Over the past several months, Gavin and I have felt a growing animosity toward Finland, for one reason: Krista Pärmäkoski.
That bitch.
As any of our winter guests can attest, we have been living and dying with the US women’s cross-country ski team through the world cup season and the Olympics. The American women are good, but the obvious favorites in any given race are the Scandinavians.
The Americans went into the Olympics on a high, having won both the sprint and distance races at the preceding world cup event. The hope was to bring home their first-ever Olympic medal (the US men had won a silver in 1972). Krista, who has about equal talent with the top American woman (Jessie Diggins, aka the Sparkly Monster) won a pair of bronze medals in the first two events, while Jessie finished fifth in both.[1] Krista seems to be a sportsmanlike competitor and a perfectly nice person, but it’s fun to have a rival, and her early Olympic success made her as good a choice as any.
Since our hostility toward Finland generally and Krista specifically felt a little unfair, we decided we needed to check the place out for ourselves.
We arrived in Helsinki via the Tallink Silja ferry line from Estonia, a journey that takes two hours. Our boat was as big as a cruise ship (with the lower levels filled with cars). Tallink Silja — just one of several ferry companies — makes the round-trip crossing seven times daily, which indicates how much traffic flows back and forth between the capitals.
Like all the Scandinavia countries, Finland invests heavily in their social system. Most notably, the World Economic Forum rates their education system as the best in the world (the US is 25th; Norway 8th). Despite spending less per student than the US, the difference between the strongest and weakest students is the smallest in the world. 93% of Finns graduate high school, and 66% go on to college. And like Norway, Finnish students spend a lot of time outside. As a result, Finland tops this year’s World Happiness Index, bumping Norway to #2 (the US is 18th).
As with the other Scandinavian capitals we’ve visited (Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen), Helsinki is very nice and seems supremely livable. It is also one of the most multilingual cities we have ever visited. All signs are posted in Finnish and Swedish — the countries two official languages — but Russian and English are also ubiquitous. Finnish is very different from the other Scandinavian languages (the Finnish word for Finland is Suomi), and is apparently one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn.
We took a walking tour of the city, with sights including Market Square, the Senate building, and a stunning church carved out of bedrock. The Helsinki Olympic Park was under construction.
We concluded the day with a traditional Finnish sauna. The sauna plays a substantial role in Finnish culture, and Finns often go to great lengths to take a sauna when traveling away from home. Finnish military field manuals state that only an eight-hour break is necessary to build, heat, and bathe in a sauna. Before the rise of public health care and nursing facilities, most Finnish women gave birth in a sauna, as it provided a near-sterile environment.
The ritual begins with a cold shower, followed by a sit in the heated sauna. Water is thrown into the oven to create steam, and if desired, the participant may beat himself with a bouquet of silver birch branches. Apparently this is supposed to help relax the muscles. When it gets too hot, the participant steps out to take a cold shower or roll around in the snow. We did not have access to the birch bouquet, but the whole ritual is pretty relaxing and refreshing.
It is considered a faux pas to wear clothes in the sauna (our hotel provided different spaces for men and women). For that reason, the pictures below are from the hotel website. Maybe it’s my puritan American sensibilities, but unlike some tourists I encountered, I did not think it was appropriate to take pictures that included other people being naked, even if I needed fodder for my blog.
After a repeat sauna experience the next morning, Gavin and I took the ferry to Suomenlinna, a sea fortress built on six islands in the Helsinki archipelago. It was constructed in 1748 to protect against the Russians, and is now a UNESCO world heritage site. Like many tourist exhibits in Scandinavia, it is a collection of old turf-covered buildings that you can’t go inside. Nevertheless, it made for a nice day on the water.
In what is maybe the most Scandinavian thing ever, the shop at Finland’s most popular tourist attraction is only open for four hours on Fridays.
Finland is super awesome, and if we had more time, I would like to explore more of the country. It was certainly not worthy of our ill will!
[1] Jessie and teammate Kikkan Randall went on to win gold in the Team Sprint, in what was arguably the most exciting finish for the US delegation in PyeongChang. Watch her edge out Swedish skier Stina Nilsson below. Finland finished fifth. Eat it Krista!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgJ1OyLoZog?rel=0&start=35&w=560&h=315]
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