Our Finnish adventure

Okay, so I now have a better idea of why Helsinki isn't the first place that leaps to mind when most people think about spring break. I was wearing shorts in Switzerland on Wednesday morning before we left for our trip, but by the next day, I was wearing my winter coat, gloves, and earmuffs in Finland. It wasn't so much the cold; temperatures were in the high 30s to low 40s, which is pretty nice for a Minnesotan. It was the wind, at least on Thursday. When it's 40 degrees outside but you've got a 30-mile-an-hour wind, it's not real pleasant. It's all greened up here in Switzerland, but Finland still looks like Minnesota in early April.

Overall, though, it was a good trip. The weather greatly improved on Friday and Saturday, and we got to see and do lots of cool things. Most of all, I just enjoy the experience of getting to know a new city and different types of people. It was a good chance to compare the Swiss and the Finns. I've mentioned before that the Swiss national motto seems to be something along the lines of, "We are Swiss and the rest of you are not. Is there any way we can secede from the planet?" (And they don't mean it as just an anti-American thing. It's a whole anti-world thing, including anti-the rest of Europe.) English is sort of a hit-or-miss proposition, at least in our part of Switzerland, and those who do speak English don't always seem so thrilled by it.

In Helsinki, by contrast, every single person I spoke to had a good grasp of English, and they seemed happy to speak with us. (Or at least they're good at faking politeness.) I learned that the official languages of Finland are both Finnish and Swedish, although only about 5% of the population speaks Swedish as a first language. Children in Finland learn both languages, and they also learn English, German, and French. Many of them also learn Russian to boot. Sheesh! I wish we Americans did a better job of learning foreign languages. To confirm what we'd heard, we asked our server one night how many languages he spoke. He said that he indeed spoke five languages, and his English, at least, was almost perfect.

I'll do another post in the next couple of days detailing our adventures, and I'll enclose some pictures. I needed to get something on the blog, though, because I know some family members will want to know that we arrived home safely. (I'm not naming the concerned family members, but those of you who know my mom can make a pretty good guess.)

I'll make two other points before closing for now. First, it's amazing how much one's perspective can change based on life experiences. The flight to Helsinki takes about the same time as the flight from Minneapolis to Salt Lake, a tad under three hours. A three-hour flight used to seem like a major ordeal, even without kids. Based on our recent travels, though, this flight was pretty much an afterthought. The kids didn't even blink at the prospect of sitting on a plane for three hours.

Second, I did indeed eat something that I wouldn't be able to eat in most other places, although I pretty much had to spit on Santa Claus to do it: I ate reindeer. That was a little difficult, because Rudolph is basically imprinted on my mind as a real person due to the number of times I watched that show as a child each Christmas, but I soldiered through it. It was pretty good. It was quite tender (and, of course, it tasted like chicken).

One final extra point. Poor Lindsey is just along for the ride on this whole experience. She struggles to pronounce "Switzerland," and that's when she can even remember it. At one point on Friday, she was trying to make a point about something. She paused in mid-sentence, got a confused look on her face, and asked, "What country are we in again?"