Some of what I learned in Scandinavia.

I learned that Stockholm is an elegant, civilized city. That a lot of places are closed on Monday. That it being light late into the evening might mean that you don’t realize that the restaurants are closed and you might end up with a bag of salted cashews as your first Swedish supper.

That picking your hotel purely on the basis of the wallpaper in the photograph on the website can sometimes be a brilliant idea. That running into a friend at the Warner Brothers prop house can lead to meeting her and doing a Stockholm river cruise with pear ice lollies. That beds in Scandinavia are designed differently with a solid base and just a thin mattress that flops on top with a thin duvet that sits neatly on top. Neat being the key. That even though Cardamon buns are crying out to be eaten, there’s always next time. Men, young and middle-aged are often wearing very sharp suits. And Women, middle-aged and old pull out their white trousers and denim jackets when the sun comes out. That lovely hair seems to come with the territory. That “ Tak” is such a great word to use for “thank you.” And Sweden is a totally cashless country. Since 2014, no cash is used. Except for in some grocery stores to help the older people who had trouble with this new concept. That ferries, even crossing the Baltic Sea, are an excuse for drinking at 9 o’clock in the morning and the best place, probably only on ferries crossing the Baltic Sea, is the spa where you can sit in the sauna and watch the scenery through the window. That alcohol is obviously cheaper in Sweden than in Finland because the majority of people disembarking were pulling carts piled high with cartons of beer and liquor. And “ Turku” is the oldest city in Finland. And there was a fire in 1827. And a lot of it burned down. But with one day you can sit in the cathedral with high vaulted ceilings and hear the organist practicing for a recital.

And spend a few hours at a preserved section of the old city that escaped the fire and where these original wooden houses still house the tools and living spaces of the craftsmen of the last few centuries.

And on top of that you can visit the old market hall and have a bowl of creamy salmon soup for your lunch

and still visit a museum where they have excavated the streets of the ancient city and see dog and pig skeletons where they lay, marvel at the thickness of the walls and even light a candle where the convent used to be for your friend’s friend who needs to be remembered. You can regret not wearing your swimming costume when you wander down to the swimming platform at one of the many lakes at Kirkkonnumi and discover it is a mild 20 degrees. And listen to the birch trees muttering in the wind.

And you can arrive in Helsinki for the longest day of the year. Where it is truly daylight at midnight and daybreak at 3 in the morning. No wonder no one goes to bed early. And bicycles are surely the best way to discover a new city. Especially when they allocate a strip of every sidewalk or pavement to let bicycles travel inbetween traffic and pedestrians. It would have been to good to know that when they say “ Midsommer” is the biggest holiday of their calendar, they also mean that the ENTIRE city, will close down for three days. I am thrilled for them. Those Finns spend 11 months and 27 days waiting for these three days when they all leave the town and go to the country. And they close the museums and the theatres and the shops and even most of the churches. The streets are empty. If there was tumbleweed in Scandinavia it would be rolling down the streets. It was probably busier during Covid.

But “Hei.” ( that’s Finnish for hey), It meant I could whizz around anywhere on my bike. But I also saw the unwillingness of local people, away from the areas of ‘service” to engage or smile when passing or acknowledge your presence. And I learned from a very bright young Australian woman married to a Finn that in her apartment building where she has lived for 5 years and had two children she knows none of her neighbours. That seemingly friends come from shared education at school or college and after that you can whistle. That she works for a company that brings in trained staff from abroad and that they factor into the expenses of relocation the inevitable repatriation on their departure which is normally less than a year. She herself, in the first year of her second child with all the social services she is allowed, realizes she cannot last more than another year without any kind of social life or indeed friendship. Hmm . That was a new one for me. But Scandinavia still calls and I haven’t been to Norway or Denmark yet. I have to get in a few more “ Tak”’s before I am done. There are all those open sandwiches on Rye. And Cardamon buns. All that wood. Walls, furniture. The epitome of streamlined. Even the toilets at the airport. And I’m not joking. But you know that.

Midsummer Nights Dream…..Hmmm?

