I know how to draw an after-sauna shower that is cold, but not too cold. Good Episcopalian that I am, I have learned to perform these rites and let the theology take care of itself.

I sit, I sweat, I ruminate, I douse the rocks to call forth the holy löyly. I vacate the premises precisely in accordance with the local concept of “on time,” which means a minute early. I shower, I don my vestment, I slouch toward my cell, arriving at 5:40 on the dot. There, I quench my thirst with several chalices of cold water and collapse on my cot until it is time for my wee dram. And I get to decide when that is. Monasticism kind of grows on you.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Finnish Sauna Society.

Oulu: The Physical City

2006-10-04T10:21:00.000+03:00

The day I arrived in Oulu, I walked around town just letting things soak in, and I was struck by the architecture. Not so much by the stone government buildings and churches that I had expected to see because they are in all the picture books, but rather, by more modest wooden structures that struck me as a rustic expression of the same classicist impulse. I knew that many of the former had been designed by Carl Ludwig Engel, the German architect who was commissioned by Tsar Alexander to turn Helsinki into a proper capital for a Grand Duchy (he built the Lutheran cathedral on Senate Square) and to transform some former Swedish towns, such as Oulu, nee Uleåborg, into Finnish, and by extension Russian, ones. What I didn’t know is that Engel also was responsible for a few of the wooden buildings that one can admire today in Oulu.

To back up, Oulu suffered a great fire in 1822. One place that was spared was Pikisaari Island, which is just offshore, and where pre-1822 wooden buildings are still to be seen. I have been encouraged to travel to other towns—Raahe, for one—if I want to see traditional Finnish wooden architecture. Anyway, because of the fire there was no shortage of work for an architect when Engel showed up a few years later. Rebuilding the Lutheran cathedral here was one of his main projects.

The wooden buildings—Engel’s and many others—are in the center of town, where the fire left plenty of scope for rebuilding. They appear to have been put to many different uses over the years. The university’s architecture school is housed in several of the finest, appropriately enough. I’m told that many others were lost to growth and prosperity in the late twentieth century. Some of the survivors are being restored. Too many seem to be lying fallow. The attached photo is of Kajaanintulli school, built by Engel in 1831. That’s the steeple of the Lutheran cathedral far in the background. Click on the title of this post for a link to an inventory of Oulu's architectural heritage.

The curious thing about the center of Oulu, architecturally speaking, is that there is the city of the Grand Duchy and the tar industry—from 1822 to the Kauppahalli of 1906, perhaps—and then, thoroughly intermixed with it, is the city of the steel, glass, and concrete kerrostalo and the Modernist office building. There is not much representing the period in between. The result in the city center is a dense mix of diverse uses, and that is a good thing, though aesthetically the effect can sometimes be jarring. Click on the link to “Yikes?” over yonder in Previous Posts to see a particularly unfortunate juxtaposition of the two Oulus.

Right away, I also was struck by the streets themselves. There is a good case to be made for cobblestones—not on interstate highways, of course, but on city streets. There is the matter of aesthetics, but I’m overlooking that for the moment, since that’s a slam-dunk for stones. I’m thinking of maintenance issues. They’ve been tearing up one of the main north-south arteries, Torikatu, since I first came to Oulu. It’s made a bit of a mess, and all the buses have had to be re-routed down Aleksanterinkatu. I check the progress of the road crew regularly, and I’ve been impressed by how much paving they are able to do in a day.

As I see it (I haven’t researched this, obviously), there are a couple of considerations here. One is that with asphalt, if you tear up the street, you have all of those heavy asphalt chunks to dispose of somehow. Then you have to lay the new stuff and you have to try to get a very tight seal. With cobblestones, if they’re in good condition, you just put the same ones back when you’re finished doing whatever you were doing underneath. Couldn't you? Or you could just turn them over if they seemed too worn on the side that had been facing up. Why not?

Then there is the whole issue of potholes, or what we used call in Cleveland “chuckholes.” Those are caused by water seeping through even very small cracks, and then freezing and cracking the asphalt, which is brittle. With stones, you don’t have the same kind of seal to begin with, so there is plenty of “give” in the gaps, or the grout, or whatever they call the stuff in between the stones. With some wiggle room, the expansion and contraction wouldn’t do the same kind of damage. And if it did, wouldn’t it be a very simple thing to repair, without the tell-tale patch? Somebody needs to straighten me out if I'm mistaken here.

Finally, it took all day, at a considerable cost to my feet, which were badly blistered by the time I limped back to my flat (those were the lazy, hazy, crazy days of sandals—only yesterday, it seems), but it finally dawned on me that there was something missing down in the city center: churches. The Lutheran cathedral looms large, and there are Lutheran churches in many of the neighborhoods. There’s a sweet little one in my neighborhood, Tuira. I’m told that there is a Russian Orthodox church in town, and I’ve seen evidence of the Salvation Army.

But in any American city of comparable size, there’d be a dozen houses of worship, or more, within a few blocks of the courthouse green or whatever serves as the heart of the heart of the city. And if it were one of the old cities of the industrial northeast, the variety would be range from Roman Catholic to Greek Orthodox to various species of Protestant. There might be high church and low church Episcopal churches, and several varieties of Baptists. There would be Latter-Day Saints and Seventh-Day Adventists and the Kingdom Halls of Jehovah’s Witnesses. There’d be African-American churches of various denominations. There’d probably be a synagogue or two. There might even be a mosque or a Hindu or Buddhist temple. Then there would be the ethnic overlay—Irish and Italian and Polish Roman Catholic churches, and so on and on.

When we talk about diversity in the United States, many of us automatically think race. But through most of our history our diversity has been religious, or even ethnic or liturgical within a particular faith. People often refer to Finland as a “homogeneous” society, and so it is. But I think sometimes those people are thinking gene pool homogeneity, when the cultural homogeneity—expressed architectonically here in the relative absence of churches—is surely far more significant.

Hottest wings, coldest beer, soft ice

2006-10-03T08:24:00.000+03:00

Here (if you click on the photo I think it will enlarge) is another little study in voluntary restraint. You can just crawl right inside this fellow’s head. I suspect maybe he had Buffalo wings somewhere in the United States, and he thought to himself, whoa, there’s gotta be a market for these babies back home in Oulu. I could help to train a public that’s just starting to develop a taste for spicy food. And after a while I could start selling Winger franchises, and then, well, who knows, maybe Conan O’Brien would come calling.

So he worked up a secret recipe, and it was really, really hot, and he leased this space, and then he went to work on the sign. He decided that it needed to be in English, since it would help to make his slogan and logo internationally recognizable. And, he thought to himself, of course, I’ll take the “American” approach to advertising, in which there is no room for understatement or self-deprecation.

Hottest wings. Absolutely. I’ve got that covered. Boy, do I have the hottest wings. Hot, hot, hot. Some might not like it hot. To hell with them. Let them go find themselves some pickled herring somewhere. Yeah, baby. These wings are hot!

Coldest beer. You gotta have the coldest beer to wash down the hottest wings. That olut is gonna be so kylmä it’ll make a witch's tit in January seem lukewarm. Arctic beer. Polar beer. Polar beer! Hey, that’s a good one! No, niin.

Softest ice? There he was, all poised for the Superlative Hat Trick. But then, like a guy who inadvertently starts to cross against the light, he catches himself just in time—I don’t mean just in time to avoid getting hit by a truck, I mean just in time to avoid making a spectacle of himself—and he leaps back to the curb. Come to think of it, this could be the very guy who, at the opera, swallowed his bravo in the middle of the first syllable. I mean it.

Soft ice. Because, well, there are a lot of places in Oulu where you can get soft, Italian-style ice cream (jäätelö), and my ice will be soft, all right, but you know, I’m gonna concentrate on the wings. Maybe develop a line of baby back ribs with their own special sauce, later on, and . . .

. . . and he just couldn’t close it out.

Adventures in Voluntary Restraint

2006-10-02T18:10:00.001+03:00

At the beginning of my course on The North American City, I spend a fair amount of time trying to show how the New England town and village, especially the former, derived from medieval value systems and land use practices. I emphasize that the success of the Puritan communities depended on the willingness of individuals to practice “voluntary restraint.” Some of the scholarly literature on this subject is wonderful, particularly a book by Kenneth Lockridge called A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. And I have students read a selection from John R. Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845.

The meaning of voluntary restraint is not self-evident, however, and I have found that some American students have a very hard time with it. I would submit that there are two reasons for this.

To begin with, voluntary restraint in the New England town was not simply a matter of self-control. There were sanctions, and some of them—think Hester Prynne—were severe. Ostracism and expulsion, and the denial of the comforts of religion, are not to be taken lightly in any society. So, the “voluntary” dimension of the phenomenon is inherently problematic.

Second, there is the brute fact that twenty-first century Americans have relatively little direct experience with voluntary restraint. It’s no wonder they find it a difficult concept.

