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.