I have this thing about Midsummer. I think it started with fairies at the bottom of the garden. And I’m going to leave that where it lands. But I look to certain things in our universe to give us a chance to get it right or do things better or just learn to listen. Midsummer, for me, is one of those. The longest day of the year. Before the next day where the sun has started it’s retreat. Shakespeare knew all about it. Naughty Puck, Proud Titania and Noble Oberon to name a few. He had everyone running round in circles. And I know I have written about this before, but there is this scene from Thomas Hardy’s “ The Woodlanders” when the young women of the village go down to the pond on Midsummers Eve and if the moon is shining they will see behind them the face of the one they shall marry. I have made friends come down to the beach in Santa Monica with me and chuck wishes into the waves. I have thrown back garden parties. I have tried to get people who like me to get as excited about Midsummer as I am. And I have failed. So this year I came to the home of a whole nation of people who dress up and dance on this night in June. Bigger than Christmas for them. Well , truly, Christmas is a lot to do with Santa Claus apparently living in Lapland and it being jolly cold.

I wish I could report that there was magical dust in the air and cheeky laughter at every turn. BUT…. I had advance notice that I couldn’t just come and join in. I was told to bypass Norway. Sweden was great in you went to the Dalarna area but it didn’t make sense if you didn’t know people and had somewhere to stay. I landed on Finland , because I came here last year in August and was going to meet up with new-ish friends who had a relative who now lived here and there was a midsummer festival on an island for which she had purchased tickets. I tucked my Peaseblossom spirit inside my belt and got ready to find my tribe.

It is now Midsummers Day. I have spent the day in the city of Helsinki where everybody has left for this special holiday and where EVERYTHING is closed. The museums. The churches. The theatres. The shops. I had a bike. I bicycled around. Up and down empty street. I found a boat of foreigners that took me around the archipelago that surrounds Helsinki and I saw many, many Finnish people on their boats or on little beaches. Fishing, Kayaking. Even swimming in the not warm Baltic Sea….anything to not to have to share their city with losers like me. At this festival, there was meant to be a maypole. I saw a tall pole lying on the ground. I didn’t see any brightly coloured ribbons anywhere and I am not sure it ever left it’s prone position. There was meant to be a bonfire. Very traditional at Midsummer. It was cancelled. Apparently it’s been cancelled for at east the last seven years because of fears that it would start a fire. There was going to be dancing. It ended up with a varied group of about twenty people in national dress carrying Finnish flags and then doing folk dancing of the “ you swing me around and then we cross hands and I swing you” variety.

There was food. Long lines for pancakes with a bucketload of jam and cream on them. Bratwurst in buns. Ice cream and deep-fried tiny baby fish.

There were people with flower crowns in their hair. There were some people playing fiddles. But I have a feeling Titania and Oberon would have had a peek and whistled away sharpish on their fairy wings.

So I am no closer to my long yearned for moment of magical flight. But I continue to believe. And there is always next year.

Chekhov’s Back Yard

Sitting on the porch of a tiny little cabin in a rural area of southern Finland. It is currently those days in June, The days of the midnight sun. So when I couldn’t sleep last night and looked out of my window at close to midnight, it was still light. Now it is 10.30 in the morning and I sit, with my second mug of tea, in the warm sunshine and under blue skies grazed with the odd linear cloud and the sounds around me are huge. Loud enough to be motorway nearby, or an airplane approaching a runway overhead, but it is neither of those things. It is leaves on trees. There is an occasional bird fighting for a moment in the sun and a bee whistling by. But, truly, it is just leaves shimmering away, high in the air, swaying around in the wind. There are apple trees in clusters in front of me. A grape vine being trained over a black trellis. An odd pine.

But the orchestral dance is being performed by the silver birches. That are left and right, behind and in front of me. Fifty foot up into the air. And I am reminded that I am in a country whose closest neighbour is Russia. Which I am sure must weigh very heavily on them at the moment. Because for a hundred years they were Russian after Sweden had taken hold the previous two centuries. Sweden is the second official language in Finland. And for many of the areas, except in the east, all road signs are in two languages. Swedish first, Finnish second. Circling back to Russia, the sounds remind of lines from those Chekhov plays that I read, saw, performed in. Dear modest birches, I like them more than any other tree. I love living here. And the wind, the wind! The bare birches and cherry-trees, unable to endure its rude caresses, bowed low down to the ground and wailed: "God, for what sin hast Thou bound us to the earth and will not let us go free?” if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness. When I plant a little birch tree and then see it budding into young green and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride ....... And I remember a production of the Cherry Orchard, that surely had Ian McKellen in it , where the set was just an army of silver birches, that the characters used to hide and weave and eventually some chose to escape from. div class="separator" style="clear: both;">