They should come to Finland. I’m not sure I have ever seen a better lesson in the meaning of voluntary restraint than the spectacle I witness every time I go into the city center, keskusta. Heading south, I have to cross an east-west street called Linnankatu where it intersects with Kirkkokatu, which is where the Lutheran Cathedral scowls at the Holiday Inn across the street (see “Yikes?” over yonder in Previous Posts). Now, Linnankatu is a main artery, a one-way (westbound) street. Heavy traffic feeds into it from only a block away, but it comes in waves, and when the surge is over, that’s pretty much it. It is not particularly wide (two lanes), and the sight lines are completely unobstructed. I made the mistake of saying to a local that, looking east, you can see all the way to the Russian border, from there. (Actually, it’s over 200 kilometers away.) “No, you can’t,” she said, deadpan. People in Finland have no taste for hyperbole. If I’ve thought that once, I’ve thought it a million times.

Anyway, the entertainment lies in watching the pedestrians and bikers congregate at the corner and wait for the light to change. I should note in passing that they are on the corner in the first place because there is no jaywalking in Finland. So there they are. Bikers poised, waiting for permission to be granted by the automatic timer on the traffic light. Walkers, cooling their heels, and maybe bouncing on the balls of their feet. The weather, the time of day, the physical condition of the participants—all are of no consequence. They wait. The men in business suits carrying the attaché cases. The rebels with the tattoos and tongue studs. They all wait. A Finnish pesäpallo player could run back and forth across that street forty times after the wave and before the light turns. Heck, those guys take longer leads off base than that. And still, on the corner of Linnankatu and Kirkkokatu, they wait.

No, we wait. And that’s the kicker. I stand there and wait with them. Of course, I’m nearly apoplectic, thinking Why don’t they go? Why don’t they go? But I’ve never seized the opportunity to show them how it’s done. Not once. Why? That, comrades, is the meaning of voluntary restraint.

It doesn’t come naturally, I’ll say that. In August, during the orientation program for this year’s Fulbrighters in Helsinki, we listened to a presentation by a young woman who works for the tax office. Basically, her message was that we ought to report any outside income—even income earned from U.S. sources—during our Fulbright tenure. That way, she explained, the experts in her office can determine whether we owe Finland any taxes. I could hardly believe my ears. Some of my colleagues gently probed to see how seriously they ought to be attending to this unwanted obligation. I sat quietly, impassively. But on the inside—and I suspect I was not alone in this—I had already joined the insurgency. “Watch the police and the taxman miss me! I’m mobile!”

As I have written many times in this blog, I admire Finnish orderliness and the willingness of people here to take a number and await their turn. And yet, it has its limits, doesn’t it? I’m in the process of preparing a post that argues—well, it suggests—that Finnish cuisine has been inhibited by the instinct to wait at the curb with everyone else.

I suspect that it manifests itself in other ways, as well. Can it be a coincidence that Finland was the only country to re-pay its war debts after World War II? And I have heard colleagues complain that university administrators are too quick to comply with directives from the education ministry in Helsinki, or from the EU. “We should say to them,” I heard one faculty member moan, “we (at the University of Oulu) will comply with the Bologna Process as soon as the University of Bologna has done so. Why do we always have to be first?”

I’ve noticed that students here in Finland have had no trouble understanding the concept of voluntary restraint. I hope they see its limits as well.

No easy sausage

2006-09-29T17:24:00.000+03:00

In my Survival Finnish class the other day, our teacher, Milla, asked us whether the lesson we had just completed was helppo (easy) or vaikea (hard). She’s still trying to gauge exactly where our language skills fall on a scale that runs from abysmal to simply incompetent.

One of my fellow Survivalists answered, in English, “piece of cake.” Milla, ever the opportunist, corrected him. “In Finland, we say, Se on helppo nakki.” Literally, “It’s an easy sausage.” Well, that was pretty much worth the price of admission, I thought to myself at the time. Perhaps you have surmised that Survival Finnish is at times a little like Reality TV.

I try to stay at the office as long as I can every day, in part because I have no internet connection at my flat, and now that the Finnish baseball season seems to be over (it’s not on TV anymore, anyway), television is a vaster wasteland than ever, which is too bad because I have a state-of-the-art TV that is attached to speakers that provide “surround sound.” It’s nice, but it takes up half the flat (my landlord is a 31-year-old single guy).

I think we get 120 channels on cable in the States. Here, I get nine or ten, to pretty much the same effect. Most nights, there’s nothing on. One station offers programming in French, another in German. I get the BBC and a couple of English-language stations with Finnish subtitles.

The BBC is a godsend, of course. Their talking heads are by far the most exotically beautiful of all the talking heads in Televisionland. You can tell that all of them have come to the BBC from the most remote corners of the late, great British Empire, by way of Oxford or Cambridge. Every one of them is expensively decked out and coiffed, and has straight, pearly white teeth, an erect posture, and an impeccable accent. Clearly, they have been home-schooled by Christiane Amanpour herself.

I force myself to watch YLE, the state-owned TV network, because I think it helps me with my Finnish. I watch the news, which seems far less grim than what we have come to expect in the States. I watch the sports, which is about as mindless as in the States, except with more ice hockey and more NASCAR. I know my numbers pretty well, so if Kuopio beat Tampere kolme to kaksi, I know the score was 3-2. Of course, some scores are harder than others. For example, a plausible American football score such as 35-21, would translate as kolmekymmentäviisi-kaksikymmentäseitsemän on YLE. Weather reports also, are fairly intelligible, mainly because of the graphics. When I heard last night that the high today would be plus neljä (+4 Celsius), I knew I’d better bundle up. I watch the financial news to find out whether the Dow is ylös (up) or alas (down).

Last night, as I was channel-surfing, I saw Jacques Chirac’s mug fill up the screen momentarily as I clicked my way past the French channel, which I customarily do at break-thumb speed. Out of idle curiosity, I went back. Chirac was being interviewed by three journalists, one of whom was outrageously sexy, though neither wholesome nor exotic enough for the BBC. She seemed to be asking tougher questions than her colleagues. I inferred that from the way Chirac squirmed when she addressed him. The thing is, I was getting something out of it--not much, but something. For instance, I could tell when Chirac was talking about foreign affairs—diplomatique. I knew it must be campaign season when I heard him refer to la campagne électorale. Next he was talking about le monde, though maybe it was La Monde. At another point he spoke of la tension in the Middle East. I didn’t understand it all, but at least it didn’t seem completely alien to me.

I studied Spanish in high school and college, though it doesn't show. In my lifetime, I have studied French for exactly eight weeks—in 1968, nearly forty years ago—during a summer when I had mononucleosis and could barely get out of bed, let alone study a foreign language. By contrast, I have been working pretty diligently on my Finnish at night and on weekends for about a year. Starting in January, I faithfully attended a language class that meets on Saturday mornings at a Lutheran church in Arlington. In May, I went to a week-long intensive language camp in northern Minnesota. I’m surviving Survival Finnish. My teachers have been excellent. My Finnish, minimal though it may be, is at least fresh. And after all that my Finnish is about on par with my French.

Finnish is no easy sausage.

Hold still, would ya?

2006-09-28T15:59:00.000+03:00

I thought folks out there in this corner of the blogosphere might enjoy seeing a photo of the students who are (or were) attending my lectures on the North American city. At least half of them are geographers, the others are history, literature, or anthropology students. I have a couple of Americans and at least three French kids. The rest are Finns. Students don’t actually register for courses here, which means it’s a bit of a revolving door, really. Students attend lectures, but they won’t necessarily sit for the exam. And if they want, they can petition to take an exam based on reading materials instead. Critics have complained that there are few incentives for students to finish their educations. I’m told that this issue, combined with pressure to standardize emanating from the EU, has resulted in less generous subsidies for university students and the imposition of a cap (five years) on how long students can enjoy the government subsidy. University students pay no tuition, but when Finland decides to bill its foreign students (surely just a matter of time), that benefit will be endangered as well.

Take a number for service

2006-09-27T18:04:00.000+03:00

Over there on the right-hand side of this blog, in the land of IAQs, I suggested that the Ota vuoronumero! (Take a number!) approach to customer service was a defining characteristic of Stockmann’s, Finland’s favorite department store. I wrote that based on personal experience in three departments of the Helsinki store: the travel agency, the ticket service, and the camera department.

I've learned that it's not so. For one thing, there are plenty of Stockmann departments—in both the Helsinki and Oulu stores—that do not operate on that basis. Moreover, Ota vuoronumero! is not at all unique to Stockmann’s. When customers can just help themselves to the merchandise, they do that and then queue up at the cashier, the kassa. That's the way things are done pretty much everywhere in this country. The number machines are reserved for commercial transactions that are more labor-intensive (though not at the post office, it seems, for some reason).

At my bank, Nordea, the number machine gives you a menu of varied services (account management, currency exchange, etc.). My language skills aren’t good enough to know for sure which button to press, so I'm guessing most of the time. The impressive thing is that when your turn comes along, there is no rushing. The customer service representative—there are no tellers, really—will give you all the time you need. Several weeks ago I had a Nordea representative accompany me out into the lobby to help me use a computer to transfer money from my account to a bank in Chicago to pay a bill. She was unbelievably patient. It didn’t work, in the end, but that was neither my fault nor hers.

I had an interesting experience at the Oulu City Theater. The ticket counter is located in a huge lobby, which was completely empty when I arrived. There were two women working the booth. I approached one of them and said I wanted to buy an opera ticket. She gave me a funny look, and then proceeded—a little reluctantly, I thought—to discuss terms with me. As we were concluding the transaction, I noticed that another man had come in and dutifully helped himself to a number from a machine that I hadn’t noticed before. I’m guessing it was my failure to take a number--empty lobby or no--that elicited the funny look.

