kuvia!

as joululoma (Christmas vacation) has just started, I figured it was time for a small photo update. I shall try to muster a blogpost sometime soon that contains actual text, but, after uploading these pictures...

the button accordion that I received as a loan from Pappa (maternal grandfather). he plays it far better than I, but it is immensely fun to play around on.

candles (both wax and electric) are everywhere. they joined forces with the snow and are bravely battling the darkness.

our front yard on the 6th of December (Finnish independence day)

oops, I guess I was feeling a bit patriotic.

äiti took me skiing on Independence Day. I didn't realize at the time that she was taking a picture, so I am not posing. this is how we ski in America, right?

on the way home from skiing, I paid another (my third) visit to the viewtower. the first time I went there, the sun was shining and the world was green. the second time was during the rain and fog of autumn. and this time, climbing the snow-blanketed steps in skiboots, it was definitely winter.

the museum at the top of the hill.

this is Finland, folks.

today I went to a friend's house for her birthday. we went snowshoeing in the field and woods behind their house. this is Meri and the field, in the ~14:00 sunset of the day after the winter solstice.

snowshoeing for the first time! the only feeling stranger than putting on snowshoes and feeling like you have enormous feet is taking them off and realizing that you have minuscule feet.

left to right: Meri, me, Meri and Sara's father Juke

minä. many thanks to Sara (whose birthday it was) for the pictures in which I am. <:

!

joulukuusi! kuusi, for the record, means both six and fir/spruce, though they're declined differently, as iskä has been teaching me. we plucked it from the woods last weekend and just brought it inside/decorated it today.

obligatory Christmas bokeh picture. <:

mihin ihmeeseen syksy meni?

oops, haven't blogged in a while.

winter has come to Savitaipale, I think. yesterday we got our first snowstorm (we got snow in late October, and a sizely amounts of it, but it was much gentler), but more on that in a bit. today is the first day of December and my 99th day in Finland and I honestly have never before witnessed an autumn that was either as incredibly mindbogglingly beautiful nor as evasively short as this one. and my sense of syntax is leaving me, I think. I spent over two minutes trying to decide whether that should be 'either' or 'neither' in the sentence two sentences before this one, and am still not entirely pleased with my decision. though I suppose I should save language-related rambling for a language-related post I hope to make in the near future.

but I digress.

I should probably tell about Thanksgiving. it's never really been my favorite of holidays, and I have always liked it mainly for the downtime at home with family (and the break from Nutcracker dress rehearsals... but I shan't speak of that). here, without the day off nor promise of a long weekend, Thursday was its usual hectic self and didn't bring the promise of a long weekend. but after school and visiting with a friend, I came home, cooked for three and a half hours, and served my host family some semblance of a Thanksgiving meal around 8 o'clock (very late for dinner here). I even managed to make an apple pie, with the last-minute emergency help of mama. it was rather stressful as I have never made one alone before... I couldn't shake the feeling that the statue of liberty was watching over one shoulder and Uncle Sam over the other, and plotting in Texan accents what they would do to me if I made a mess of such an American icon as apple pie. I comforted myself that if worst came to worst Finland wouldn't be a bad place to start my career as a refugee.

at any rate, it ended up looking alright (see photo below). my host family enjoyed it, and I admit the texture was rather nice, but I couldn't taste it at all due to a headcold.

the pie

yesterday came the kind of stinging, minuscule snow that comes on furious winds and doesn't fall but flies, antiquating fresh footprints and filling the cracks between layers of clothing. the lights were flickering all day.

I think perhaps now is the time to begin my telling of the prechristmas atmosphere in this country. or this village, I suppose I should say, for fear of undue generalization. even before our first snow (October 26), people could be heard singing Christmas carols in the hallways at school and talk of Christmas has only grown. as if out of inability to wait, Finns hold parties called pikkujoulut (lit. "little Christmas"), at which Christmas pastries are eaten, glöggi is drunk (with raisins and almonds mmm), saunas are saunad in, tonttu hats are worn, songs are sung... the reporter who came to school on Black Friday to interview me for the local paper explained pikkujoulut as a way to have Christmas celebrations with friends and extended family, as Christmas itself is more of a family affair.

pikkujoulut have been happening since October, but I went to my first last weekend (with my AFS chapter) and my second was yesterday. all the cousins came over. there were seven small children in Santa hats singing Finnish carols. while snow-smattered wind glazed the windows. the power went out while the cousins were in the sauna (that's also when joulupukki (Santa Claus (lit. Christmas goat), who looked a lot like me, Tiina and the oldest cousin Eveliina) came and hid presents in the living room for them to find). there was much tickling and red hats and one of the major bonuses that has accompanied the bettering of my Finnish skills (and the lessening of my shyness to make language mistakes) is my ability to play with my Finnish cousins. yes, you can play with small children without words (I mostly do...) but understanding when they say something like "tickle Katsu while I distract her with this little Santa Claus" is a convenient ability to have.

