The Silence of the Nature

I spent my last weekend in a village called Häkkilä. And believe me: this is in the middle of nowhere!!! To be more exact: it is in Central Finland. The next town called Saarijärvi (with about 10,000 inhabitants) is 25 km away and there is no grocery store which is any closer. So, you check twice if you have everything on your shopping list before you get back on the long gravel road to your house.
Well, but let me start by giving you a few maps so that you can see where everything is. I live in Tervalampi which is only 40 km away from Helsinki (Map 1). Saarijärvi is 350 km north of Tervalampi and you need 4,5 hours to drive there because of a lack of high ways; not because of the traffic because there is none (Map 2). And the house where Sari, my host mom, grew up in is on a little island called Kurjensaari (saari = island) which is connected to the main land by a bridge (Map 3). The red dot shows you where the house is. The island has, believe it or not, 12 permanent residents (5 of them belong to Sari's family). The other houses are only used as summer cottages.

My host family wanted to leave Tervalampi at 5 pm on Friday. But so far they have never made it on time anywhere. So, I predicted that we would leave at 6 pm and I think I’m a psychic because we did. After a long time on normal concrete roads and the temperatures getting colder all the time, we finally turned onto a gravel road and I figured it couldn’t be long now. On this gravel road we didn’t meet one other car although we stayed on it for about 20 km. When I had already given up hope that we’ll ever arrive, we finally turned onto an either smaller gravel road which was in worse condition. We drove a few meters through the forest and over the bridge and then we stopped at a little yellow house directly by the shore. By the time we arrived at the lake, it was midnight, 2 degrees Celsius (in summer!) and it wasn’t dark at all. (The last picture in this set was really taken at midnight, I swear!)

At least the next day it was up to 6 degrees Celsius and we went to the graduation party of Sari’s niece. They again had sandwich cakes (delicious!) and 7 types of cakes. And none of the clothes I wore (except my underwear, of course) were mine! *lol* I haven't brought any nice clothes to Finland with me. But luckily my host mom nearly has my size! :-) In the evening I took a little walk around the island. Then we relaxed in the sauna (In Finland, women and men go to the sauna separately. In Germany, I always went to the mixed sauna and didn’t mind at all.) While the sun was going down, we roasted sausages over the fire in the dressing room of the sauna, drank alcoholic drinks (The Finnish way of drinking is straight out of the bottle. Who needs glasses anyway?), listened to accordion music and I took about a hundred pictures of the sunset. But it’s definitely one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve ever seen!

On Sunday, we wanted to leave the island at 1 pm and I predicted we would leave at 2 pm. And of course, we did! So, back in the car for 5 hours and I always had at least one of the boys and sometimes even both of them lying on me. But as long as they are sleeping, they are not arguing with each other, so it had its upside! :-P

So, how did I like Häkkilä? It was ok. If it had been warmer and I could have spent time at the beach, I would have probably liked it more. But I asked myself one question while I was there: Can it be too quiet? And my answer is: YES! In Kassel (my university town) I lived in a building close to a tram line, a 4-lane street and regular helicopter traffic to a hospital, so I’m used to lots of noise around me. But on the island I could only hear birds, the occasional lawn mower, and the meowing of a cat. That’s why on the way back I had to turn the volume of my mp3-player up to an almost painful level to surround myself with noise again and to make myself feel normal again! :-P I might go to Häkkila again for midsummer, but this time I’ll take my laptop with me and use the internet of Sari’s brother (who only lives 200 m away) at least every over day. I simply can’t live with my favorite electrical device!!! Maybe I should give my laptop a name. How about Michael? Hmm…