A Polish Wedding

I call my little blog “ Travels with an Unlikely Aunt.” It was a whim of an idea. It’s obviously not catchy. Even my friends cannot remember it. But there was this Grahame Greene novel called “Travels with my Aunt.” Then I mixed it up with the play “Charley’s Aunt”, who was a young chap pretending to be another young chap’s aunt for the purposes of schoolboy deception. I am an Aunt, but not a classical one I think. An Unlikely one perhaps. And Voila! A persona. A catchy phrase that is totally unmemorable. I went to Poland in the role of a true Unlikely Aunt as my eldest nephew married his Polish girlfriend, Malgorzata, or Maggie when you leave Polish shores. There was going to be small family wedding in the town in which she had been brought up and where her family still live. If you look up Kalisz, there aren’t a long list of things to visit. There is a big town square, there is a river. There are parks. And Lots of Catholic Churches. There are cobbled streets, a train station and a honey festival. I did all of those and that was on the first afternoon.

My brother and I rented a car and we drove around the area. Stephen had declared a wish to find a local pub and have a beer. Stephen lives in New Zealand. He has gained that “ good day mate” mentality where you can find a nook and smile at friendly people and laugh at the gathering storms. We drove and we drove. I had the map. I would navigate us to little town after little town, through which we would slow down long enough to see there was nothing more than a few houses and vegetables. The odd child on a bike. A dog. We were in an area known as the capital of the tomato. There was nothing more than fields of cabbages and greenhouses full to the brim of aforesaid tomatoes. Literally for a two hours we wandered every road from no-town to no-town until we came to what I have to describe as a square. With a fountain and a couple of benches. We emerged from the car as if we had found El Dorado. Neither of us speak any Polish but we went into the first shop which we sadly found to be a butchers. We smiled wanly and congratulated them on selling EVERY part of an animal and stumbled into the other shop. Which had laundry detergent, cakes and dried fish.

We went with the cakes and sat on the bench in the square eating them.

There were people milling around. Buying things. Children with a scooter. Nobody looked at us askance. We were obviously not the first people who had ended up here, hoping for a pot of gold and ending up with a bad chocolate eclair. In Kalisz we were all staying at the Hotel Calisia, which is where the reception would be. There was an overwhelming seventies feel to the hotel. With marble and brass and a curving staircase. In the reception area itself there is the bar. To the left of the reception area is the kidney shaped dining room, to the right are the bedrooms. Along the corridors are chairs. Rows of them on every floor, as if there would be auditions for wedding guests. The dining room is where the wedding reception will be happening. They will put the tables together to make one long one and the space at the end will become the dance floor. The wedding itself was held at the court house. There were just a few of us. A young couple of classical string players, two women to officiate; One speaking in Polish and the other in English for Joel. It was a very practical and humane service.

Joel and Maggie were declared married and we emerged into the afternoon sun and threw rice. A group of the parents’ friends arrived to drive us back to the hotel. With their windows open and wedding music blaring out on their radios. There was a not very dry champagne ( Read between the lines here for my taste in champagne) There were bottles of red, white and vodka on the table. There was a lot of vodka. The first course was a tasty courgette followed by a special vodka.

There was a main course that had a lot of meat and the very best mashed potatoes. There was a lovely cake. And then as I might have been looking for a small chocolate and a cup of mint tea, these vast platters of cold meats, cheeses and pickles arrived. I now understand it is a traditional “ soak up the vodka” thing. Then the lights went down and the music came up. The vodka shots were flowing. The dancing commenced. Jackets came off. Twirling happened. Margaret had asked us all to learn this folk dance which we performed in a circle. it looked easy, but those folk dances are designed to confuse.

I danced a little bit. I think of myself as quite a good dancer. Unfortunately, someone took a video and my dancing looked like a pigeon strutting with a stiff neck. Note to self…only dance in dark. I went to bed and left the dancing and the vodka shots to others. Long and the short, big and the small…is that my nephew has married a woman that he truly loves and has gained a large and gloriously chaotic Polish family.