 

that is a photo of Savitaipale at about 4 o'clock today, as I approached the center square (where the light-hung tree is) from home. last night there was a joulutori (Christmas market) there, where handmade baked- and woolengoods, hot glöggi, and sausages were vended. there was singing of carols and a Santa giving out candy, and I think the whole village probably came there in the five o'clock darkness and flickering streetlights of a biting snowstorm.

on the theme of Thanksgiving, I must say that I am  truly and deeply thankful to have ended up in such a lovely host community. I can't imagine a warmer group at school (my grade and otherwise) or a more fantastic host family. I rather wonder what I did to deserve it all. and sometimes it worries me how perfect this has all been...

and I shall leave you all with a photo I took today while walking with Eddie and a friend. shortly before we cut into the woods. it was very dark, and there was a glittering snowfall.

happy December to you all!

pyhäinpäivä

halloween isn't a big deal in Finland. actually, (in Savitaipale, anyway) it is hardly a deal at all. trickortreating doesn't seem to happen at all.

but they do observe Pyhäinpäivä, which I gather is All Saints Day. it is a quiet holiday of memorial for the dead. I went with my host family to each of Savitaipale's three cemeteries place candles on the graves of relatives. I can't really explain the silent, foggy beauty of a cemetery of black stones in the middle of the woods, flickering with constellations of candles. nearly every stone had multiple candles on it. and all real candles. none of the blinking colored electric monstrosities I've grown resigned to back in the old country.

I didn't take any pictures during the day, but after visiting the grandmother and seeing the graveyard (the one by the church nearest the center of town) in the dark as we were walking back, I realized it was a photographic subject not to be passed up. about an hour later, I returned with a friend Kaisa, a spirited girl who refuses to speak English (not that I have ever asked her to, mind you!), speaks Finnish at 300 km/h (roughly 186mph for those of you still in America), and doesn't mind spontaneous long walks late into cold, rainy nights (the history of our friendship consists mainly of spontaneous long walks late into cold, rainy nights).

after meandering the graveyard for almost an hour, we visited the näkötorni (view tower), a wooden ~15m high tower atop the hill. from there one gets a splendid view of the lake (Kuolimo) and the Savitaipale village. 

glowing graveyard (from halfway up the hill)

the village lights, reflected in the Kuolimo (from the tower)

village lights refracted by fog and editless photoediting (from the tower).

on boats

 

my dear readers, I shall now embark on the telling of two different adventures that I have had recently, a weekend apart from eachother. except for the fact that they both include boats, they have rather little do to with eachother and should really be in seperate blog posts, but alas.
 

as for the first one, two weekends ago, it so happened that Ayla (the only other person in my chapter here, a truly lovely soul from Germany) was to be accompanying her host family on a steamship on which her hostfather works, and they had room for one more, so she invited me. it was marvelous. the ship (S/S Heinävesi) was from 1906. it left from Savonlinna and took us to an island on lake Saimaa, where there was saunaing, lake-swimming, and musicing. there appear to be quite a lot of songs about Saimaa, as many such were sung that night, in the belly of a steamship over cold, black water and below a black, starry sky.

 





the linna of Savonlinna



 



I found a friend in the cabin we slept in onboard.

one has to watch out for accordions in this country. they seem to appear out of nowhere.

 

Ayla and I on the island.

and now to tell of the second trip. this one was last weekend, during syysloma (autumn vacation), which was friday through monday for our school. we went to Tallinn, Estonia.




the ship's mirrored stairwells with Tuuli

...and Tiina.

our ship left on saturday early evening from Helsinki--a stylish, bustling, wonderland of a city of which I failed to take pictures. we toured a bit of the city and ate lunch at a Fazer café (one hasn't seen chocolate displays until one has seen the windows of this place) before catching our ship. having never been on a cruise ship before, I have to say it was a little overwhelmingly vast.




I think this boat may have been bigger than Tallinn.



Estonian lights!

playing with Baltic rain in the ship's light.

on board was a buffet (at which we ate an unseemly quantity of food), cosmetic, candy/liquor, and souvenir shops, a sauna, at least two discos, and, of course hundreds of sleeping cabins (we slept on the ship at port in Tallinn). one would not have noticed that one was in the Baltic sea if one didn't consciously remind oneself.
 

the café at which we breakfasted is the rightmost building here.



 Tallinn, o, Tallinn! for starters, Estonian is an incredible language that I want to learn. it's like Finnish that has taken its silk off in favor of wool. it actually bears many resemblances to the Karelian dialect of Finnish (spoken in my area).

outside the church.



inside the church.




atop the church.

 

atop the church with Tallinn layed out below.

the city itself will remain in my memory as a cluster of cobblestone streets, old women selling woolen mittens in accented Finnish, and medieval church spires disappearing into the fog. that is, of course, only the old part of the city (vana linna). we spent pretty much our whole time in Tallinn bouncing between vana linna and the shopping centers on its perimeter (goods are cheeper than in Finland, apparently). it's probably a combination of the remarkable lack of crowds, the general cleanliness, and my never having been in a medieval city before, but I had to keep reminding myself that everything I was seeing was real.

Tallinn's got some pretty interesting walls...



...and doorways...

...and layers...



heippa, Tallinn.

another ship by our side on the way back.

 it is truly a magical feeling to walk the deck of a ship using the wind as a crutch, and tell yourself: here I am, with Estonia behind me, Finland ahead of me, Russia somewhere over to my right, and the Baltic sea all around me. nobody was outside (probably because of the cold) and I made several loops of the huge, deserted deck, feeling incredibly small and balanced on top of the world. when we got back to Helsinki, the sun was waiting for us, and by the time we got back to Savitaipale, the clear sky had brought us rime on the grass, which crunched under our feet when äiti and I took Eddie for a walk under the white stars and the black sky and the stripes of silver clouds. this week it feels winter is coming to Savitaipale.




selfportrait in the window of the return ship.