Our guest columnist on September 26 suggested that the Ota vuoronumero! concept is well suited to this country because Finns “somehow realize they need rules. . . . If you couldn’t take a number all hell would break out. Chaos would reign, much like it does in places like Italy.” I agree with that statement as far as it goes. But doesn’t it just push the question back a step? Why is it that Finns just “somehow realize” that, while Italians and Americans, who need rules every bit as much, I would say, somehow don’t? One might even infer from that that the Finns’ “social peripheral vision,” as he so nicely put it, is actually more highly developed than ours. I don’t know, civilization seems like an awfully thin veneer pretty much wherever you go.

Yikes?

2006-09-26T11:07:00.000+03:00

I walk past this place every day, and I just can’t decide. On the one hand, a lovely nineteenth century building in wood (it's called Ynninkulma house) has been preserved by being grafted onto a modern hotel that uses it for banquets. They're connected by an enclosed passageway. On the other hand, it's not all that happy a juxtaposition, is it? Prince Charles once complained that modern architecture too often is like a carbuncle on the face of an old and dear friend. This is more like a rare pearl round the neck of a scrubwoman. Still,...

Guest Column

2006-09-26T10:06:00.000+03:00

The other day I told a former Fulbrighter who has lived in Finland for over five years that I was writing about Finnish pedestrian behavior (they don't cross against the lights) and Finnish cuisine (it's a little complacent, I think). I am convinced that they are somehow related, but I haven't worked it all out. That elicited the following, which he said I could post as long as I included the caveat "that this is only one American's observations and opinions. Sometimes these things reflect frustrations that might be described as culture shock.” Enjoy.

Finns are less cross-walk inhibited than they used to be. But consider this, Finns have no apparent physical or social peripheral vision, at least to me. It’s a wonder that they don't all crash into each other on their bikes. In public spaces they do not give way to others. I found out the hard way when I was in a car wreck. I was going straight across the intersection. The other driver was turning left and did not give way in front of me. Our eyes met, and I could see that she had no intention of stopping or taking evasive action. I did but she hit me anyway. Later she explained in court that she thought she had the right-of-way! She did not and was found guilty, but Finns will not (egalitarianism) give up something they think they are entitled to. Because of this, part of the reason why they do not disobey crossing signals is that somehow they realize they need rules. This is also why you see so many of those number machines in service places. If you couldn't take a number all hell would break out. Chaos would reign, much like it does in places like Italy. As for food... The original basis of Finnish cuisine was survival in spite of the weather and the geography. Next came social reforms I believe due in significant part to Soviet style public services. During this phase the keyword became nutrition. Finns are disgustingly healthy in terms of their food. As well, due in part to the homogeneous construct of the population, there came about a large degree of food sensitivity, thus you see little in the way of spices, and Finns have food allergies and lactose intolerance for example is rampant. Finally, in the third phase there has been some progress. I have observed massive changes in food selections at Prisma since I moved here. More and more ethnic foods particularly. Some Finns will agree that tourists do not come here for the food. But some are quite sensitive about it, and feel that in a very pragmatic sense that Finnish food is healthy, and no more need be said or done. Cheers,

Ling-O-Matic

2006-09-22T10:42:00.000+03:00

My course in Survival Finnish course is finally underway. There are about 15 of us, and we come from all over the world. Only two of us are Mercans, as Lyndon Johnson used to say. We have had two sessions thus far, with two different teachers, Milla and Maija, both of them twenty-something blondes. It isn’t clear which will turn up for the next class, but either one is okay by me.

Both teachers try hard to mix it up. They talk, we listen. They ask questions. We answer. They write almost everything on the blackboard. We read. We role-play. No singing—so far, anyway. We play Bingo, which helps us learn our numbers. Sometimes we break up in pairs and play a game where we have to interrogate our partners to ferret out vital information. For example, I was assigned the case of Karin Andersen. From the dossier I learned that Andersen lives in Vaasa and that her phone number is 040-212-543, but I wasn’t told her nationality, how old she is, or where she is enrolled as a student. Okay, it’s not exactly Mission Impossible, but it does have some Cold War overtones, doesn’t it? From my partner, a Russian woman who moved to Oulu when she married a Finn (or so she says), I found out that Andersen is a Swede (ruotsalainen), 26 years old (kaksikymmentäkuusi vuotias), and a student in Stockholm (Tukholmassa). I’m persuaded that this multi-media approach to language learning is the real deal, and it has inspired me to invent my own game.

You need three things to play: a map, a bike, and a dictionary. Here’s how it works. You find a place name on the map, you try to figure out its derivation, first using the dictionary, if need be, and then by finding a physical trace of that which inspired the name in the first place. Here’s an example. My street address is Koskitie 35. Koski is rapids, and tie is road. So what you’d do is head for the river, look for the power plant, and that’s where you’d find the rapids, which are within spitting distance of my kerrostalo.

To test it out, I pedaled down to the town center and played the game with street names. Katu, by the way, is the word for street. One of the main north-south streets is Kirkkokatu (church street); sure enough, there was the Lutheran cathedral, right where it belonged. Kauppa is shop, so I wasn’t surprised to find that there was plenty of opportunity for “retail therapy” on Kauppakatu. Tori is Finnish for square, or piazza. I was a little surprised that Torikatu doesn’t lead directly into the market square, though it comes close. Puistokatu is, basically, park avenue. I expected to find a statue or some other trace of the tsar on Aleksanterinkatu, but I didn’t. The biggest no-brainer was the intersection of Rautatienkatu (railroad street) and Asemakatu (station street), where there is in fact. . . a rautatieasema. Duh! Just on the other side of the station is Ratakatu, or track street.

Those were some of the easy ones. I biked up and down Linnankatu (castle street) looking for crenellated towers, to no avail. It turns out that the castle used to be down at the end of the street, on what is called Linnansaari (castle island). Speaking of saari, one of the main east-west streets is Saaristonkatu, and sure enough it leads to a couple of islands in the harbor. I suspect you are starting to get the idea that the Finns are a pretty literal-minded people. That’s all right, so am I.

Hallituskatu is government street, or maybe state street. Yes, there are government buildings on Hallituskatu, most notably the kaupungintalo, or town hall. I hadn’t known the word hallitus before, and I am ashamed to say that the anarchist that dwells within my breast is using “Halitosis Street” as a mnemonic device.

Rantakatu proved to be right where it belonged, hugging the shoreline. The Finns are allergic to certain consonant combinations, especially at the beginnings of words. “St” is one of those combinations; look back at how Stockholm morphs into Tukholma. Ranta is Finnish for strand, or shore.

Pakkahuoneenkatu has been a tough nut to crack. My sanakirja (literally, wordbook, i.e., dictionary) tells me that pakata means to pack up, to pack. I’m guessing that the street name is a reference to packing houses, which would make sense since the street leads directly to the docks. Then again, pakara means buttock, and I suppose you could make a plausible case for that on the waterfront, too. Anyway, I didn’t find any packing houses, though there are some buildings that might have served that purpose at one time. Or, it could be that the packing houses burned in one of the fires.

I think it’s only a matter of time until I can declare victory in the case of Sepänkatu. Seppä means blacksmith, so all I need to do is find evidence of a forge or maybe even just a stable, since the smithy wouldn’t have been very far from the horses. Same thing with Tulliväylä, which is the name of one of the main roads leading into Oulu. Tulli is a reference to customs, or customs house, and I’m guessing that if I look hard enough I’ll find the vestiges of an old toll gate there.

Want to know where the old part of the town center ended and the extension began? Look no farther than Uusikatu. That’s right, new street. On the other hand, I haven’t made much progress with Isokatu, which means big street. I’ve stepped it off; it’s the same size as all the others.

My greatest triumph thus far has been Kasarmintie, which means barracks road. It took a little time, but eventually I found the garrison, which proved to be a ensemble of fine old wooden structures. I’m also proud of my work with Heinäntorikatu. Knowing that Heinäkuu is the word for July, harvest season, told me that I was cycling down haymarket street.

See how much fun we’re having. Think how much you could be learning—about urban history, as well as language—while firming up your thighs, with Ling-O-Matic. Be the first one in your kerrostalo to have one. Ling-O-Matic comes complete with handlebars-mounted sanakirja and GPS software installed. Not available in stores. Order now, while supplies last!

Saari.

Wasting away again in irantilainen viskiville

2006-09-21T09:38:00.000+03:00

I’ve found that it really helps to end a hard day with a wee dram. “Wee dram” may be a little misleading, actually, since that conjures up images of the Hebrides and the peaty essence of single malts. As I am more patriot than connoisseur, Kentucky bourbon is my nightcap of choice—Makers Mark, if it’s on the shelf. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t have written “hard day,” either. Or “end,” for that matter, since in mid-September the sun acts like it’s going to set at around 5:30, but then just scuds along the horizon for another three hours or so.

Anyway, Finland is beer country. You can buy any brand that grabs your fancy at a “convenience” store. Young men careen around town cradling their ten-packs of Karhu or Koff. But if you want the fruit of the vine, or any other kind of spirit, you have to go to an emporium called “Alko.”