When we got on the train to Warsaw on the Monday morning, Margaret's father, Artur, came to see us off. We all waved and said the two or three Polish words we knew which we hoped were thank you and I hope you don’t have too much food left over. And as the train slowly pulled out of Kalisz station he ran alongside and kept running till he ran out of platform. Margaret was crying and I understand why. Who would do that? Run alongside a train pretending you were faster than any engine? It would be a father who didn’t care about anything more than to let his daughter know he would always be there to catch up with her if she needed him.

The most important meal of the day…….

I know that is now considered “old hat”. In our modern world of intermittent fasting. But three things come into play when you are traveling. Breakfast is an indication of the country you are in. Breakfast is an indication of the money you spent on the hotel. If you eat breakfast well, you don’t need to worry about lunch. In Tampere north of Helsinki in Finland. I had landed in a rather nice family run hotel. All by a happy accident. I had a lovely room with a view across the city. They gave me slippers and a waffle cotton dressing gown. I never managed to sort out the lights. And the top floor of the hotel was a sauna that opened from 4 to 10 each evening. With separate men’s and women’s and a joint infra red sauna.

And to the point of this whole message from abroad: Breakfast.,And I have to point out we are starting high and going low. There was an omelette bar. There was a whole honeycomb, waiting for you to scrape it. A selection of gluten free breads and cakes. there was the yoghurt and cereal section, with toppings of dried powdered berries and seeds and a green powder that smelt like a christmas candle labeled “top of the pine trees.” There were many breads, all warm, waiting for you to slice them. Rye, seeded, crisp breads. There were different butters, salted, unsalted and smoked reindeer butter. There was Kale pesto. There were jams galore. Cloudberry, lingonberry, gooseberry. ( The reindeer bit is going to be a theme, but only in Finland…makes sense really) There were containers with mushrooms and onions ( for me) and reindeer sausages ( for others) And there was a container of the best porridge I have ever had in my life. I wrote about it when I wrote about Finland and I have a packet in my case with instructions on how to make it and it involves milk and salt and butter. In the centre of the room there was an island with a massive selection of sliced cheese, sliced meats, pickled vegetables, pickled herrings, smoked salmon, smoked eggs, and yes, reindeer.

The hotel was full of Finns, who were having a weekend break or something similar, and I noticed that most of them had bread and then piled everything on top into a vast open sandwich which they held between their two hands and engineered it brilliantly so it didn’t slide an inch. I went for courses. It’s the way I do things. I started with a tiny bowl of yoghurt with aforementioned sprinkles. then I went for the porridge with lingonberry sauce, then I had a baby omelette with mushrooms and cheese and two pots of tea. One black and one of their home made roobios. I should point out in relation to the reindeer. I did try the smoked reindeer butter on a slice of rye bread. As I pushed it around on the bread I realized it was butter with tiny pieces of smoked reindeer in it. For some reason I thought they milked the female reindeer and the butter would be made from that milk and the smoked bit.. I don’t know what I was thinking… a Lapland bar-b-que?

Anyway , I left it to one side. Eating reindeer is not for me. 10/10 The next hotel was in Helsinki. A sharp slide down to a hotel that looked like it was left over from a safe house in a John le Carre novel. The room was filled with old office furniture. The shower could only fit someone under six foot and slim of girth. The lift or elevator doors looked like te belonged in a morgue.

The breakfast was meat that looked like spam, cheese that looked like it belonged on a hamburger bun, bread that stuck to the roof of your mouth and pickles. 2/10 In Estonia. The sliced cheese and meat was becoming a visual backdrop. With lots of warm sausages and containers of flavored yoghurt.I’d give it 4/10. Latvia, we were staying at this hotel I mentioned before. Built in the seventies and a few miles out of town on the Number 1 bus line. The other guests seemed to be Russians on a mini break or a large group of young and naughty Indian men who took to running around the corridor at night in their underpants. I know. I opened my door in my white cotton nightie to remonstrate with them. they looked sheepish.

