June 11
S. and I take the ferry into town. Some guy is standing at the back of the boat tossing bread crumbs to the seagulls, driving them into a frenzy of flapping wings and high-pitched squeals and causing unbelievable mayhem. The guy turns around and looks at us.
“It’s fun, yes?” he asks, gesturing toward his own private version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
We respond with a look of deep loathing that the guy mistakes for quiet encouragement because he keeps doing it.
We have a meeting with the director of our art residency at the main office, which is located in the Kaapelitehdas or Cable Factory. The building dates back to the 1940’s and, like practically everything else in Finland, used to be owned by Nokia. Now it’s home to various cultural organizations. For years, it also served as a venue for the annual Finnish Metal Expo “where more than 50 operators in the metal music industry showcase their latest products and services,” but I’m not sure that’s happening anymore.
We’re early, so we hang out with the interns who give S. and me a history lesson. They tell us that during the Cold War, Finland stayed neutral and didn’t join NATO, mostly so they wouldn’t tick off the Soviets. Finland’s modest ambition back then was to avoid being annihilated by the Superpower next door. This policy was dubbed “Finlandization.” The interns tell us that Finns nowadays are embarrassed about this chapter in their history. I, on the other hand, am totally sympathetic to the idea. Finlandization is how I survived growing up in Texas. The idea is to shut up, keep your head down, and hope the bullies will forget you’re even there.
The director of the residency invites us into his office for coffee. Coffee is a big deal in Finland. In fact, the mid-morning coffee break is a legally protected right. I read somewhere that people in Finland drink more coffee per capita than anyone else on Earth. There’s no definitive explanation for this. It might be because the country is plunged into wintery despair for half the year. Or it might be because Finland is famous for its product design, and a coffee break is the perfect excuse for Finns to show off their thoughtfully designed ceramic coffee cups and saucers.
After our meeting, S. and I decide it's too beautiful to spend the day inside fiddling with our Nokia 3310’s, so we head out to Seurasaari instead. A century ago, an ethnographer named Axel Olai Heikel began collecting traditional Finnish structures out on this island. Sweden already had an open-air museum like that (pff, of course!), so Heikel decided that Finland should have one, too.
We read that there are historical re-enactors in the buildings, so we're expecting a Finnish version of Colonial Williamsburg, with artisanal baking demonstrations and maybe some farriery or blacksmithing. Coopering. That kind of thing. But the re-enactors we encounter are mostly high school kids with bad attitudes whose summer job is to hang out on the island wearing period costumes while staring at their smart phones.
We hustle through a series of smoke cabins, crofter's dwellings, granaries, and farmyards. We glimpse a wooden church. We spot a parsonage. We read that many of these buildings are the last surviving examples of early 19th-century Finnish architecture. They're lovely, these rustic wooden structures with elegant joinery and stripped down minimalism that look like something Alvar Aalto might have built if he'd been a crofter.
Love the comparison to Finlandization and your upbringing in Texas!