That—the unvarnished Finnish truth in advertising—is of course a deterrent in itself. Americans would call it a party store or a package store to make themselves feel better about it, but the Finns will eschew the euphemism every time. You want a drink, buddy? Get thee to an Alko. It would appear to be a state-owned, or at least a state-chartered, monopoly. Prices are pretty much off the charts. I’m told people in Helsinki buy their booze in Estonia.

Finding your friendly neighborhood Alko is challenge number one. I have a feeling many of the outlets are out in the ‘burbs, snuggled up against the big-box grocery stores. But those of us who depend on two-wheelers or the tedious process of putting one foot before the other must look in the town center, keskusta. Sure enough, there is one next door to Stockmann, the Center of the Ouluniverse.

It’s an interesting place. For one thing, there are formidable looking devices that recycle cans and glass bottles. I’ve seen them in grocery stores as well. You just stick your recyclables in the slot, and the machine does the rest. With the cans, you hear a satisfying crunch straightaway. You press a button when you’re finished, and the machine gives you a bill of credit that you take to the kassa. Then there’s the vodka aisle. There seem to be as many varieties of vodka as there are Sámi words for reindeer poop. Most of the wine is from France, with unfamiliar labels. And expensive. I head for the whiskey department.

Here, price proves decisive. Virtually all the options come in 700-centiliter bottles, so at least it’s easy to compare. No Maker’s Mark, of course, but they do stock Jack Daniels. Unfortunately, he sells for 25 euro. The cash register in my head counters with Jim Beam, at 21. The rotgut called Kentucky Gentleman is only 15 euro, but you have to draw the line somewhere. There is, it turns out, a limit to my patriotism. For “only” 20 euro, I leave with a very decent bottle of Bushmill’s. I suppose the relative affordability of Irish whiskey—they call it irlantilainen viski here—has something to do with Finland’s membership in the EU.

Whatever. The important thing is that I am now prepared for the dread December day when the sun disappears over the yardarm for good in the middle of the afternoon. They say it sneaks up on you, it does. When that moment arrives, I will hoist a celebratory noggin of Bushmill’s and wait for someone to turn on the northern lights. Life is good.

The time has come, the walrus said. . .

2006-09-20T17:51:00.000+03:00

. . . to buy a winter coat. And a hat, a scarf, a pair of gloves, and some boots.

This morning, on my five-minute bike ride to the bus stop, with the wind blowing off the sea and into my face, I realized it was time. The sea, for those of you who don’t have your atlases handy, is the Gulf of Bothnia, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Baltic. This corner of the world, when the Swedes were in charge, was known as Northern Ostrobothnia.

I didn’t bring any winter clothes with me because they would have taken up so much room. I will, of course, get my new duds at Stockmann, the Center of the Ouluniverse. I’ll figure out how to schlep them home later.

As a bonus today, here’s a little something our Survival Finnish teacher taught us. She was trying to show us that Finnish words are long because of the way suffixes pile up.

Kirja = book
Kirjasto = library
Kirjastoi = libraries
Kirjastoissa = in libraries
Kirjastoissamme = in our libraries
Kirjastoissammekin = also in our libraries

Näkemiin!

Going Mobile

2006-09-19T10:08:00.000+03:00

I was strictly a pedestrian for my first few days in Oulu, but then an angel named Maija lent me a bike, which I have learned to love. Part of its charm is that it’s old and a little dinged up. I’ll be unhappy if it gets stolen, but I won’t be heartbroken, because Maija insists she could get by without it. Anyway, I use the lock faithfully, and so far, so good.

Oulu, like almost all of Finland, is flat, which makes for good biking, at least through most of the year. Finns are famous for being willing to endure almost any kind of hardship to be close to nature. I’m told that there are plenty of people who bike all winter long.

What I can say based on my own observation is that people really want to be outside. I can see it all play out from my apartment house at the end of the footbridge that connects my neighborhood, Tuira, to the town center through a series of islands criss-crossed with bicycle and trekking paths and gardens—and even a salmon ladder. (I’m told that this area was designed by Alvar Aalto, the Finnish Frank Lloyd Wright, but I haven’t had a chance to check that out.) All day, and even long after dark, people stream across that bridge—both sexes, all ages, all sizes.

The most serious, of course, are the runners and joggers, and there are many accomplished bikers, in addition to those, such as myself, who just wobble and wheeze. Then there are the people on scooters and rollerblades. Of the pedestrians, the most dedicated appear to be those engaged in something called Nordic walking, which involves ski poles and staring straight ahead, no talking allowed. It’s a little hard to tell exactly what the poles contribute, maybe just better balance—gravitas. Then there are the seniors in wheelchairs, or on scooters or walkers. I saw one old fellow on a scooter that must have been inspired by a catamaran; it was four-wheeled and it had two hulls, if you know what I mean. An alarming number of these folks are either attached to iPods or other audio devices, or they are chattering away on the ubiquitous Nokia cell phone, or kännykä, a word so new it does not appear in my sanakirja (sana+kirja, literally, wordbook).

The rollerbladers with ski poles don’t have a free hand for the kännykä, though I did see one with a headset once. They generate an amazing amount of power with their gait alone, and then they get added propulsion from the poles. I can hear these cocks of the walk coming up behind me on my rickety bike, and it’s a little intimidating. They take up a lot of room, but I really respect the fact that they don’t wear a lot of body armor. If they bowl you over, they—unlike, say, the driver of an eighteen-wheeler on the Capital Beltway—are likely to do as much damage to themselves as they do to you.

And that’s the point of this sermonette. Maybe it’s true that the Finns are more at home in the woods than the rest of us. And maybe they feel squeezed in their smallish homes. But maybe it’s also the case that somebody—some planner, I freely acknowledge—had a brilliant idea when he or she decided that bikers and pedestrians should travel together on a wide sidewalk, instead of out in the street with the motorcars. In the twentieth century, bike-paths were a kind of laughable cliché in places like Radburn and Greenbelt and Reston, but that was because they could only be used for getting around Radburn or Greenbelt or Reston. Try pedaling into city center, the keskusta, and you were in deep doo-doo. Here, you can go anywhere on the street grid with your bicycle. In the town center, where there are lots of people, there are also lots of cobblestones to slow you down, and lots of bike racks, for when you need to park it for awhile. There must be some reason why the same man who loves biking in Finland never takes his bike out of the shed back in the U.S. of A. The answer, my friends, is capacious sidewalks.

Thus endeth today’s rant. When I am not mentally redesigning the streets of Alexandria to accommodate bicycles (and trams), I am customizing my Finnish bicycle to show those rollerblader dudes a thing or two. I aspire to “play the tape machine, make the toast and tea, when I’m mobile.”

Don Giovanni Suomeksi

2006-09-16T11:03:00.000+03:00

Last night I went to see Don Giovanni at the city theater, which is a modernist box perched out over the harbor adjacent to the main market square in Oulu (the one behind the municipal library in this photo, which by the way I didn't take).

It was a very impressive performance. The music is great, of course, and both the orchestra and the voices seemed to me first-rate. Afterwards I did some research on the baritone cast in the title role, Juha Kotilainen. His voice has so much range he has actually sung counter-tenor in some productions. The action was set on a turntable that generated a seemingly endless parade of young maidens who had been, or were about to be, deflowered by the Don. As for the maidens, they came in all sizes and shapes, except that each had been fitted with a pair of humongous prosthetic boobs. The effect was a little like Mozart Meets Benny Hill.

The theater was extremely comfortable, with plenty of leg room and good sight lines. I noticed that people took their seats without the assistance of ushers, which reminded me of something I had read about Finland—that it’s not a nanny state, and it doesn’t have a “mind the gap” culture. Given the quality of the production, I thought the audience was a little restrained, but then rhythmic applause can only be speeded up, it can't swell. Maybe they just didn’t like it as much as I did.

Anyway, the great thing about opera is that if you’re having trouble with the Italian you can always look up at the sur-titles for the Finnish translation. Luckily, with Don Giovanni it’s not hard to follow the plot.

The Mysterious Rites of Sauna, Part One

2006-09-15T13:11:00.000+03:00

My landlord asked me many months ago whether I wanted to have a weekly sauna appointment. I said sure. I was assigned to Saturdays, 5:00 to 6:00.

I didn’t think much about it until after I returned from an urban history conference in Stockholm. I came back with a miserable head cold and just wanted to burrow in and recover.

After a few days my landlord came over to show me around my block of flats, or kerrostalo. The sauna, which is in the basement, was locked because it is open only on weekends. He explained that the appointments are overlapping, which means that I would have the sauna from 5:00 to 5:30, and one of two adjacent showers and changing rooms—I was assigned to room A—until 6:00. After he left it occurred to me that because mine was the first appointment of the day, there might be some set-up duties I’d be expected to perform. I needn’t have worried.

When my time came I went downstairs and stripped in the changing room. Naked except for my apartment key, which I wear around my neck at all times, I walked through the shower area and into the sauna, where the thermometer already registered 75° Celsius; that’s 167° Fahrenheit. The custodian evidently had stoked up the fire and set out a bucket of water and a ladle for creating steam. There is a special word, löyly, for steam generated in a sauna, about which the locals can get quite misty-eyed. Then, he or she—this is one of those moments when the writer longs for that unisex Finnish pronoun, hän—discretely vanished.

