Easter

Easter is approaching, and there are some uniquely Finnish ways of celebrating the occasion. One is the eating of mämmi.

From the Helsingin Sanomat:

Mämmi is a thick dark brown porridge made from water and sweetened rye malt. It is baked in the oven, then stored in the fridge and served cold, perhaps with sugar and milk or cream.
Rather like another odd Finnish speciality, the salty licorice-flavoured candy known as salmiakki (made, believe it or not, from ammonium chloride), mämmi is "an acquired taste".
Actually a Germanic (and Roman Catholic) invention, mämmi is now just a curious Finnish relic, and it has even lost its early laxative/purgative usage during Lent and is seen simply as a traditional Easter dessert.

What they don't say there, is that mämmi looks like the result, rather than the cause, of laxative effects. This has put me off trying it just yet (though I will buy some for the weekend).

The diametric opposite is the eating of luxurious Fazer Mignon easter eggs. Fazer, the Finnish confectionary company, makes marvellous little hazlenut-chocolate filled eggs for Easter. I don't mean some kind of cheap chocolate shell filled with chocolate goo - they fill a real eggshell. Back in the day, they were given as gifts at the court of the Czars (when Finland was part of Russia) so it's another modern miracle that you can pick up an Easter egg fit for a Czar for about two euros in any supermarket now. It struck me when I saw the Fabergé eggs in St Petersburg, that though beautiful, they were inedible. To a younger memeber of the court, I wonder which was more wonderful: a golden egg, or a plain eggshell filled with chocolate.


A more pagan tradition involves growing a small bowl of rye-grass to thank the Sun for returning after the dark winter (we were stupified by the sale of tiny bowls of grass for five euros at the supermarket yesterday, which prompted research).

Changes

The visit of the parental units was a lot like Changing Rooms or whatever the hell it is now. I have curtains (no little thing, I have an apartment-wide window facing west), a comfy computer chair, and general order. I very nearly had a dining table and four chairs besides. I think they really enjoyed it (no irony), and it's nice that there's a bit of them in the room. Metaphorically, of course.

I've also finally figured out why I can't record my guitar on my computer. It's a very tricky issue, involving treatises on buffers, ADC chips etc, but can be summarised as follows: my current soundcard is, technically speaking, a bunch of arse. Unfortunately, I work very close to the computer equivalent of IKEA (bless you Verkkokauppa!), and have just purchased a Creative Audigy ZS. Like an ageing celebrity, my computer has increasingly few original parts left.

It becomes clear

To continue the trend of elucidating the post before, the reason my apartment has been made detergent commercial clean is that my parents are visiting. It's the first time they've come over, and it's a little strange to see them here, to be honest. Not bad or uncomfortable, but it's like when I used to meet Dad in college - I just didn't associate him with the space - somewhere in my brain it triggers a mental non sequitur.

To return to my abode: it is possibly too clean. While ridding it of mess, it became apparant that said mess was probably making up for lack of character. It's now a little sterile, and it has that faint empty-room echo that makes uninhabited houses vaguely creepy.

Late

Moi,

Well, there was supposed to be a post to go with the picture below, posted yesterday, but Blogger just wouldn't let me log in (dangerous behaviour on the day I created a Livejournal account).

I spent all morning rendering my apartment spotless. It's surfaces, recently obscured by dirty dishes, and primordial soup (very tasty with fresh bread), now gleam.

I really must get around to sticking an "Ei mainoksia" - "no junkmail" notice above my letterbox. I have a tendency to allow things to accumulate. Unwashed dishes, for example, empty cereal boxes (they have to be recycled down the road, and it's not worth the trip for one box), and inevitably, junkmail. I had enough unsolicited advertisements, free papers, and come-ons from local pizza vendors stacked in or around my doorway to completely fill a large black refuse sack. This was a satisfying enough process, until I realised that it was effectively refuse-sack sized chunk of reconstituted wood. After a struggle, the contents ended up in the relevant bin outside for collection, and I returned upstairs for my boxes and bottles (for that trip down the road). There was an ad-ware paper on my floor.

Anyway, back to the picture: over the weekend I went to a large, frozen lake in Järvenpää with Joonas and a friend of his. They enjoy kite-surfing during the summer months, and were planning on using the kite, a snowboard, and cross country skiis to duplicate the fun on a frozen snowy lake. While I did get to do some skiing, the kite I tried by itself. Great fun, though!

