the second 45

It’s a thing we want to know about when we travel: the toilets. Tell us about the facilities. We’ll be visiting several times a day, and we don’t want to make embarrassing mistakes.

The Finnish bathroom is entirely familiar, only better in some respects. The toilet fixture itself is likely to be low-flow, but not those awful sluggish low-flow things we find in the States. I exposed myself as an American chauvinist right there, privately, in the john. I mean, didn’t you always just assume we ‘mericans would have all the best stuff? We’re such good little greedy consumers. So why don’t we have these toilets that work?And then there is often a little hand-held thingy hooked to a sink bowl crowding you in the public stall…a bidet attachment! It took me two visits to figure that one out. How civilized. I want one in my home bath.

In public, the WC is available at cafes, gas stations, indoor markets, and for cash at fully automated pods situated in high-touristed areas. It was a news story widely picked up, for some reason, when the Finnish Roadside Authority started requiring users to text-message the toilet to open the door at rest stops–supposed to reduce vandalism. Finns say it was pretty much a non-issue, as they are all on the phone all the time and already do all sorts of things by mobile phone, including paying for parking, metro tickets, various entertainment…why not for relief?

As an aside…Finns are on the phone all the time. Maybe that’s why they’re so reserved…they’re too busy on the phone to notice the people out there. When we arrived at the Helsinki airport, we were greeted with hugs and a phone–and very handy it was in a family group of six or eight highly impulsive people all headed out in whatever direction looked good at the moment, rarely in synchrony.

As another aside, Nokia made rubber boots long before they made phones. Guess where the higher profit margin resides.

As for the private bathrooms, my experience all comes from relatively new construction, from the 1980s or later. The Finnish bathroom first of all has a handy feature in the door, a “bolt indicator” as I learned while trying to shop for some…I’m looking to adopt the custom here, although all the (expensive) choices I find are sold from the UK. It’s a deadbolt that shows a tiny “occupied” or red dot marker on the outside when locked, just like in an airplane…makes sense to me, a lot more than the dumb doorknob locks we have in this house that don’t actually work anymore. Very subtle sign that I missed until it was pointed out to me, but it saves rattling doorknobs and walking in on your visitors.

The bathroom is divided roughly into four quadrants. There’s a drain towards one side and the floor slopes there…no shower stall or bathtub but a showerhead, maybe with a ring from the ceiling with a shower curtain that can close around. A sink near that, sometimes using a single diverter for the shower and the sink. There’s a big floor squeegee nearby, perhaps, and in that case you squick off the floor after your shower. The other two quadrants hold the toilet throne and a smallish washer and dryer. There might be a towel rack or there might not, and that door over there is not the master closet you’re accustomed to in your American master bath. Clothes and storage are elsewhere. This door leads inward to the electric sauna.

The sauna I love, though, is the one at the summerplace or lake cottage out in the country, a separate little building with a wood stove, the place that’s warm when you’re cold, the place that’s clean when you’re dirty and there’s no running water to be had. The place that smells heavenly, of heated cedar and birch smoke and steam…at least until your husband decides to try throwing beer on the stove. Honestly. He said he saw it on the Simpsons. I said, “and if Homer threw a pig off a bridge, does that mean YOU would–” and then realized that Homer has thrown a pig off a bridge, and it’s better not to give the man ideas. Scorched beer fumes, gah. Pretty much any bad idea you can have, Homer has done it. Although come to think of it, it was Marge who poured the beer on the stove. Hmm.

I guess Marge knew her man. And this topic has been derailed. Oh well. It was time to stop, anyway.

So, Finland, for those of you who asked. And may my in-laws forgive me my facile impressions.

Calm, polite, reserved Finns. These are the people we shared airplane space with going over. It was a later afternoon flight from JFK, and everybody knew it would be tomorrow morning by the time we landed and we’d better be ready to function for a full day…so it was dinner and a movie and try to sleep. Quietly. Finns aren’t really interested in talking to a bunch of strangers, even sitting next to them for eight hours on a plane. Or in line at the grocery store. Or waiting for a bus. Which struck me as quite the cultural difference now that I’ve lived in the southern US for 15 years. And on the way home: Finns headed to New York on holiday. Drunken, calm, polite Finns. Still fairly reserved. Soooo not Texans. And that’s a fine thing, when you’re stuck flying on a plane together.

Flying Finnair, all announcements are made in three languages. Finns know a lot more languages than you do. And especially English. Any time anybody heard T start translating for me, they just switched without question to English. I felt like a big dumb backwards oaf, for the most part. The only people I met who didn’t speak English were an 8-year-old neighbor and T’s 2-year-old niece and 91-year-old grandmother. The city of Helsinki itself runs on Finnish or Swedish, the official languages, or English.

The cities of Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa run together, at least in my mind, into one big metro area, and along with Tampere further inland are the areas of greatest population. And public transportation works there. It’s really impressive to an American who feels mortally threatened walking beside the road around here. Bike paths are built in with sidewalks and all connect with bus and train stations, with routes seemingly everywhere. There are plenty of private cars being driven around, but much more defensively than in, say, Austin. I am assured that tailgating, lane weaving and speeding happen but it’s not every third driver like I’m used to here. If you do drive your car into the city, you park and then you walk. And walk. It was so lovely to be out and moving instead of shriveled by heat just cracking the door open…although there was quite the heat wave in Helsinki while we were there, temps in the low 80s. About as warm as summer gets.

Summer is short, but the days are long: in early August about three hours longer in Helsinki than in Austin. Even longer at the solstice, of course, although you have to travel north some hours before you reach the midnight sun. The growing season is quite short so everything is hugely green and flowering and ripening by August; spectacularly so when you come from the burned dusty brown country that central Texas is this year. There are flowers everywhere. Massive rose bushes covered in flowers and rose hips, both. Cherries ripe, and apples ripening. And berries everywhere. Wild strawberries just finishing, and currants and gooseberries just ripe, lingonberries and cloudberries and bilberries, oh my.

Berries, rye bread, cheese. Coffee. I forget to eat reindeer but that’s quite alright. We had the traditional sausages over the fire at the summerplace. Gluten-free eating was easier than it is when I travel in the States–the cafes generally had a gluten-free cake available, and salad bars everywhere in the city for lunch, and the grocery store had many more choices for g/f breads and desserts than I find here. Before we left, T stocked up on the things he usually stocks up on: chocolate, salt licorice, coffee, mustard, all different in Finland from what we can get here.

Finn style, Finnish homes, topics for another day. For now, I’ve been inspired by our trip to go out and get myself a bicycle, partly because of all the physical activity over there, and partly because of looking at hundreds of unedited photos…that little round person has got to get moving!