Only slightly bent

At the end of the previous post, I hinted on how good it feels to return home from the woods, so to say. So how can returing from a great little trip be better than the trip? As such, it really isn’t. But when you’re visiting someplace where you really wouldn’t want to move to permanently, there are many upsides in the return to civilization. While these trips to the “countryside” are thoroughly enjoyable, they also manage to convince me every time that I really don’t need a summer cottage of my own. It’s often said that “every” Finnish family has a summer cottage, but I see no point in owning a place you visit a few times a year – especially when I’d go nuts if I had to stay in the middle of nowhere for a month or more. Now, summer cottage in Fiji would be a different story altogether..

But back to the issue at hand. Look at the photos below – what do you see? To the untrained eye, it’s perfectly innocuous Finnish forest, very typical at that. Perfect for picking berries and all that good stuff. And it is all that. But it’s more – it’s also breeding ground and hiding places to zillions of small annoying living things. While Finland doesn’t have any lethal bugs, there are creatures capable of causing some discomfort. And some of them do carry nasty diseases such as Lyme disease and TBE. For example, from the people who went to this one island place, one had to have four ticks removed after just one day.

But what’s great about returning to the city is this:

• Electricity. Ok, so the places I went to this year had electricity – but many summer cottages do not.
• Running water. And even better, running hot water on every faucet encountered. No carrying drinking and bathing water from the well.
• Toilets that don’t smell and that actually reside within the same building you sleep in.
• No mosquitoes hungry for your blood. No horseflies vying for pieces of your precious flesh. No ticks ready to semi-permanently latch on to you. Windows and doors can be kept open and the only thing coming in will be a nice cool breeze.
• Public transportation that works. Outside bigger cities, you’re lucky to get a bus pass you once a day within 10 kilometers.
• Shops that sell more than local smoked fish. Of course, the one thing they don’t sell is local smoked fish, but that’s a small price to pay for getting all the other stuff.
• Bike roads. There are none in rural areas; I don’t really feel like biking on the same narrow dirt roads Finns are using for unofficial rally practises.
• No TV. Yes, that’s right – there was a TV in both summer cottages and in the city, I’m spared from that.
• Nature in still available and in any dosage required. There’s more nature in Helsinki than many people think – and you can freely pick anything ranging from your clean local park to the semi-wilderness of Nuuksio to your daily itinerary; and still be close to a restaurant when you need one. Sometimes these urban oasis are much better than the unregulated, unending wilderness of other places.

And all this newfound appreciation for the standard conveniences lasts for something like 24-48 hours, after which you’re back into taking all that for granted. This is why one needs to repeat the treatment regularly.

A week ago I came back to the city from a couple of mandatory summer cottage / rural Finland excursions. The first one took us to Pori, a smallish city on the western coast of Finland, couple of hours north of Turku. A couple items of note here: first, the city is showing a good example through their use of renewable energy sources, namely wind. Even if there are only a few of these modern windmills, it’s a start. You’ll see from the photo that that is a human there for size comparison.

Another thing are creatures called frogs. A frog here is not a slimy jumpy thing but a delicious, sweet – and smiling – thing as can be seen from the photo on the right. One is great, two would probably kill you with all the sugar and sweetness they have in it. Pori is also the home to the only real beach in the entire Finland (I kid you not), Yyteri. Too bad it’s so far away from Helsinki, as this is one of the two places in Finland that ever get surfable waves.

The second excursion was a few days in the Turku archipelago, an exquisitely beautiful area of the Baltic sea, dotted with thousands and thousands of islands. The islands, of course, block two of my favorite things about the sea – the horizon and the waves – but it’s still nice. So what is there to do on an island? Well, as evidenced by the photos below, one can admire absolutely terrific sunsets, enjoy a perfect summer day on the beach reading a good novel or something, watch the sky with great interest as a big evil cloud is about to devour an innocent small cloud and visit quaint small villages on other islands. And so on.

So does summer get any better than this? It does, in fact – by returning home. More on that a bit later.

I had a chance to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a preview screening tonight. Having enjoyed the book(s) very much years ago, I tried hard to keep expectations sufficiently low. I think it’s generally accepted that most books are better than their movie-derivatives – and this time was no exception.

Having read the book both helped and hindered the experience; on the other hand, a lot of the stuff is not explained very well in the movie so the book provided good background information and a better context. Yet on the other hand, one always has his or her own mental image of the characters and when those and the ones presented in the movie are not quite aligned it’s annoying. And of course this happens. Marvin was good as a depressed robot, but his appearance wasn’t quite what I had imagined. Somehow Zaphod Beeblebrox also felt wrong. But that’s just the preconceptions from the books talking, of course.

