two weeks in 'the hole'

So, er ... just in case anyone is wondering, Finland continued to do its marvellously spacious and tranquil thing all the way through to the end of my time there. In fact, it did so even more determinedly in the final two weeks, stepping up from Sparsely Populated Mode to Well-Nigh-Deserted Mode ... which is possibly my favourite mode of all.

My final obligation to my employer involved spending two weeks in "The Hole" (a literal translation of Valkeala, which was the closest town to the college where I worked). So down The Hole I went, and this is where the mode change happened.


RUSH HOUR                                                                         Nuutilla, FInland, 21.8.10 

I know I've said this before, but honestly, ESL teaching is an odd profession. I mean, some of the places where you can land a job teaching English are seriously crappy*, whereas others are ... well, strangely reminiscent of paradise. At both extremes of the spectrum, you end up spending quite a bit of time in locations where the average comfortable Westerner simply wouldn't ever find themselves. To me, this is still hugely appealing.

A case in point: imagine you wake up every morning at around 6:30am, and the first thing you do is throw open your curtains to reveal a panoramic view of a calm, picturesque lake, its shores lined with pine forests and dotted with red timber cottages. You finish planning your lessons (started the night before), then stumble up to the dining room where a buffet breakfast awaits your perusal, before adding some final tweaks to your lesson plans and plunging into five hours of teaching.

Come mid-afternoon, classes finish and your students are transferred into the care of their camp instructors, leaving you free to spend the rest of your day as you like. And so you jump on the bike and go cycling through farmland and forest. Or you take on a longer expedition to a town or village. Or you go for a row on the lake, play badminton with your colleagues, read in the afternoon sun, or row/walk to a beautiful 100-year-old wooden hydro-electric station (only in Finland could you have a "beautiful power station"), to enjoy ice cream with friends while watching a family of ducks choosing their route up river. Or, y'know, you just go to your room, mess around on the internet for a while, and sleep till dinner time.

Of course you have to plan everything you want to do in the classroom, and some days this can be very time-consuming. But more often than not, a large portion of your time is completely your own.

After a few days of this, one morning you hear a sound that gets your attention. It's the sound of a car engine, and it's getting louder. You think "Hmmm, strange. Who that could be?".

Then the following realisation hits you:  "Holy crap! I'm so far removed from civilisation here that an approaching car is a frikkin' event ... and yet, I'm actually holding down a job in this place!"

And at that point, you know you've been making some good choices in your life.

This, in the proverbial shell of a metaphorical nut, was my time in Valkeala. Even though I was missing The Belle intensely the whole time, and there were some issues with the camp instructors, and the students weren't nearly as cool there as they were in Anjalankoski, being in The Hole still contributed to making 2010 one of the best summers I've had.

At the end of it all, I rode back to the town of Inkeroinen, and returned my bicycle to the bike hire shop. This in itself was quite an intense experience – a 55km 'farewell ride' through some stunning countryside*. Not wanting to compromise my rugged manliness or anything, but I've really no idea when (or even if) I'll be back in Finland, and as I approached Inkeroinen's not-especially-charming town centre, there were some emotional moments. I have a lot of good memories that centre around this little corner of the world now.

So yeah ... on my fourth year there, I think I finally learned how to appreciate Finland properly. Amazing that it took me so long – for the last couple of years I've been the Meg Ryan character to Finland's Annoying Guy who Randomly Meets Meg and Inconveniences/Irritates Her. You know the plot outline even if you haven't suffered through the films: she sees all his faults and complains bitterly about him, then later realises that she's madly in love with the very same guy, a minimum of half an hour after every single audience member – even those with IQs bordering on the subnormal – have effortlessly reached the same conclusion**.

Silly Me(g)! 

Oops, sorry for the tangent. Let's skip to the finish of the Finnishness.

The following day, several expensive train rides and a fairly bad hostel experience later, I flew out of a completely different part of southern Finland. Ascending over the Turku archipelago, on my way to Gdansk in northern Poland, I had one last rush of "Oh my gods, this country is amazing".

The archipelago extends far out into the Baltic Sea and is made up of more than 2,000 islands. on some of them I could see little communities, joined to their neigbouring islands by bridges, but on quite a few of the smaller ones there was just a single visible house, alone among the waves and the wilderness. Still others remained completely uninhabited ... at least for now.

I just don't think I could have been more impressed with this. I really don't. It was as if Finland was sending me a farewell message – something along the lines of:

"Don't dismiss your dreams, Anthony. Nothing is too far-fetched, 'cause after all, you live in a world where people can still have their own frikkin' islands! Got that?"

Yep. Message received.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about all this is that, despite everything I've described in the last two entries, plus a well-functioning socialist society, an educational system that's the envy of the rest of Europe, brilliant health care, decent life expectancy, financial comfort, low crime and more quiet lakeside beauty spots than you can poke a fishing rod at***, Finns are one of the most clinically depressed races of people on Earth. They have one of the highest incidences of both suicide and chronic alcoholism you'll find anywhere. So why?

Seems to me there's a whole treatise waiting to be written in answer to that question. It'd be about how people who routinely live in ideal circumstances struggle to find 'highs', because the good moments in their lives aren't that much better than what seems normal, while on the other side of this coin, those who live in crappy circumstances are often happier because any time something good happens to them (even small, everyday stuff), it stands out from the crappiness ... blah blah.

Or maybe none of that is true, and northern peoples are just more inclined to be melancholic.

As intrigued as I am by this question, though, I think I'll leave the treatise to other people (and there are plenty of them) who have spent a lot more time than I have trying to penetrate the mysteries of Finnish culture. Good luck, guys!

Anyway, to get back to the original point of this entry, which sort of got buried in the ramble: Turku-Gdansk was part of a longer journey leading back to Lviv, the Ukrainian city where I lived and worked until recently. I'm in the 'burbs of the city now, looking out of a 2nd story window into a street called Rubchaka, which has witnessed some fairly significant events in The Word Nerd's recent life.

At this point, the super-observant reader might be questioning my decision-making capacities. The question would go something like this: "So, Mr Nerd, you're telling me that you've just left behind a country which you've said is pretty darn fabulous, and returned to a city which you didn't write a single word about during the whole ten months you lived there ... and where you no longer have a job. So, er, what the Hell are you doing back in Lviv?"

It's a fair question, and I'm glad you asked it ;-)

I'll tell you next time ... but meanwhile, I've posted the above pic to help you guess (if you don't know already).

Bye!


(*Just wanted to acknowledge the extensive and obvious Photoshop work on this photo. My excuse is poor light ... the skies went all moody and dark while I was setting up for the shot, and I didn't feel like fiddling with my camera for ages to try and brighten up the shot.)

(**And yet they stay and watch the whole tedious thing unfold with mind-numbing inevitability ... leading to such questions as "Why?", "Why oh why?" and "For Douglas' sake, WHY do they do that?")


(***Estimates of the number of lakes in Finland range from 30,000 to 200,000. That's just a ridiculous number of lakes, don't you think? I mean, how do they manage to fit any actual land into the country?)