(Christmas trip 2009, Part 1)
First posts and all that. Lots of pressure. Need to set the over-all themes and moods and things like that. My previous big blog started with “I’m single again” and ended up being about my life as a nerd. So, they matter.
I’m at the Tampere railway station, waiting for my train to Jyväskylä to arrive. The weather is close to what postcard-makers have their wet dreams over – brisk, cold, snowy. Very snowy. The sort of snowy that covers statues just perfectly so that you still see the form, but it still conveys the image of purity with the white veil that hangs on it and says “perfect to ski here, mate!” in an Australian accent.
Your friends who get the postcards you send to them made in this weather will look at them and gasp in awe – “Oh dear, Poodles. The Wellingtons are in such a pretty place. Should we go there as well next year?” They won’t, of course since they have to deal with that nasty sex scandal when the winter comes. So your secret will stay safe. Those magical postcard moments come with a price. Why do they think there was no-one in the picture of that beautiful building draped in snow? It’s so damn cold and windy no-one sane would go outside.
I’ll get to my current situation in a few posts time, hopefully, but let’s rewind a couple of days and get to the beginning of this all. Xmas Eve. I’m sitting home, getting ready to spend the next couple of days in Christmas bliss – listening to hip-hop and pop punk, drinking Pepsi Max and re-reading Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan. Someone on this Earth needs to uphold the important holiday traditions, so why not me. I start chatting with a friend on Facebook and the next thing I know I’ve made a pact with her to get the Hell away from where we’re currently at (I’m in Helsinki, she’s in Geneve) on the first train that leaves on Christmas Day and reporting what happens on our trips via the Internet. There are few things that I’m very vulnerable to. One of them is crazy ideas like this.
So, quick reservation of train tickets, book rooms at hotels and pack the bag. On Christmas Day I wobble to the train station around noon. The only people around are a bunch of Romani kids flirting with each other and trying to get smokes from passer-bys. Few moments later more people start arriving. Black, gray, black, dark brown, blue jeans. Occasional young blonde thing in a white coat. A blur of people dressed in camouflage from being noticed rush by. This is Helsinki on Christmas Day. Hurry, worry, anxiety. People call their friends how they’ve missed the train and swear how everything is shit. How the timetables on the internet weren’t accurate (even if they were) and how now the Christmas is ruined because of it. A guy in a pilot jacket with a big dog exchanges glances with the dark-skinned workers rushing through the station.
The train arrives. I get a seat opposite to a young woman who is knitting socks for her godchildren. First sign of Finns being more than just dark and depressed on this trip. She’s going to Hämeenlinna, so she’s there only for the first half of my trip to Tampere. We don’t talk much or anything like that. Just small-talk, laughing at the situations that rise in the train (and there are a lot of those). The usual stuff. It feels so normal while it’s going on that you don’t even realize how out of place it is in a Finnish travel environment. She hops off at Hämeenlinna. For a moment I wonder if I should have gone there instead of Tampere.
I really start missing the woman when the seat she leaves vacant is filled by some kid who keeps telling his dad stories of what he saw on the Duudsonit DVD set he had gotten for a Christmas present from his mom (apparently the parents are divorced and the kid was with the mom for Christmas Eve and heads to dad’s place for the rest of the holidays). His father protests and says he doesn’t want to hear about it. But still the kid continues. He’s so fascinated by the people who had put hooks into their skin and pulled a car several meters with wires tied to the hooks that he doesn’t realize how awkward his dad is being about it. The dad’s too old and too proper for that shit, and his ex-wife is ruining his kid with that garbage when he’s not there to keep guard. He will probably make them ski and play some video games when they get to where-ever they were going. Just so that he can keep control of how fast they are aging.
To distract myself from the kid, I put on some music and I find myself thinking how awesome Tampere will be. Full of Christmas festivities, parks filled with performances and art. Maybe a Christmas Day market. At least a lot of people who are doing interesting stuff. And a beautiful weather.
At this point, imagine a fast cut some hour or so forward, to me standing in the middle of the empty main street of Tampere, wind blowing snow everywhere. No cars or people are in sight. And it’s getting dark (even though it’s like 3pm)
Suddenly I wonder if I really should have hopped off at Hämeenlinna instead. The magic post-card moment is peeling my face off with it’s magical postcardness.