#2.1 Möki and Autumn

The seasons change fast here. Rovaniemi's city website clams that it is a city of 8 seasons and would have to agree with them. It felt like just a day after I got back from Oulu it was Autumn. It only took a few days for all the leaves to change into brilliant shades of orange and gold, 'ruska' as the Finns call the color change. After each season i am struck by the beauty of this city.Maybe it has something to do with the trees.

The next weekend My family decided to spend the weekend at our summer cottage, 'möki' in Finnish. Summer cottages are a very big part of Finnish culture. Its the quintessential Finnish vacation, like the road trip is America's. Every family has access to one. It's a retreat away from the stress of modern life, back into the nature that they love so much. The cottages usually don't have running water or electricity. They are usually on or near one of the many lakes in Finland. All of them have a traditional Sauna! Our cottage is about 40 km north of Rovaniemi, above the arctic circle, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We had to navigate through a maze of dirt roads to get there, but my dad seamed to falter even for a second, he goes there so often for so many years.

The cottage (or cottages) were right on a little river bank. There were 4 buildings, the main one which was red (most Finnish cottages are red...) the second building was called the museum, it had a bedroom and the sauna. Then there was a storage shack that held enough fire wood to make it through the winter and then there was my least favorite building, the outhouse, that was just a little ways into the woods. When we got there there were 2 other cars already waiting for us, my dad's brother, and my dad's girlfriend and her 15 year old daughter. They had all brought there dogs, and so had we, + our 2 cats.

We went for a few hikes though the forest. The fall colors were beautiful. We picked a bunch of berries. Blueberries just grow wild in the forest and they are delicious. They also have a few other different kinds of berries, but i don't think there are even English names for them, but they were really good. Once we got in a boat and took a trip down the river. One night we had a camp fire, and another we set up a game of crocay all over the front lawn. Mari and I slept in the main cabin, the fire place doubled as a ladder into the loft. Pretty cool! There was also a TV so my dad didn't miss out on any of the formula 1 races (its a really big deal in Finland) All in all it was a nice little weekend retreat.

Once we got back home, things fell into their usual rhythm. The only change was that my Finnish lessons started! I'm taking Finnish lessons outside of school at a place called Rovalla in the 'city'. I have them twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays. I recognized one of the Turkish girls and the french boy from the Oulu trip. We were the youngest ones in the class. There are people from all over the world in the class, and were all trying to learn this insane
language! The teacher ONLY speaks Finnish in the class, which was kinda hard at first, but now i can understand pretty much everything in the class. And spoken Finnish is so different from Written Finnish so its like learning 2 different languages.

Slowly I've been able to understand more and more Finnish.It was crazy when i first got here i could hardly understand anything. I was hearing this crazy language all the time, and i would always try so hard to understand but i just couldn't. Some syllables in Finnish kinda sound a little bit like some in English, so i would keep hearing things when people were talking. So to keep myself from going mad i started to disassociate all meanings from sounds and syllables,one word was as meaningless as the next. I would be watching TV, maybe a Finnish program, and then the next show would start, and i would take me like 2 minutes of watching it to realize that this one was in English, i had to re-attach meaning to sounds before i could get it all. It was crazy!

I have started to notice the things Finnish people get wrong the most in English. They get he and she mixed up all the time because they only have hän, which is genderless. They also get their articles a, an, the, wrong a lot because they don’t have any articles in Finnish. And there really confused about prepositions, words like in, at, into, on and things like that, because in Finnish they have 6 different cases that express that sort of stuff, and that’s probably one of the hardest parts of Finnish for me to learn. For example talo means house, but talossa means inside the house talosta means from inside the house, taloon means to inside the house, talolla means like at-in the general area of the house, talolta means from the general area of the house, and
talolle means to the general area of the house. Ahhh is that not crazy? So if I wanted to say the apple is on the table I would say omena on pöytällä.

Crazy!