But back to breakfast. In Riga there were pancakes and fried eggs along with the regular fare. And very bad white bread that had to be toasted at least three times to make it edible. And butter in packets that were labeled “ Butter.” But you can’t fool me. I am a butter connoisseur. That butter had never met a cow. 3/10 Lithuania. The first breakfast was by the sea in Klapaieda. That was very inventive, Jams and dumplings. Egg salad, tomatoes sliced with cheese, beetroot sliced with vinegar. Lots of sausages. It probably looked better than it tasted. But I’m giving it 6/10 for the colour palette. Second breakfast was in a home stay…..whole new world. A long wooden table with drop scone style pancakes one day and a quiche style thing the next. Sliced tomatoes and cucumber from the garden.7/10

Third Lithuanian breakfast was in a hotel in the capital Vilnius. I had a fantastic view from my window. And I have to stop there. If I put porridge, cheese and a pear on my plate..they would have all tasted like wood clippings. 1/10

And lastly to Poland. In this gently tacky hotel in a town called Kalisz. Which I will be more forthcoming as to why I was there, later; the entire ( been-there-before) enterprise of sliced cheese, meats, pickles, tomatoes and bready buns with a jam filling, was lifted to the ceiling by a young woman called Emily who was making scrambled eggs to order. I will never whisk them in a bowl again. I will never let the butter fully melt again. I will eschew Jacques Pepin and Delia. I will follow young Emily hereafter. Breakfast 5/10. In conclusion. Go to Lapland for breakfast , if you happen to be passing. Skip out the Baltic States unless you happen to be staying in a lovely home in the country. Go to central Poland for scrambled eggs. But only if Emily is on duty. She gets 11/10.

A skate over the two “L” Countries in the Baltics.

It’s not that I want to roll Latvia and Lithuania together. The problem is I didn’t spend enough time in either one to speak with intelligence. It was a little of the “ Oh, it’s Rome, then it must be Monday.”

I have two friends who came from Latvia and Lithuania respectively. Friend 1. was brought up in Riga, the capital of Latvia, before emigrating with her family to Israel. Her father lost his first family in the holocaust before marrying a second time and then giving up his country because of the Soviets. But she has memories of a lovely childhood in the city, as only children can do, when the weight of invasion seems such a far away concept. Friend 2. Never lived in Lithuania, but her mother came from there and would sing songs in her native tongue all the time. Her mother ran away in a party frock when she was a child, when the Russians invaded her town and her grandmother spent decades in the soviet gulags’s before gaining her freedom. I always wanted to go to Lithuania with my friend, but sadly she died a couple of years ago. So I took a tiny bag of her ashes instead. The Finns go to Estonia to buy their alcohol. The Estonians go to Latvia for theirs. And so on. The price seems to drop the further south you travel. Alcohol in all the countries are sold in shops called ALKOHOLE. Seriously. Latvia seemed more Russian than Estonia. And indeed it has a much higher percentage of Russians than Lithuania.

The story seems to be that Latvia is demanding that any person unable to speak the Latvian language by the end of the year will be repatriated. To be clear, they are talking about the Russians. These Russians were settled in Latvia from that period after World War II until independence in 1991, but for the last 32 years the Latvian flag has been flying and still, not only is Russian their first language, it’s their only language.

There is a similar story in Lithuania. But there, the Russian Population is much smaller. Education is taught in Lithuanian, so all the young Russians speak the language, but their parents do not. Nobody, anywhere, seems to be flying the flag for Russia. But the blue and yellow flag…. In the plaza in Riga, bang in front of the Russian embassy. there is a large scaffold where many Ukrainian flags are whipping around in defiance.

And with the young Rigans, the educated, multi-lingual, clear-eyed and astute young Rigans; they know that Uber-wealthy Russians are being allowed to bring their “ not so clean” money in and have bought into the nicer parts of the city and the beach resorts. They know Latvians are not without blame in the atrocities that happened under the Nazi’s and the Soviets. But they are looking westwards and all of them are very conscious of the drumbeats on their eastern border. And the Lithuanians. They are still struggling to find a way to teach the children in school about that dark period of their history in the Second World War. It is an active and ongoing story. Some would like to be truthful. But others wonder if they will ever know the truth. So I end this eavesdrop of a note on Latvia and Lithuania, with this fantastic image.

On the 23rd of August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of that Hitler/ Stalin Pact made to invade and then share the Baltic States that no one was ever willing to acknowledge; On that day in August… One and half million people stretched in a line from Tallinn the capital of Estonia, down through Riga the capital of Latvia to Vilnius the capital of Lithuania. They held hands. Women, children, men, Priests. They stood there all day. To demand their independence. They sang. A protest that shook the Soviet Union. They got their independence. The Berlin Wall fell less than three months later.