The sauna in my basement is made of wood to simulate the real thing, which would be the sauna at one’s summer house on the lake, if one were a Finn. The only difference is that out there at the lake you’d throw logs in the stove, whereas at Koskitie 35, electric power is used to heat up a pile of rocks.

I sat down and started to sweat. I am not particularly good at entertaining myself in such circumstances. It was too dark to read. I wondered if my cell phone or CD player would work down there. I threw water on the rocks to create löyly. I sat in that sauna for what seemed like an eternity, thinking about what I ought to be thinking about. At one point I accidentally touched my house key and literally burned my hand. That’s when I opted for a bracing, luke-cold shower, which reminded me of the pending visit of a friend from the States whose idea of sauna involves racing outside to roll in a snow bank. In the absence of a practicing cardiologist, I think I’ll pass on that.

When I returned the temperature inside was 80° Celsius, 176° Fahrenheit. I sat and sweated and pondered for another eternity. In due course, I took another shower, a long one this time, changed back into my clothes, and returned to my flat. It was only 5:40.

I drank six glasses of water, prepared a little dinner for myself, opened a bottle of cheap red wine, and reflected on my experience, which was not at all unpleasant, but far from transcendental. As a card-carrying humanist, I am more intrigued by the cultural construction of sauna than the event itself. It occurs to me that it probably is not a coincidence that sauna management in my kerrostalo is orchestrated in such a way as to entail no face-to-face interaction of any kind. If sauna suddenly were to catch on in the United States, I strongly suspect that it would involve joining a private club with HDTV and full beverage service. In Italy, one would likely have to visit the monastery next door between 3:30 and 5:00 on Thursday afternoon, ring the third doorbell from the left, and ask Brother Dominick for the key. And none of that would be written down.

By the time I had finished my dinner I felt like walking into town. I was about half-way there before it dawned on me that my head cold was gone. Next week I’ll try to last until 5:45.

New and Improved Syllabus

2006-09-14T10:09:00.000+03:00

Here is the revised syllabus for The North American City, which very soon will replace the original version over there on the right-hand side of this page under "Course Materials." Thank you for your patience.

12 September 2006
The North American City
Course Description

Meetings are scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 12:00-14:00 hours, with a few exceptions (including the first day). Our classroom is HU207, on the second floor of the Humanities Building.

This course is about the urban history of North America, though it is worth keeping in mind that the instructor is not a trained historian. He is a political scientist with a keen interest in the politics of city planning, and also in land use issues and urban geography. Topics are taken up roughly in chronological order, but the course is based less on documentary sources than on questions about space and place, about the social order and how it is embedded in landscape and cityscape, and about the physical development of cities. These questions are addressed by many of the readings, though sometimes implicitly, especially in the case of literary materials. It also is worth keeping in mind that the course has not been designed to train those who aspire to careers in the urban planning profession. It aims instead to provide an overview of North American urban history by using some primary sources and excerpts from major interpretive works. It would probably be fair to say the course is more critique than celebration of the field of urban planning.

We will meet four hours a week for six weeks (24 total hours), from 5 September to 12 October. The final examination is scheduled for 17 October. The course is supported by a bibliography with full citations. The syllabus that follows has been significantly revised from the one that was distributed at the first class meeting. It is subject to further revision. The current syllabus and bibliography will be accessible at all times through the instructor’s blog: http://fulbrighterinfinland.blogspot.com. All course materials are in English. As indicated below, each classroom session will make use of at least one suggested reading. Most of these are fairly short, and many can be found on the World Wide Web. Please see the following pages for a course outline.

Writing Assignments

There are two writing assignments. Each paper should be at least 750 words long. Papers should be submitted electronically by 18:00 hours on the due date.
1. Select one non-wilderness place that you know well, in Oulu or elsewhere, and explain why it should be regarded as “landscape,” or “cityscape,” noting the differences between the two. Discuss the relationship between form and function and consider whether there are ways that the place could be improved. Due 22 September.
2. Explain how “internal improvements” contributed to westward expansion in nineteenth-century North America, and also to the major population shifts of the twentieth century. Have “internal improvements” played a role in urban development in Finland? If so, how? Due 6 October.

Final Exam

Several essay questions will be posed for you on the final examination. There will be an element of choice (e.g., answer five of the following eight questions about the history of the North American city). Grading Calculus

Your grade in the course will be calculated as follows:
Short papers (25% x 2) = 50%
Final Examination = 50%

Instructor

Kenneth Kolson (Ph.D., University of Kentucky, 1972) is visiting the University of Oulu on a Fulbright Lectureship. A resident of Alexandria, Virginia, he is the author of Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Contact Information

Office: HU313
Hours: 14:00-15:30, Tuesdays and Thursdays, or by appointment
Email: kenjanekolson@yahoo.com
Phone: 044-924-4027

New and Improved Course Outline

Week 36

5 September, 14:00-16:00: What is the City?
· Lewis Mumford, “What Is a City?” (1937), reprinted in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 184-188.

7 September, 12:00-14:00: The “Hidden Cities” of Ancient North America
· Henry Marie Brackenridge, Antiquities in the Valley of the Mississippi (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear and Eichbaum, 1814), 181-195. Available on the Web at http://olivercowdery.com/texts/1814brak.htm

Week 37

12 September, 12:00-14:00: European Traditions and Colonial Urbanism
· John R. Stilgoe, “Landscape,” Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 1-29.

14 September, 12:00-14:00: Cities on the Frontier
· John W. Reps, “New England Recreated in Frontier Ohio,” in The Making of Urban America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 227-239.

Week 38

19 September, 11:00-13:00: Planning the National Capital
· Reps, “Planning the National Capital,” in The Making of Urban America, 240-262.

21 September, 12:00-14:00: The Growth of a Planning Tradition
· Reps, “Chicago Fair and Capital City: the Rebirth of American Urban Planning,” in The Making of Urban America, 497-525.

22 September, 18:00: Paper #1 Due

Week 39

26 September, 12:00-14:00: The Urban Community Examined
· Margaret F. Byington, “The Make-up of the Town,” in Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1974, orig. 1910), pp. 12-32. Available on the Web at http://digital.library.pitt.edu/.

28 September, 12:00-14:00: Utopian Visions on the Crabgrass Frontier
· Ebenezer Howard, from Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), reprinted, edited with a preface by F. J. Osborn and an introductory essay by Lewis Mumford (London: Faber & Faber, 1946). Available on the Web at http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/howard.htm.

Week 40

3 October, 12:00-14:00: Radiant Garden City Beautiful
· Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 3-25.

5 October, 12:00-14:00: Creative Destruction and the Age of Urbanism
· Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1-31.

6 October, 18:00: Paper #2 Due

Week 41

10 October, 12:00-14:00: Urban Mortality
· Joel Garreau, “A Sad Truth: Cities Aren’t Forever,” The Washington Post, Sunday, September 11, 2005, page B01. Available as a link on the instructor’s blog.

12 October 12:00-14:00: The Sprawl Brawl
· Joel Kotkin, et al, The New Suburbanism: A Realist’s Guide to the American Future, a report produced by The Planning Center, November, 2005. Available on the Web at http://www.joelkotkin.com/

Week 42

17 October, 14:00-16:00, Final Examination

I call it home

2006-09-12T16:15:00.000+03:00

Hi, gang. No time to write today, but here's a photo of the outside of my flat (also of my bike, far left). The address is Koskitie 35 D 5. Koski means rapids and tie means road. Rapids Road is, in fact, right next to the Oulujoki (Oulu River). 35 is the street address that applies to several buildings that constitute a block of flats; the Finns call it a kerrostalo. Within a given kerrostalo, stacks of apartments are hung vertically from stairwells, rather than arranged horizontally along internal corridors. The stacks are designated by letter. I am in apartment 5 of stack D of the kerrostalo at Koskitie 35.

Halfway to Haukipudas

2006-09-11T18:13:00.000+03:00

I’ll confess to being fairly obsessive about travel planning. I try to buy a detailed map ahead of time to maximize efficiency. Conventional street maps have real limitations, however. Once, prior to a brief visit to Athens, I plotted a walking route that would take me directly from my hotel to a famous antiquities museum. On the map it appeared to be a straight shot. On foot, it entailed climbing up and down an appalling precipice. The “streets” were actually stairways verging on toeholds. With a topographical map I might have seen this coming.

If distances are too great, or routes too arduous, I take public transportation. A route map--here in Finland it's called a linjakartta--often can be downloaded from the internet. In Helsinki, for example, I learned from my linjakartta that the 3T and the 3B trams could take me virtually everywhere I needed to go, and so the first thing I did was to purchase a five-day pass at the office of the city’s public transport authority (it’s called HKL). It cost only about a third as much as a Helsinki Card.

Like every other city in Finland aside from Helsinki, Oulu has no subway or tram lines, only buses. Service is good, but bus systems are inherently complicated. You need to do your homework. Even then, buses, unlike trams and subways, can easily be rerouted—because of road construction, for example—and those kinds of refinements seldom find their way onto bus maps or timetables. All of this is by way explaining how it was that I boarded a #24 bus intending to go to the university and ended up halfway to Haukipudas, a town on the Gulf of Bothnia about twenty kilometers north of Oulu.