Note the tracks behind the heels... 

This is about to be my low-temperature cycling record. 

Finland does Winter awfully well

Good (insert appropriate greeting here),

Well, it was so bright and sunny today that I assumed it was above zero on my ride in. There was a time when -5 equated to "dangerously cold" in my little head (now it equates to (2.23606798 i)^2 - this is what they do to you in JF engineering). The weather is exactly the kind you don't get in Ireland: blue skies, dazzling sunshine, bright white snow everywhere (pleasingly crunchy under wheels), it's quite uplifting. I took the long route to work, just to provide myself with a little more vitamin D, and a couple more kilometres on my speedy aluminium steed. I have to say, if you want to buy a bike in Helsinki, go to Velosport - that last service was worth every cent. It's so gratifying when your mode of transport makes you smile.

Collectively, people started going out on the lakes in large numbers over the weekend - there seems to be some kind of Finnish sixth sense for knowing when it is ok to walk on a frozen lake. The unbroken sub zero temperatures seem to have frozen most water sources sufficiently solid for most icy-lake pursuits, such as skating on prepared tracks and through ice-sculptures (actually, I'm not sure how usual that is), and it's not uncommon to bump into someone coming out of a metro car carrying one of these:
My standing-around-in-the-cold experiences leave me in no hurry to grab join them in the sitting-around-in-the-cold-holding-a-pole excitment just yet. Now that I consider it, there's a good chance that that "sixth sense" is in fact an announcement on TV.

I should be regailing you with tales of a seriously good time had at the water-park meets rave event held in Espoo this weekend but, unfortunately, I was feeling quite unwell and didn't go (cursed microscopic bastards, RELEASE THE T-CELLS!), so you'll have to learn Russian and hope that Alex has posted about it instead. This was probably the wisest thing I've done all year, but wisdom does not a fun time make.

On Saturday I did make it out of the appartment briefly, and met Joonas at ESO (a student union building) where he'd overnighted after a party. They take their partying pretty seriously at ESO, as you can see:


There I spied a noble conservation park, dedicated to the endangered and ellusive "Champagne Creature"

This guy looks happy...


In an entirely unrelated note, in Finland the government pays you to study...

The Chills

Since I last wrote, I have again introduced a little bit of mirth into the lives of complete strangers, and a little bit of bruising into my own. On the first commute after my bike was re-incarnated, it decided (it definitely has a mind of its own, think of it more as an aluminium horse) that the deep hollow in the sloped drive up to my block had far too close a resemblance to a luge course to just roll down, on wheels. Oh no. It was a short, but close race, and I feel had I been wearing my water-proof over pants that the reduction in friction might have made all the difference, but in the end, it won by a length.

I don't know if you've ever tried, but I'm becoming quite experienced, and I've decided it's just not possible to regain your dignity after something like this. Sometimes it take a couple of kilometers just to regain any feeling in your ass. Not something that is helped by the temperatures it has to be said. It's been cold here for a while now, and when I say cold, we are subzero on the Fahrenheit scale. It's been at least ten days since the temperature has been above minus 5, and at the minute it's plunging towards minus twenty at an appreciable rate (which makes me feel like I should start pedaling homewards post haste).

In other news, I think I've been infected. There's been a flu bug circulating for the last few weeks, and it's finally mutated into a form that allows it to slip insidiously past my defenses. I'm hoping I can fight it off - at the minute my arsenal consists mostly of oranges, which have proved ineffectual in conflicts in the past, (having little or no effect on the zombie hordes that invaded our flats a while back for example, even when peeled and segmented for greater shrapnel effect) but I'm reliably told that they are "the bomb". I've tried setting fire to one, but apart from a little sparking I can't confirm this.

Apart from all that silliness, I was delighted to find the Swearasaurus recently. Great stuff, but I was a little surprised that the rather innocuous "Is dócha nach bhfuil seans ar bith?" (~= So there isn't any chance at all?) seems to mean "I suppose a ride is out of the question" to real gaelgóirs (Irish speakers). I could see people stumbling into this one by accident:
Doctor: I don't want to sound negative sir, but you're hemorrhoids surgery didn't go so well, you probably won't be out this weekend.
Man (coaxingly): Ah go on doctor - isn't there any chance at all?!
*Camera pans to the hospital grounds, where a piercing scream frightens the resident ravens*

Meanwhile, contrary to fairy tales and TV, my presentation for tomorrow has not written itself like it was supposed to...