Those crazy Finns ...

The BBC has reported on Finland's love for crazy contests. Click to see the full article, but I've pasted a few excerpts here as I think this is very much in the spirit of cultural education which was one of the reasons I started this blog.

"The mobile phone throwing world championship in Finland on Saturday is just one of many crazy contests on the country's summer diary. Helsingin Sanomat columnist Perttu Hakkinen asks why Finns have such a fondness for these wacky pursuits.

Finland is well-known for several reasons: mass-produced mobiles phones, lakes - 190,000 of them - and boiling hot saunas. Also, for Santa Claus and the Eurovision monsterman, Lordi.

Finnish summer sports and pastimes owe something to all of these things. The telecoms industry, the natural environment - and the country's gimmicky eccentric side. The list includes boot throwing, wife carrying, mosquito slapping, mobile-phone throwing, sauna endurance contests... and many more.

The most popular summer sport in Finland, however, is not wife carrying or boot throwing, but swamp soccer (SS). The SS World Championships can attract over 30,000 enthusiasts and 300 teams to the tiny northern village of Hyrynsalmi (population 2,895), travelling all the way from the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Russia and Iceland. The game is basically just like normal soccer, but it's played on a wet, marshy swamp."

The article concludes with a quote from Harri Kinnunen, two-time organiser of the Boot Throwing World Championships. "Yeah, I know what the foreigners think," Kinnunen laughs. "Those crazy Finns!"

Hmmm.

Summer holiday part deux ...

It seems amazing to think I've been back working for a week already and returned to the office in Helsinki today.

After our return from the mökki, we visited Helsinki's zoo on Friday and then flew on Sunday to Edinburgh, via Heathrow. We started with a couple of nights in Edinburgh, staying at the Haymarket area, in easy walk to the city centre. We packed in a lot - an open top bus tour, visit to the Edinburgh Dungeon, some shopping on Prince's Street, a craft market and a walk through Grassmarket and around the castle area. We didn't manage to get tickets to any of the fringe comedy festival but picked up the buzz around the city.

We then crossed the Forth Road Bridge and travelled to Stirling Castle, thence to Perth (shown on the picture) for an overnight stay and a visit the following day to Scone Palace, the original home of the stone of destiny.

From there, we visited Scotland's oldest working distillery at Glenturret, which dates back to 1775. Unlike the visits recently to Guinness and Jameson in Dublin, this place is still preparing the water of life (the word whisky is derived from the Scottish Gaelic words of that meaning, uisge beatha) in a process virtually unchanged in more than 200 years. Glenturret single malt is one of the whiskies that go into the Famous Grouse, so we had the tour and were pretty impressed.

After this, a couple of days of chilling out were called for. We stayed in Drymen, on the shores (or is that the bonnie, bonnie banks) of Loch Lomond. Though all of the scenery we saw in Scotland was beautiful (helped, of course, by the sunshine), this was perhaps the most spectacular, the largest body of freshwater in the UK (by surface area, Loch Ness is smaller but has more volume).

We flew home on the Friday, after a visit to Hopetoun House, Scotland's finest stately home, then went to Ladies Day at Newbury Races on Saturday with friends. Unusually, we came out ahead of the bookies on that occasion, a very enjoyable day.

So now it is back to work. Hopefully when I feel stressed, a look at the photos will remind me of the tranquility of the Scottish countryside and reduce my blood pressure a little.

Summer holiday part 1 ...

This week saw the first part of our family holiday. Horrified at the prices quoted for Tuscany, I had persuaded the family to take a cottage in the Finnish countryside.

I've written before about the mökki thing - Finland has around half a million of them, for a population slightly less than eleven times that number. Escaping from the cities to a cottage during the summer months is considered a normal thing to do.

Regular readers will know that I have a strong affection for this country and its people, so I apologise in advance to any Finnish friends who feel my reporting has taken a more negative turn. I'm afraid our experiences this week mean it is rather unlikely that the kesamökki will become a regular fixture on this family's calendar.

I booked our cottage via a website (http://www.lomarengas.fi/, ours was number 8238 and the company's service was excellent). The details suggested that the town of Perniö, only 5km away, offered restaurants and other amenities and we would not be too far from Salo, a larger town and an hour or so from Turku, one of Finland's major cities.

Things did not look promising from the beginning. As we drove to the cottage on Finnish road #1 (European route E18), the heavens opened and the rain fell so hard that even the wipers on double speed had trouble clearing the screen. The few tunnels en route gave temporary respite but confused the GPS, already struggling for a signal because of the millions of litres of water in the air between the satellites and my phone.

Having followed the (very accurate) driving directions, we spent the last 3km driving down barely surfaced roads, finally ending up in the yard of a farm, in whose grounds our cottage was. The cottage was well equipped, warm and clean and we unpacked, before heading back to Perniö for supplies. We had plenty of choice at least, with K-Market, S-Market and Siwa all represented (first stop, though, was Alko, for the most essential provisions).

At the only bar in the town, which doubled as its only restaurant, we chatted with our waitress who was recently returned to Finland after 11 years spent studying and then working around Birmingham, the first Finn I've met with a brummie accent in English! She explained that the next day, Saturday, was the annual market in the town, worth experiencing.

So, we returned to see more of Perniö, which we concluded in rough translation means "one horse town but the horse is on vacation". We did make it that day to Fiskars, once home of the eponymous manufacturer of knives and related items but now a cute village of craft workshops and sales outlets.

Sunday saw rain, so we stayed at the cottage, swam briefly in the 21°C lake during a gap in the clouds, took a sauna and played Mah Jongg.

On Monday we ventured to Turku to see the castle, billed in my tour guide as one of Finland's most popular tourist attractions. It was shut, despite information to the contrary in my guidebook and online. The rest of the city appeared to be similarly disinterested in visitors and we returned home rather disappointed.

Tuesday gave us a warm day, ideal for chilling out by the lake (or in it) and some barbecue, so that was OK.

On Wednesday, seduced by further tourist literature found in the cottage, we visited Hanko, described as a pretty little town by the sea. It seems to have been caught in a time warp since the 1950s, though it did give me an opportunity to paddle in what I was told was the most southerly seawater in Finland (the picture at the top of this post shows the proof). We at least had found the Finnish equivalent of Littlehampton.

Today, we decided to return to Helsinki a day early, stopping in Salo for the market and a very pleasant lunch. It was the hottest day of the holiday so far, at 24.5°C, so sitting at a pavement table felt almost Mediterranean!

Now we have a couple of days before the next part of our holiday, 6 days touring in Scotland. Stay tuned for the next instalment