I knew I was in trouble when the 24 bus zoomed past the entrance to the university. I pulled out my map and just stayed the course to the end of the line, which is in the town of Kiviniemi—about ten kilometers from Oulu. The bus was entirely faithful to the published route—except of course at that one crucial point where I needed to have it turn onto Yliopistokatu (University Drive). Luckily, I had my cell phone with me and was able to rearrange my 10:00 appointment.

At Kiviniemi, I explained to the driver where I wanted to go. He had no English, but he understood when I used the word for university: yliopisto. And he made it a point to shout it out as we approached the stop closest to the university. I jumped off and hiked a kilometer or so to the Humanities Building on the far side of campus.

I still haven't figured out why the linjakartta led me astray. Until I do, I'll stick to the 4, 5, 6, and 7 lines. I know from experience that I can count on them. And I'll ponder the practical limits of such abstractions as maps and timetables. Really, someone should write a book.

So let me tell you about my gall bladder operation

2006-09-09T11:32:00.000+03:00

Just for fun, I'm attaching a photo of the Lutheran cathedral in Helsinki. And as food for thought, here is a tale related by an American who has lived in Finland for many years.

"One thing to be cautious about here is privacy. Finns are very private people, especially with personal information. We Americans open up quickly and talk to just about anyone about our recent gall bladder operation. I once rented a lake cottage from a Finn in Savonlinna. He rented several cabins on a beautiful lake and we all gathered for breakfast at the old farmhouse. I happened to sit with him this particular morning and as we began to eat I noticed that nothing was being said (another story you are no doubt familiar with by now). After some time I couldn't stand it and began to think what topic I might bring up. Then it dawned on me that we could talk about the farm. So I said, "how big is your farm?" He looked me straight in the eye and curtly said, "big enough." Of course we both realized instantly that we had goofed up. I made the mistake of asking a Finn the kind of thing that they view as private, and he realized (I believe) that I was a visiting tourist on his farm (a paying one) and that visitors are naturally curious and he needed to be prepared for questions like that. After this 'critical incident' our relationship became much better as we both tried to save face. But I never did find out how big that farm was.So it may be best to reserve such probing questions until late into the sauna evening, if you now know what I mean by that."

Vertical Pitching

2006-09-08T12:16:00.000+03:00

And now for something completely different, as Monty Python used to say. Once—in Bermuda, many years ago—I was introduced to the mysterious rites of cricket. More recently, I had the pleasure of watching a baseball game in Seoul. That was a lot more comprehensible than the cricket match, with better kimchee. Some would say that I have been blessed. But they would be wrong. For until this week I had never known the esoteric joys associated with pesäpallo. That’s right, Finnish baseball.

Let’s start with the concept of vertical pitching. “The batter and the pitcher face each other in the home base, on opposite sides of the circular plate. The pitch is delivered by throwing the ball directly upwards above the plate, to a height of at least 1 meter over the head of the pitcher.” As far as I could tell, the ball is simply lobbed. I don’t think there are any spinners or sliders or change-ups or split-fingered fastballs.

Sometimes, instead of throwing the ball directly upwards above the plate, to a height of at least 1 meter over his head, the pitcher suddenly whirls and heaves the ball in the direction of “first base,” though it is not technically the first base in pesäpallo. Pitchers seem to enjoy doing this repeatedly. Now some might think that this is akin to the “pick-off” play that makes baseball so exciting. It is, except that disrupting the timing or concentration of the batter is not an ulterior motive, it must be the only motive, since it is done regardless of whether anyone happens to be on base at the time.

The batter tries to hit the ball when it is pretty much at the top of its arc—at its apogee, for you science geeks. That’s not hard to do, but as a bodily movement it doesn’t have much going for it aesthetically. I know it is probably culturally insensitive to make such a statement, but this is not a game that is going to produce many “sweet-swinging lefties,” or righties, for that matter. Imagine Don Mattingly playing Whack-a-Mole. It doesn’t help that some of these guys hold the bat cross-handed. In pesäpallo, if the batter hits a fair ball, he may or may not run to first base. It’s up to him. It’s a free country.

Oh, and by the way, they don’t run counter-clockwise around the bases, but perform sort of a lateral arabesque en route to the “circular plate.” Outs are hard to come by. Fielders try to catch batted balls on the fly, but if they do it’s not an out. Players who have been caught on the basepaths “are removed from the field, but they do not count as outs.”

There are designated hitters in pesäpallo, but they are called “jokers,” a term that might in fact have some import value. Think you’re starting to acquire a taste for pesäpallo? Think again. “The manager leads his team’s offense by giving signals to his players with a multicolored fan.”

I am not making this stuff up. The quotations are from a website called Pesäpalloliitto. I tried to attach a link, but it didn't work. Google Finnish Baseball and then click on Pesäpalloliitto. For some reason that works better. It’s like vertical pitching. Go figure.

Fulbright Class Fall 2006

2006-09-07T09:00:00.000+03:00

Seated (l-r): Peggy Strand, Michael Parrish, Janis Barry, Joan Maynard, Doug Maynard. Standing (l-r): Ken Kolson, Katherine Wilson, Philip Tidwell, Daena Funahashi, Charlie Bell, Liesl Yamaguchi, Robert Thompson, Eileen Johnson, Daniel Dye, Karen Keifer-Boyd.

Doug Maynard is a sociologist and former NEH Fellow, his project having to do with the delivery of good and bad news by physicians and other healthcare workers. Doug is teaching at the University of Helsinki this semester.

The case of Robert Thompson and Charlie Bell is very interesting. Robert teaches English, and Charlie math, at Medina High School in Ohio. Each was unaware of the other’s Fulbright application. The clever folks in Helsinki seized the opportunity to work out an exchange with a Finnish couple who had been living separately because of jobs in school districts distant from one another. Now the Finnish couple are teaching in Medina and living together in the Thompsons’ house in Akron.

Warms the cockles of a bureaucrat’s heart.

Higher Education in Finland

2006-09-06T12:06:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I delivered my first lecture on North American urban history, which was received by a stony but not overtly hostile silence. I have thus declared victory and am confidently looking forward to lecture #2 tomorrow afternoon.

The North American City is scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00. But there is something called the “academic quarter,” which means that the class actually begins at 12:15 and ends at 1:45. Luckily, this subject was covered during the orientation program at the Fulbright Center last week. Thanks be to God!

With all this experience under my belt, I suppose I am now qualified to pontificate on the status of higher education in Finland.

The Orientation Handbook for American Fulbright Grantees in Finland, 2006-2007, has this to say about universities in Finland: "In relation to population, Finland has one of the most comprehensive university networks in Europe, with twenty university-level institutions: ten multifaculty universities, three universities of technology, three schools of economics and business administration, and four art academies. Geographically, the network covers the whole country. Overall, there are approximately 170,000 students in university education, of whom 21,900 are postgraduate students. The courses of study are rigorous and admission is difficult: only ten percent of each senior secondary graduating class will gain university admission. On the other hand, there are no tuition fees, and students are eligible for government financial aid and some grants. Due to the structure of the Finnish university system, students are relatively free to determine the rate and direction of their courses of study. Many courses may be passed by readings and examinations on prescribed books in lieu of lecture attendance. Moreover, both course and department examinations may be retaken until the student succeeds" (p. 24).

It is my understanding that students do not actually register for courses. They attend lectures and then decide whether they wish to sit for the exam. “Generally, there is not much reading in conjunction with lectures, nor are discussion seminars especially successful except at advanced levels” (p. 25). Reading materials typically are made available at the reserve desk in the library, as students do not buy textbooks—part of the idea that their education will be “free.” Grading scales vary. “Some courses are graded from 1 to 3 (3 being highest) and some simply on a pass/fail basis” (p. 26).

Twenty-three students attended my lecture yesterday. Most of them seem to be geography majors. I didn’t think to ask how many are undergraduates and how many are post-graduates. It will be interesting to see how many return on Thursday.

To the extent that academic achievement (i.e., making the cut at 10%) counts more than aptitude and ambition alone, the Finnish system is somewhat un-American. It also is a system that gets mixed reviews from Americans who have taught here. Some have charged that with their subsidies and the lack of curricular structure, Finnish students are entirely too passive, and these critics are inclined to invoke the stereotype of the reticent Finn in their indictment. The Finnish system, serving as it does only the upper 10%, also has can be seen as anachronistic in an egalitarian society.

Others have had a very different experience, and they are inclined to think that the Finnish system has removed some artificial impediments (daily homework assignments, term papers, grades, etc.) to active, and genuine, learning. These observers see Finnish students exercising real control over what they learn, and how. Some have even had the temerity to defend the stereotype of the taciturn Finn, suggesting that it is not unreasonable for a person to silently think an issue through before venturing an opinion.

As I was educating myself about Finnish higher education last spring, I had lunch with a former Fulbrighter who told me with a heavy sigh that his Finnish students knew more about American history than his students at his home university in the United States. He added, however, that they are not as skilled as American students at recognizing arguments in assigned readings, making an argument themselves, or marshaling evidence in support of a thesis. That seemed to me related to the Orientation Manual’s assertion that “Student questioning of teachers, and vice versa, is comparatively rare” (p. 25). Another former Fulbrighter referred to the ethos as essentially “Germanic.” She encouraged me to try to model a more active and participatory style of teaching and learning.

