June 6
The weather changes. A cold wind whips off the Gulf of Finland. It’s a parting shot from winter, a season that’s like the worst kind of house guest, always showing up uninvited and shamelessly overstaying its welcome. The wind rips the blossoms off the lilacs and snaps the necks of a few innocent peonies. On a blustery day like today, I begin to understand why everyone in Finland has a sauna, and why people who don’t have a sauna blow their brains out.
S. and I need to find used cell phones for our art project. Someone tells us to try the big flea market called Valtteri. The market is located in a warehouse on the north side of Helsinki where they used to build train cars. Now people come here to sell stuff. All sorts of people: suburbanites cleaning out their attics; recent immigrants eking out a living; shady dudes offloading hot electronics. The warehouse is crammed with hundreds of folding tables stacked high with knockoffs, knick-knacks, tchotchkes, and discards. It’s like the afterlife of consumer goods. A place where the things that people once paid good money for wind up, deeply discounted and desperate for one last chance to prove they’re still worth something to somebody.
We find a table selling old Nokia 3310’s out of a cardboard box. This was once the most popular phone in the world. A phone that was nearly indestructible. A phone that hooked a 100 million kids on Snake II and once accounted for a sizable chunk of Finland’s GDP. We buy a half-dozen for a euro.