The relentless rain we are currently experiencing is pretty miserable. Of course, having lived in London for the past five or so years, and being from Leeds, which, while admittedly not getting as much rainfall as Manchester, is still pretty wet and miserable, you might think that I am somewhat well-adjusted to this kind of weather. And of course it provides an excellent topic of conversation (incidentally, I didn't realise how much I talk about the weather until I came to Helsinki, and I didn't appreciate how useful it could be when making small talk). But the quality of the rain here is different. It's not worse (assuming cold rain water does in fact have a quality spectrum). It's just different. It just doesn't feel like England.
Perhaps the comfortable shoe of weather-related small talk is now the vessel through which I am experiencing my first pangs of homesickness. I don't think attending the heavy metal bar PKRL (which is an abbreviation of perkele, a naughty word in Finnish) last night did much to alleviate this feeling. To be far, we (myself and my comrade from Stockholm) had a pretty good time. The only hairy moment was unrelated to heavy metal, and involved a mildly intoxicated Zambian lady wanting to know what we did for a living. On telling her that we were lawyers (which in hindsight was a mistake), she sat down next to us, insisted we told her where we worked (don't worry, she was convinced we worked at "Russian") and managed to extract a business card from my friend.
This weekend wasn't all doom and gloom. A very nice lady from work took us to her hometown of Porvoo, Finland's second city (I should clarify: it's the second oldest city; there are only c. 50,000 inhabitants, 30 per cent. of whom are Swedish-speaking Finns). Alexander I, the Russian Tsar who annexed Finland from Sweden, lived in Porvoo for a while and apparently had a mistress (and at least one illegitimate child) who hung out in the town square.
Porvoo is famous for being the birthplace of the Finnish independent state. It was at Porvoo cathedral that Tsar Alexander I convened the Porvoo Diet and declared that he would govern Finland in accordance with its ancient laws, which led to the "myth" of Finnish constitutionalism, and which in turn led to the ineluctable rise of Finnish nationalism, and which ultimately resulted in the reality of Finnish constitutionalism and the independent state in 1917. Unfortunately lepers were not allowed in this cathedral. They had to hang out beneath the bell tower, which is located in a separate stone building next to the church. And funnily enough, Finnish speaking Finns were not allowed in the church either, and they had to hang out in this red wooden building next to the bell tower. You can see that there was a definite hierarchy in Swedish Porvoo.
Perhaps the comfortable shoe of weather-related small talk is now the vessel through which I am experiencing my first pangs of homesickness. I don't think attending the heavy metal bar PKRL (which is an abbreviation of perkele, a naughty word in Finnish) last night did much to alleviate this feeling. To be far, we (myself and my comrade from Stockholm) had a pretty good time. The only hairy moment was unrelated to heavy metal, and involved a mildly intoxicated Zambian lady wanting to know what we did for a living. On telling her that we were lawyers (which in hindsight was a mistake), she sat down next to us, insisted we told her where we worked (don't worry, she was convinced we worked at "Russian") and managed to extract a business card from my friend.
This weekend wasn't all doom and gloom. A very nice lady from work took us to her hometown of Porvoo, Finland's second city (I should clarify: it's the second oldest city; there are only c. 50,000 inhabitants, 30 per cent. of whom are Swedish-speaking Finns). Alexander I, the Russian Tsar who annexed Finland from Sweden, lived in Porvoo for a while and apparently had a mistress (and at least one illegitimate child) who hung out in the town square.
Porvoo is famous for being the birthplace of the Finnish independent state. It was at Porvoo cathedral that Tsar Alexander I convened the Porvoo Diet and declared that he would govern Finland in accordance with its ancient laws, which led to the "myth" of Finnish constitutionalism, and which in turn led to the ineluctable rise of Finnish nationalism, and which ultimately resulted in the reality of Finnish constitutionalism and the independent state in 1917. Unfortunately lepers were not allowed in this cathedral. They had to hang out beneath the bell tower, which is located in a separate stone building next to the church. And funnily enough, Finnish speaking Finns were not allowed in the church either, and they had to hang out in this red wooden building next to the bell tower. You can see that there was a definite hierarchy in Swedish Porvoo.
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