In both of my courses, I have built some writing assignments into the plan, and I also have devised a scheme to try to encourage some, albeit limited, oral participation. But I have been warned repeatedly not to expect too much. And in truth, I am inclined to “go native” and see where it leads. That will mean, among other things, learning to live with prolonged silences. Fine, though silence is not likely to catch on here in the blogosphere, or over there in Nokialand.

As if things were not complicated enough, Finnish higher education—whatever its virtues and vices—is very much in transition at the moment thanks to reforms introduced by the European Union. These are usually referred to as the Bologna Process: http://www.minedu.fi/minedu/education/bolognaprocess.html. According to the Fulbright Center’s Orientation Handbook, the Bologna Process is a campaign being waged on six different fronts. Its main objectives are1) Easily readable and comparable degrees, 2) Uniform degree structures, 3) Establishment of a system of credits—such as in the ECTS system, 4) Increased mobility, 5) Promotion of European cooperation in quality assurance with a view to developing comparable criteria and methodologies, and 6) Promotion of the European dimension in higher education.

In short, while I try to adapt to an educational system that is very different from the only one I have ever known, major changes are underway that do not necessarily favor convergence. Clearly, I will need to be light on my feet.

Anticipation

2006-08-17T19:15:00.000+03:00

Ever since the day last April that I received my offer letter from the Fulbright Center in Helsinki <http://www.fulbright.fi/>, people have been saying to me, “You will have a wonderful experience. You are going to learn so much.” Future tense.

I never doubted it, and yet the fact is that I already have had a wonderful experience and already have learned a lot. And, as this is being written (August 17), I haven’t even left home yet. Now it’s time to share.

I’ve been attending an introductory language course at the Finnish Language School Association <http://www.finnschool.org/>. We meet on Saturday mornings at a Lutheran church in Arlington. My classmates are mainly young people, most of them from Finnish-American families, and many possess that foreign-language-acquisition gene that somehow passed me by. We have a great teacher, but Finnish is a very difficult language for an under-endowed sixty-year-old man to learn, and so the experience has been both rewarding and humbling. In May, I went to a language camp in northern Minnesota run by Concordia College. Salolampi was an intense week of fun and games, music and movies, energetic line dancing, good Finnish eats, and, not least, an introduction to the mysterious rites of sauna. Unfortunately, my Finnish language skills remain rudimentary. I can say Kuinka sanotaan suomeksi. . . ? (the Finnish version of “How you say . . . ?”) and Puhutteko englantia? (“Do you speak English?”). I know the days of the week and the months. I know a little about the geography of the country, and I’ve learned the numbers so I can count my change. Hey, it’s a start.

Here are a few interesting factoids about the Finnish language—suomea. One of the reasons Finnish is so hard is that it’s not an Indo-European language, and there are no cognates. It’s a Finno-Ugric language, a subdivision of the Uralic languages. It’s closely related to Estonian. I’ve been told that if you know Hungarian, you can pick up Finnish fairly easily. It is more distantly related to Turkish. All of these languages originated somewhere in central Asia and migrated west with one marauding horde or another.

There is no future tense in Finnish. So, for example, there is no difference between “You will have a wonderful experience” and “You are having a wonderful experience.” And that, as I have already said, has been literally true in my case. The Finns seem to function perfectly well without a future tense.

Also, there is no grammatical gender. There is a third-person singular pronoun, hän (rhymes with “man”), that means he or she, so there is no need to worry about modifiers and nouns matching up with each other and with their accompanying masculine or feminine articles—as in la casa blanca, los tios gordos, etc.

There are in fact no definite or indefinite articles in Finnish, and only a handful of prepositions. Instead, there are noun cases—some fifteen or so of them—that require you to tack a suffix onto a word, or set of words, to convey meaning. Consider the language-related words I used above—suomea and suomeksi. The first is the word for the language itself. The second means “in Finnish.” Suomi is the name of the country, and a Finn is a suomalainen. From Finland is suomesta. Once I have arrived in Helsinki, I will be Helsingissa. Finnish is very orderly (e.g., every word is stressed on the first syllable), but the “agglutinating” process can produce eight-syllable words in a hurry. For example, a high-tech company is a tietokonefirmassa, and a receptionist is a vastaanottoapulainen. Even a simple concept like “interesting” comes out as mielenkiintoinen. There are a number of good instructional websites, including Tavataan Tass <http://donnerwetter.kielikeskus.helsinki.fi/FinnishForForeigners/> and Chiugate’s Guide to Finnish <http://www.chiugate.be/>.

The Finnish culture is rich and distinctive. I’ve started dipping into the Kalevala, which is usually referred to as the “national folk epic,” but which is probably better understood as “a conflation and concatenation of a considerable number and variety of traditional songs, narrative, lyric, and magic, sung by unlettered singers, male and female, living to a great extent in northern Karelia in the general vicinity of Archangel” [Magoun edition, p. xiii]. And I’ve learned how intimately related the country’s history and culture are to those of its two big, strong, and occasionally bumptious neighbors, Russia and Sweden. The Kalevala was compiled by Elias Lönnrot, a nineteenth-century physician/ethnographer. I’m reading a translation, of course, and since the editor has turned the poetry into prose, I suppose much has been lost in the process. Still, it is a way into a culture that most Finns regard as Nordic, rather than Scandinavian. Far and away the most lively and charming chronicler of daily life in Finland is an Australian woman named Therese Catanzariti, who goes by “treezycat” <http://del.icio.us/treezycat/finland> (Thanks for the referral, Niina).

Finns seem to be lovers of modernism and efficiency. I say that on the basis of my experience at the Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, where I went to apply for my residence permit. It took about thirty minutes to complete the application; they actually did it for me. It had to be processed in Helsinki, and yet I had my permit in about a week. The Embassy building itself is very mielenkiintoinen, though not exactly to my taste. It is an eloquent steel-and-glass—and wood—tribute to modern architecture and Finland that sits unpretentiously on Embassy Row in a forest of stately Beaux Arts and Italianate mansions. It has a strictly functional interior, with exposed ductwork and George Jetson furniture. The building inspired me to do some reading about the great Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, and as a consequence I have added the Aalto Center in Jyväskylä (don’t try this at home) to my list of things to do, along with the city of Rovaniemi. After its destruction in World War II, Aalto redesigned Rovaniemi in the form of reindeer’s antlers!

I’ve succeeded, to a certain extent, at least, in harnessing the instructional potential of the internet. I’ll be offering two courses—consecutively, not concurrently—starting with a lecture course on North American urban history. Googling for enduring issues and classic texts turned up an enormous number of pertinent internet resources (e.g., Dickens, Olmsted, Riis, Engels). During the second half of the semester I’ll be teaching a seminar that uses Pittsburgh as a case study in the history of urban form. Here I was able to build on a remarkable digital archive consisting of over 500 books—again, many of them classics, such as Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography, Ida Tarbell’s history of the Standard Oil Company, and Margaret Byington’s Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, part of the historic Pittsburgh Survey conducted in the first decade of the twentieth century. Check it out: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/.

Being able to find and exploit digital resources was vital to my course planning because Finnish university students are not expected to buy books, and the University of Oulu library has very little in the way of English-language materials in my field. For me the internet was an alternative to schlepping books (though I did ship a box of books a few weeks ago). As for my students, they will be spared the nuisance and expense associated with reserve desks and photocopy machines. (Why, you ask, do Finnish university students not buy textbooks? The answer is to be found in several distinctive features of Finnish higher education. That will be the subject of a later post.)

Another thing I’ve learned during the anticipation phase is that the internet is a treasure trove of materials bearing specifically on urbanism in Finland. I hope to find ways of working some of these materials into my teaching, and also onto my blog.

And that reminds me that learning how to manage a blog has been extremely rewarding in itself, though it is rather more tedious and time-consuming than I had expected, and I've been told that blogs can become unruly. One of the purposes of this project is to share the fun and exchange ideas, and so I’ve set things up so posting a comment is easy. Before you can publish your comment there is a simple Word Word Verification test designed to keep out spam. Just type the letters as you see them on the screen (machines can’t do that). You may wish to bookmark fulbrighterinfinland. As soon as you come aboard you should hit your Refresh or Reload button to ensure that the latest post is displayed. You can always find old posts in the Archives.

I am indebted to Ginny Hammell for suggesting that I document my experience this way, and I couldn’t have done it without the technical expertise of Michael Hall. Thanks, too, to my keepers at CIES, the Fulbright Center in Helsinki, and the University of Oulu, for giving me permission to enter the blogosphere. Finally, please keep in mind that this is an experiment. If we all mind our manners, we won’t need a censor. Kiitoksia paljon!

Joel Garreau, "A Sad Truth..."

