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?)

today was ...

1:  ... joy and contentment

There’s no doubt that the last four weeks have been an amazing time in my life. I mean, I haven’t done anything really spectacular (apart from lying on a bed of nails, which was very cool), but I have begun to recover two things that I’d lost.

The first is my liking for Finland. I really enjoyed it here when I first visited four-and-a-half years ago, but I kinda fell out of love with it during successive visits. This time around, though, I’ve found myself marching in the “I love Finland” parade once again, waving my little blue-and-white flag and my stuffed moomin* around like ... well, like a mad Finn, basically.

This place truly is a tonic for the soul.

The thing is, it’s exactly the same country I left a year ago, so I can only conclude that it’s my mindset which has changed. The vast open spaces, the dramatic skies, the clean air and the profound quiet all do their part to clear my mind and put me in a good mood – whereas last year I just found the whole place kinda boring.

As a nice little bonus, the strange hobbity language, with its wonderfully long compound words and crazy umlauty vowel sounds, is really grabbing me this time … perhaps because my contact with Estonian last year has rendered at least a few Finnish words understandable**.

Anyway, today I got a large dose of southern Finland at its green, idyllic best, and out there in the middle of nowhere with not a soul around, I found myself rather blissed out. There were moments when I felt infused with a zen-like calm, and others when I wanted to yell “Woo-hoooo!” across the empty fields. Both were fun )))

2: ... a bitter farewell

The other thing I’d partially lost during my nine months in Lviv was my passion for teaching English. Of course teaching has the same ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ as any profession, and for various reasons which I won’t bore you with, the nine months from October last year to June this year was probably the biggest downer I’ve had (only in the professional sense) since I started doing this weirdarse job.

When I came to Finland, I think there was a shiny little neuron of hope lurking somewhere in the back of my brain, boldly claiming that coming here might help me to recover some of the ‘fire’ that I’d lost.

And, amazingly, that’s exactly what happened.

Being in Finland (see above) was certainly part of the reason for this. Hanging out with my colleagues Andrea, Chelsea and Jonny helped as well, ‘cause the four of us had loads of fun and helped each other cope with the stresses and absurdities of summer camp. But the dominant influence was the busloads of Russian teenagers with whom I’ve basically lived for the last four weeks.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while are familiar with my rants about the most surprising/miraculous aspect of teaching English: namely the number of great and inspiring people you meet, especially amongst the younger folk. When you see how brilliantly some of your young students can shine – not just academically, but in plenty of other ways too – it’s hard to remain cynical and unaffected.

This year my summer job brought me two miracles in human form: sisters from Moscow, Liza and Sonja, who blew me away on more or less a daily basis. They were not only gifted students, but also great humans with impressive creative abilities. On top of that, their classmates (the “Yummy All-stars”) were also pretty damn cool, and every morning I woke up looking forward to seeing them and ‘working’ with them.

Maybe the greatest thing about all of this, btw, is that I felt the need to put rabbit ears around the word 'working' in that previous paragraph. I just read it back to myself, noticed the ears (which I'd typed without really thinking about it) and thought "Hey ... cool!" I mean, surely this is the kind of thing everyone hopes for in their professional life: a job which you scarcely think of as work at all, but more as something which you simply do because it's part of who you are.

"But wait", you may or may not be thinking. "Why is all this cheerful rambling under such a dark heading?"

Well, there's sort of a catch. See, the weird meta-reality of summer camp can only be sustained for a short period before it collapses on itself, like a probability wave when you open the box and the cat either a) leaps out and asks for food or b) lies still and decomposes. At the end of it all, there comes the point where everyone has to say “goodbye” (often through a flood of tears), get on a bus and go home. And that’s the last time you ever see 98% of them.

Today was the final day of camp at Anjalankoski. After breakfast all the students piled their bags into the luggage hold of their coach, and I spent my final hour with Liza and Sonja. It was every bit as sad and depressing as I’d anticipated.

The goodbyes never get easier (((

3: … a mad mission

Dull-but-necessary contextual stuff: after the month-long stint at Anjalankoski, I’d signed on with the same employer for another summer camp in a place called Valkeala***. The two places are about 55km distant from each other, with a reasonable-sized city called Kouvola lying in between.

My school had offered me a lift to Valkeala, which would take about 3/4 of an hour. But I decided that it would be more fun to make my own way there. (Plus I wanted the exercise – gonna see My Beloved in two weeks, and I want to look as good as possible when the day arrrives.)

The resulting plan: go to the bike shop in Anjalankoski, ask if I could take the bike I’d been renting from them on an ‘extended excursion’, then get the train to Kouvola and cycle the remaining 30kms to Valkeala.

I arranged all of that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like everything would be ok. However, Finland’s weather has been unusually wild lately, with heatwaves, storms, fires, and even tornadoes occasionally destroying forests and knocking out power lines for days at a time.

So … when I went into school today, I heard the dire forecasts: “There’s going to be a really big thunderstorm this afternoon. Stay indoors – it’s gonna be nasty out there.”

“Hmmm”, thinks Anthony. “To ride or not to ride?”

At 2:30pm, when the time came to make the final decision, the winds were gusting angrily and the skies were apocalyptically dark. I realised that the only sensible course of action would be to return my bike and accept the lift that my school had offered me.

Then I realised something else: that was never going to happen.

I cycled out of Kouvola an hour later, without a map. (I'd printed out a set of written instructions from Google, like “Take Valkealayannta for 3.4kms then left into the Kalevantie for 11.6kms.")

