The days are starting to run together at this point, so that’s the perspective you’re going to get from this blog now, dear reader. If anything you’ve read heretofore made any sense whatsoever in the first place, that’s probably outside the norm, anyway.
Regarding our last day in Copenhagen, remember that thing where I said ‘Mike kept testing the gods, saying things like “I thought it always rained here? You guys are just pulling my leg.”?’
You knew that meant rain in our future, right?
Our luck was holding out on our second day in Copenhagen, although Mike kept testing the gods, saying things like “I thought it always rained here? You guys are just pulling my leg.” Jack kept shushing him and making the sign for the evil eye and looking skyward.
We returned to Nyhavn for a boat tour, which started near this thing:
This, as it turned out, was an enormous art installation called Soleil Levant, featuring 3,500 life jackets discarded by refugees who’d landed at Lesbos. The piece as assembled for World Refugee Day, June 20, by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
The good news is: we have our boy back. The big one. The one who’s been on exchange for almost a year.
The better news is: he appears to have actually taken the opportunity of his exchange to learn a decent amount of Danish. Most folks in this country are fluent in English, so if he’d wanted, he could have easily frittered the opportunity to expand that part of his brain.
The really exciting news is: there are about a bajillion new ways to annoy him by pronouncing Danish words incorrectly, and we don’t even have to try.
Pretty much the first day into this trip, I decided our primary goal was to give Jack’s eye rolling mechanism a workout by mispronouncing purt’near everything I can in Danish. It isn’t hard to do, and he’s mostly a good sport about it, BUT I haven’t broken out my Swedish Chef imitation yet, nor has Colin asked him how to say Fahrvergnügen in Dutch, so we have some cards left to play.
In all seriousness, it is really nice to have the band back together.
[From Beth] On Tuesday, we toured around Oulu on foot and stopped at a Finnish buffet for lunch. While we’re in the company of both Colin and Saara, the next meal is never far from our thoughts. Fortunately, the Finns enjoy no fewer than five meals a day, lunch is typically the biggest. On this day we stopped at a Finnish buffet for salmon chowder, reindeer meatballs and mashed potatoes, a typical mid-day meal for Lapplanders (although Oulu is central Finland).
Here we took our leave of Juhani’s sister-in-law Serpa, who is darling. We traveled south from Oulu to Pulkilla to visit Juhani’s sister Airi and her husband Aaro at their summer cabin about 10 km outside of town. Aaro keeps bees on the property and showed us his honey making operation. Many Finnish families have cabins in the country. Airi and Aaro’s is a one room building with a loft. They have a wood-fire sauna off one side of the building and a bunkhouse where Saara and her cousin have spent many summers.
Airi served an afternoon coffee (usually thought of as dinner #1) of sweetbreads, blueberries and cream. Berries of some kind are a part of most meals here. While walking through the park in Oulu, we stopped to pick raspberries. At Aaro’s cabin, we were shown their strawberry beds. Some sort of fresh berry or berry compote is available at every meal.
[From Beth] Sunday didn’t start out as well as we’d hoped. Colin’s stomach woke him up after nearly 12 hours of much needed sleep. Poor kid had had fewer than 18 meals in the last 24 hours and needed sustenance NOW, which meant that we cave in on our normal standards and eat at McDonalds. Good news: McDonalds in Finland serves organic, hormone-free milk and has a gluten free menu, so mom was somewhat appeased.
We loaded up on healthy snacks from the grocery store, stowed our luggage in a locker and took a ferry to the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress off the coast of Helsinki. The ferry ride gave us the opportunity for a spectacular view of the Helsinki Harbor and downtown, and the weather was beautiful.
Suomenlinna was built during the era of Swedish rule of Finland, and most of it’s buildings date toward the mid to end 18th century. From the early 19th century to the early 20th century, it was a garrison town under Russian rule (as was the rest of Finland). Today there are still 800 residents and a naval academy stationed on the islands, as well as a number of gift shops, museums, restaurants and places to take pictures.
[from Mike] At about 10am on Sunday, Mountain time, we’ll be boarding an overnight train with sleeper-cars that will take us from Helsinki to Rovanemei in the northern region or Lapland. This will be pretty cool – especially for the boys because Rovanemei is just inside the the Arctic Circle (no, we’re not talking about the fast food chain spanning in Ontario, Caldwell and Buhl–the real one). Rovanemei also serves as the Finnish home of Santa Claus.
Making the journey north was a last-minute change in plans; Saara’s parents, Juhani and Helena generously offered to send us on this excursion while they drive to meet up with Saara and us when we arrive Monday morning. We’ll tour the northern part of the country, hop over the border into Sweden for part of a day, and then drive south through Oulu, which is the home town for many of Saara’s extended family. We’ll be on the road until Wednesday-ish, when we arrive in Vaasa for a few days.
[From Beth] Today we had an early start, with a flight from Bremen, Germany, to Tallinn, Estonia, and a ferry ride back into Helsinki. We had hoped to stow the luggage for a few hours and walk around Old Town again, but the process of getting a shuttle from the airport to the harbor took so long that all we had time for was lunch.
(This image is really blurry, but I like how it includes the most recent, post Soviet era sky scrapers, with the older buildings in the foreground that have been refurbished to showcase the town’s history).
[From Beth] Serious travel day today, which when you’re on a train, is so much more comfortable for all involved than cramped in a little car, hopped up on Dramamine and Dr. Pepper.
First, we had a few hours this morning to tool around Amsterdam more. We looked at the line for the Anne Frank House and thought we had better things to do with our time, like visiting a few souvenir shops and ogling all the suggestive signs for tomorrow’s Gay Pride Festival through Amsterdam Central (seriously sorry to be missing out on that).
[From Beth and Mike] Today we were able to rally early for our three-hour train ride into Amsterdam. Upon arriving, we bought the kids pre-lunch snacks (see how we’re learning?) and then were able to tackle the how-to-find-street-signs and whether-to-take-the-tram-bus-metro-or-canal-bus questions without breaking into fist-a-cuffs before an official lunch.
We had lunch kitty-corner from Westerkerk, listening to the same bells Anne Frank could hear from her room, and people-watched for a little while, then boarded a canal bus for a slow circuit around Central Amsterdam.
Out of dozens of museums, we were able to make it through exactly one floor of the Van Gogh museum before Colin declared it officially stupid. Mike tried to invent a dozen new games about finding random objects such as windmills (a few), flowers (a bunch) or skulls (at least two that we know of, but only one in this whole collection), before we all got tired of “Speed Museum” and decided to leave. We honestly forget the poor kid is eight years old and we have a habit of seeking out and dragging both boys through some of the least kid friendly stuff in the world. For the most part they’re pretty good sports.