2006-08-09T21:27:00.000+03:00

Hurricane Katrina: The Aftermath
A Sad Truth: Cities Aren't Forever
By Joel Garreau
Sunday, September 11, 2005; Page B01
The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.
The tourist neighborhoods? The ancient parts from the French Quarter to the Garden District on that slim crescent of relatively high ground near the river? Yes, they will be restored. The airport and the convention center? Yes, those, too.
But the far larger swath -- the real New Orleans where the tourists don't go, the part that Katrina turned into a toxic soup bowl, its population of 400,000 scattered to the waves? Not so much.
When Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert said that it makes no sense to spend billions of federal dollars to rebuild a city that's below sea level, he added, "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." In the face of criticism, he hurried to "clarify" his remarks. But according to Washington lore, such a flap occurs when someone inadvertently tells the truth. New Orleans has had a good run for 287 years, but even before Katrina hit, the city was on the wane, as its steadily dropping population figures for decades have shown.
All the brave rhetoric about the indomitable human spirit notwithstanding, we may want to consider some realities. As much as it causes heartache to those of us who love New Orleans -- the whole place, not just the one of myth and memory -- cities are not forever. Look at Babylon, Carthage, Pompeii.
Certainly, as long as the Mississippi River stays within its manmade banks, there will be a need for the almost 200 miles of ports near its mouth. But ports no longer require legions of workers. In the 21st century, a thriving port is not the same thing as a thriving city, as demonstrated from Oakland to Norfolk. The city of New Orleans has for years resembled Venice -- a beloved tourist attraction but not a driver of global trade.
Does the end of New Orleans as one of America's top 50 cities represent a dilemma of race and class in America? Of course. There are a lot of black and poor people who are not going to return to New Orleans any more than Okies did to the Dust Bowl.
What the city of New Orleans is really up against, however, is the set of economic, historic, social, technological and geological forces that have shaped fixed settlements for 8,000 years. Its necessity is no longer obvious to many stakeholders with the money to rebuild it, from the oil industry, to the grain industry, to the commercial real estate industry, to the global insurance industry, to the politicians.
If the impetus does not come from them, where will it come from?
New Orleans, politically defined, is the 180.6 square miles making up Orleans Parish. (In Louisiana a "parish" is comparable to a county.) This place is roughly three times the size of the District of Columbia, though in 2004 it was less populated and its head count was dropping precipitously.
The original reason for founding La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1718 was the thin crescent of ground French trappers found there. Hence the name "Crescent City." Elevated several feet above the Mississippi mud, it was the last semi-dry natural landing place before the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. That crescent today is where you find all the stuff that attracts tourists, from the French Quarter, to the Central Business District (the "American Quarter") with the convention center and the Superdome, to the Garden District and Uptown. This area is roughly comparable to Washington from Adams Morgan through K Street to Georgetown and Foxhall Road.
That tourist crescent is relatively intact. (Only two of the 1,500 animals at the Audubon Zoo died.) But it is only perhaps 10 percent of the city.
The rest to the north of the river -- as distinct from the Algiers district on the south bank, which has always been something of an afterthought -- is under as much as 25 feet of water. For the last 90 years, this vast bulk of the city has required mammoth pumps to clear the streets every time it rains. This is where you'd find working folk -- cops, teachers and nurses -- with bathtub madonnas and colored Christmas tree lights. It's also where you would find areas of soul-destroying poverty, part of the shredding fabric of a city that had a poverty rate of 23 percent. Planners have warned for years that this area would be destroyed if the levees were ever breached.
Yet, as novelist Anne Rice wrote of her native city a week ago: "The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries . . . . They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs."
Sentiment, however, won't guide the insurance industry. When it looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance -- without which nothing can be rebuilt.
Distinct from Orleans Parish is the rest of metropolitan New Orleans, with a population of 850,000 -- twice that of the "city." These parishes, including Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John, Plaquemines and St. James, were hard hit. There was four feet of water in some expensive living rooms in Metairie. But they were not scenes of comparable devastation.
Also distinct from the city are the region's ports, lining 172 miles of both banks of the Mississippi, as well as points on the Gulf. For example, the largest in the Western Hemisphere is the 54-mile stretch of the Port of South Louisiana. It is centered on La Place, 20 miles upriver from New Orleans. It moved 199 million tons of cargo in 2003, including the vast bulk of the river's grain. That is more than twice as much as the Port of New Orleans, according to the American Association of Port Authorities. The Port of Baton Rouge, almost as big as the Port of New Orleans, was not damaged. Also, downstream, there is the LOOP -- the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port out in the Gulf that handles supertankers requiring water depths of 85 feet. These ports are just a few of the biggest.
Illustrating how different the Port of New Orleans is from the city, its landline phones were back in business a week ago, says Gary LaGrange, the port's president and CEO. "The river is working beautifully," he reports, and "the terminal's not that bad."
Throughout the world, you see an increasing distinction between "port" and "city." As long as a port needed stevedores and recreational areas for sailors, cities like New Orleans -- or Baltimore or Rotterdam -- thrived. Today, however, the measure of a port is how quickly it can load or unload a ship and return it to sea. That process is measured in hours. It is the product of extremely sophisticated automation, which requires some very skilled people but does not create remotely enough jobs to support a city of half a million or so.
The dazzling Offshore Oil Port, for example, employs only about 100 people. Even the specialized Port of New Orleans, which handles things like coffee, steel and cruise boats, only needs 2,500 people on an average day, LaGrange says. The Warehouse District was being turned into trendy condos.
Compare that to the tourism industry, which employs about 25,000 people in the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation and food sectors -- some 5 percent of the city's former population, according to the census.
New Orleans's economy is vividly illustrated by its supply of white-collar jobs. Its Central Business District has not added a new office building since 1989, according to Southeast Real Estate Business. It has 13.5 million square feet of leasable office space -- not much bigger than Bethesda/Chevy Chase, where rents are twice as high. The office vacancy rate in New Orleans is an unhealthy 16 percent and the only reason it isn't worse is that 3 million square feet have been remade as hotels, apartments and condominiums.
There are no national corporations with their headquarters in New Orleans. There are regional headquarters of oil companies such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips, but their primary needs are an airport, a heliport and air conditioning. Not much tying them down. In the Central Business District you will also find the offices of the utilities you'd expect, such as the electricity company Entergy. But if you look for major employers in New Orleans, you quickly get down to the local operations of the casino Harrah's, and Popeye's Fried Chicken.
Hardly a crying demand for a commercial entrepot.
This is not the first time that harsh realities have reshaped cities along the Gulf of Mexico.
The historic analogy for New Orleans is Galveston. For 60 years in the 1800s, that coastal city was the most advanced in Texas. It had the state's first post office, first naval base, first bakery, first gaslights, first opera house, first telephones, first electric lights and first medical school.
Then came the hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900. As yet unsurpassed as the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it washed away at least 6,000 souls. Civic leaders responded with heroic determination, building a seawall seven miles long and 17 feet high. Homes were jacked up. Dredges poured four to six feet of sand under them.
Galveston today is a charming tourist and entertainment destination, but it never returned to its old commercial glory. In part, that's because the leaders of Houston took one look at what the hurricane had wrought and concluded a barrier island might not be the best place to build the major metropolis that a growing east central Texas was going to need.
They responded with an equally Lone-Star-scale project, the 50-mile-long Ship Channel. It made inland Houston a world port. In the wake of the Spindletop gusher that launched the Texas oil industry, Houston became the capital of the world petroleum industry. As the leaders of the "awl bidness" were fond of saying, "Don't matter if the oil is in Siberia or the South China Sea -- you buy your rig in Houston or dig for it with a silver spoon." Houston went on to become a finance, medical, university, biotech and now nanotech center. The first word from the surface of the moon was not "Galveston." It was "Houston?"
What will New Orleans be known for in 100 years?
How a city responds to disaster is shaped both by large outside forces and internal social cohesion. Chicago rebuilt to greater glory after the fire of 1871 destroyed its heart. San Franciscans so transformed their city after the earthquake and fire of 1906 that nine years later they proudly hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to toast the Panama Canal and their own resurrection.
Not long ago, I co-taught a team of George Mason University students in a semester-long scenario-planning course aimed at analyzing which global cities would be the winners and losers 100 years from now. The students were keenly aware of the impact that climate change might have on their calculations, among hundreds of other factors. Yet in the end they could not bring themselves to write off such water cities as New York and Tokyo. They simply wouldn't bet against the determination and imagination of New Yorkers and the Japanese. As someone put it at the time, "If it turned out New York needed dikes 200 feet high, you can just hear somebody saying, 'I know this guy in Jersey.' "
Will such fortitude be found in New Orleans? In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," political scientist Robert Putnam measured social capital around the country -- the group cohesion that allows people to come together in times of great need to perform seemingly impossible feats together. He found some of the lowest levels in Louisiana. (More Louisianans agree with the statement "I do better than average in a fistfight" than people from almost anywhere else.) His data do not seem to be contradicted by New Orleans's murder rate, which is 10 times the national average. Not to mention the political candidates through the ages who, to little effect, have run on promises of cleaning up the corruption endemic to the government and police force. New Orleans is not called the Big Easy for nothing. This is the place whose most famous slogan is " Laissez les bons temps rouler" -- "Let the good times roll."
I hope I'm wrong about the future of the city. But if the determination and resources to rebuild New Orleans to greater glory does not come from within, from where else will it come?
Author's email : garreauj@washpost.com
Joel Garreau, a Post reporter and editor, is the author of "Edge City: Life on the New Frontier" (Doubleday).