As I reached the outskirts of the city, heavy rain drops were darkening my shirt and bouncing off my head, while the wind pushed me around like a playground bully, and the skies rumbled with malicious intent. I braced myself for a difficult, possibly even terrifying ride – I mean, what was I going to do if the weather got really intense, and I was dodging lightning bolts in Nowheresville with not a soul around to help me?

Fortunately I didn't have to find out; after the first hour or so of riding through rain, the skies cleared and the usual sunny, perfect tranquility of Finland re-appeared. Yay!

Two and a half hours later I arrived at the new college, somewhat exhausted but feeling great after the ride. The landscape out here is stunningly spacious and pretty, especially after you leave the main highways and get onto the almost-deserted country roads – and it was this that produced the ‘magic moments’ I mentioned earlier.

Of course, the Russian camp administrators at both ends of the journey thought I was insane. But that’s fine … I’m more or less used to being a ‘weird foreigner’, and most of what I do/say/think seems odd to the people around. It often used to happen in my own country, anyway ... at least here, I have an excuse for being weird ;-)

… a day of resolutions

Cycling through the wide open spaces of Finland gave me a lot of time to think today. At some point, I realised that a few things had been simmering slowly in the back of my head, and that they'd formed themselves into more or less clear thoughts during the journey.

(Isn't it great how journeys do that?)

Actually, a few of these things were more than just thoughts: they were resolutions. So, at the risk of sending everyone to sleep, I'm going to share three of these with you now. Please don't feel that I'm 'preaching' here – these resolutions are just for me. Having said that, I'd be interested to hear your opinion about them. Let me know if you think they're reasonable or not.

Ok, here we go ...

Resolution #1: never, ever grow up
(a.k.a. "be a teenager forever")

Working with young people teaches you this: being an 'adult' is ridiculous. When you're in summer camp, you watch and listen to young people all day long (and sometimes all night), you find ways of relating to them, you see them on their best and worst behaviour, and sometimes at their most creative. In a way, you almost get to be a kid for a little while, doing silly 'kid/teenaged things' like riding your bike into town for ice cream after school, trying out new table tennis moves or making a home movie with your friends. And guess what? It's a great life.

This is something that I never want to lose sight of as adult life tries to bury me (and everyone else) beneath a mountain of responsibilities. So ... here's what I reck'n:

Rather than letting the sensible adult world mould us into boring people, and leaving kidhood behind, we should be aiming to do the absolute minimum possible amount of adult stuff necessary to keep us from becoming homeless. And we should do it in the knowledge that a) it's mostly bullshit, and b) it's trying to kill us inside. Look at it as merely an unavoidable distraction from the real mission ... which, btw, is to be incredibly silly, run about laughing, eat ice cream, play racquet sports and do whatever stuff we happen to think is fun/cool.

That's all )))


Resolution #2: Never have a normal life

Sometimes when I hear others say things like "People think I'm crazy", it sounds like a pretentious boast. So I hesitate a little to make a similar claim about myself. However, it really seems to be true. And y'know, I've gradually reached the conclusion that this is a very, very good thing. 

The why of it goes like this: if people doubt your sanity, it's because you do or say things which lie outside the range of what they think a sane person might decide to do or say. By implication, the people who think this about you define themselves as sane and normal. Over the years I've noticed something about these 'normal' people: namely, that they don't appear to be having anywhere near as much fun as I am.

Logically, therefore, it follows that when people think you're crazy, the only sensible reaction is to feel sorry for those people. They're clearly not enjoying their lives to the fullest ... such a shame that they're too frikkin' scared, unimaginative or just plain dull to leap onto the crazy float with you and join the parade ;-)


Resolution #3: Be where the people aren't

My last resolution for the day was simply this: sometimes the only way to deal with the fact that you share your world with other people is to get as far away from them as you possibly can.

I find it extremely interesting that, on the one hand, solitary confinement causes many people who experience it to go insane, whereas just the solitude without the confinement is actually sanity-enhancing. (At least it is for me ... and I don't think I'm alone here.****)

Certainly I've found that's one of the best things about Finland: there's enough space here for everyone to be truly alone any time they want to. The open fields, empty roads, gently winding rivers etc. don't photograph as well as, say, craggy fjords and dramatic mountainscapes, but they have a real therapeutic effect ... as though you've just spring cleaned your brain and now you can finally relax in it.

Maybe the feeling of spaciousness is a function of the number of saunas here – altogether there are two million, for a population of five million people. Could be that most of the people you'd otherwise be sharing your environs with are underground and therefore out of sight.

(In Helsinki, a tour guide once pointed out to me that there's one sauna for every 2.5 people in Finland, which means that, in theory, every Finn could be having a sauna at the same time. She then explained that this is exactly the moment the Russians are waiting for ;-)


But whatever the reason, the availability of solitude is a marvellous thing, and today I resolved to look for opportunities to "be where the people aren't" on a regular basis. I mean, I think this is something I tend to do anyway, but from now on, it's no longer optional. It must happen ... 'cause it keeps me sane )))

And that was today. Hope you enjoyed it :-)

Bye!

Anthony.


P.S. Thanks to Yuliya and to Anna Ternheim for inspiring the title (and hence the whole format) of this little ramble.


* A cartoon character that's one of the symbols of Finland. He looks kinda like a little hippo. In two of the photos here you can almost see moomin on my t-shirt, which my students bought for me.

** The two languages, Finnish and Estonian, are ‘cousins’, with lots of similarities in lexis, grammar etc.

*** Valkeala: a great-sounding name, no? At least I thought so. Sadly it kinda loses something in translation: roughly translated, it means "the hole".

**** Sorry for the terrible pun. You can slap me for it the next time you see me.