It’s always difficult to judge whether the movie itself was good in cases like this. The book(s) I loved. The movie I didn’t – it was an okay piece of work, but that’s all. Not terrible but not great either. How much this diagnosis is hampered or helped by the fact that I’ve read the books, I can’t say.

Thanks to my sister, I recently found out about and visited a new Greek restaurant in Helsinki, Ravintola Grecia. Situated conveniently at the start of Katajanokka in Helsinki (close to the market square), the first thing you notice when entering the place is that it’s huge. Well, maybe not huge huge, but definately bigger than your average restaurant in Helsinki. On a weekday evening there weren’t many people around, but it’s to be expected as it was just recently opened. The interior decoration is somewhat schizophrenic with (IMO, anyway) ugly chandeliers and darkish general colors, but on the other hand nice paintings of Greek views on the walls. Authentic Greek music played on the background and it was apparent that the place at times also has live music performances.

The most important parts, however, were right on the mark. Being the designated driver of the day, I had to skip the Ouzo that was appropriately suggested as an appetizer. The food was delicious and reasonably priced; my choice of Chicken Souvlaki with Tzatziki was close to perfect and a hearty portion of it at that. So big a portion, in fact, that I had to skip the dessert also (which is both good and bad), but had we spent a longer time there it would’ve fit in also. On my second visit today (I suppose it says something about a restaurant to visit it twice within one week) I chose the Grecia Special, tender beef with a cheese sauce and onions. Also excellent. And also such a big portion that we had to share a dessert with my wife.

Service was also impeccable; fast and friendly. My only concern about the restaurant is that compared to its size, not enough customers were in there on either visit. While this is understandable for a new place, I hope they find their clientele quickly enough and stick around.

Anyway, highly recommended.

One day last week, there was another perfect day for a summer picnic: +25C and sunshine from a cloudless sky.

Rather than face the crowds at Suomenlinna again, we headed off to a different island with my brother’s family: some 20km off the coast of Helsinki, at the edge of the archipelago, sits an island maintained by the city of Helsinki. With the added distance came the diminishing crowds: hardly anyone in sight despite it being a perfect summer day. For some reason, that’s how it’s supposed to be at a Finnish beach: deserted. And I’ll take uncompromising privacy any day over the super-crowded Mediterranean tourist-traps.

It turns out you don’t need to have fine-grained sand to make for a perfect beach day; a gently sloping bedrock will do just fine. With good company & food, great cold wine and drinks, it came out as another perfect vacation day. Sure, it could’ve used some good sandbars and surf, but there needs to be some scale left in perfection also

On this island, it was also possible to see something that despite the omnipresent water is far too rare in Finland: a horizon. Most of the Finnish coast is so dotted with islands that it’s often impossible to get a clear view of the horizon. There’s something special about the Pacific horizon when you just know it goes on for thousands of miles. You can never get that feeling on the tiny Baltic Sea, but this is as good as it gets here – not bad:

First finished book of the summer was Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious. This fascinating book is about us and how we don’t really know us at all. Trying – and to a good degree, succeeding – to explain the adaptive unconscious mind that has largely been overlooked in traditional theories of personality, Wilson takes the reader through a number of interesting topics and how our unconscious mind is a lot more complicated and “in charge” than what we’d like to think. What’s more, we don’t know why we do or think many of the things we do or think. And when we try to explain our actions, the result is mostly confabulation – our conscious mind making up, sometimes ridiculous, stuff to explain our actions while we are blissfully unaware that we’re making stuff up.

There is one part about emotional extremes. As has been shown in other studies, Wilson also brings up the notion of baseline happiness: that is, peoples’ level of happiness is inherent (even on a genetic, inheritable level) and people tend to return to their baseline level of happiness over time. Moreover, people tend to drastically overestimate the effect of either positive (“If I win the lottery, I’ll be happy forever!“) or negative (“I’ll never get over his/her death!“) events. For good or bad, people return to their baseline happiness much sooner than what they think they would. Both physiological and psychological mechanisms make sure there is no lasting euphoria – but also no lasting desperation.

Other topics include how children develop their theory of mind (and ingenious experiments to study this), how conscious emotions follow (and indeed, may be partly caused by) physical reactions, why too much introspection is both impossible and a bad thing, how prone we are to maintain an overly positive self-image (and why that may be good for you) etc.

While not exactly your typical summer-novel, this was excellent reading. Highly recommended.