Renee’s Blog

Dearest Faithful Readers,

As some of you may know, this blog is lagging behind by a couple of weeks. As such,  we have finished the Finland portion of our trip and will be flying home tomorrow from Stockholm.

This has been a really interesting experience, and as my sitemeter tells me (look at the little thing on the bottom left of the main page) my daily visitors have increased from 25 to 50. Maybe not much as web sites go, but double in 6 weeks is double! Plus, I have the greatest readers who write the funniest comments.

If you have an interest in reading more about this trip online, let me know in the comments section and I will consider continuing to post when I get home.  Meanwhile, I am planning to put together a book proposal. Will let you know if anything comes of it.

Merci, Kiitos and Tack!

XO, Renee

I tell Ed the Great Grandpa Herman story and he thinks it is wild. Both of us are chewing on the fact that Herman was probably in his 40s, like us, when he did it, and among other things, probably burnt out on a little too much togetherness with the spouse and kids. I, for one, am feeling his pain even without the farm, the snow and the three additional kids. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about how big his shame was and how it made one bad choice lead to another and cost him his son, Eino.

We all agree that the reunion has made the whole trip so far worthwhile (okay, Benny, who misses his dogs and his own bed a WHOLE lot disagrees). That night, we are invited to a wonderful dinner of Finnish meatballs and new potatoes at the home of Anna’s sister and brother in law.  Again, more incredibly nice and generous cousins. Minimal English is spoken until their 20 something daughter, who is studying to be a nurse/midwife, comes home from her summer job at the local nursing home. More showing of Ed’s paintings online on the family computer.

Our next couple of days in Yokie are filled with mosquitos. cold drizzle and lots of fighting inside the charming cabin from Lapland. It’s so dark, quaint and romantic that it’s ridiculous that we can’t get some peace and quiet here. Mostly the fighting is about how much noise the boys are making while Hannah is trying to read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, from her school summer reading list and I am trying to wrap up an assignment so I can email it to my editor when we get back to Ana’s in Oulu.

There are a handful of wonderful moments though. These include seeing moose tracks on Ed’s two hour walk with the kids through the marsh and down to the family fishing shacks on the river where men are netting herring.

The best time of all, though, is when Ana tells us that she has made a fire in the sauna wood stove and we are welcome to use it. Fully dressed, Ben pokes his head in first to check it out, and before I know it, he and Isaac and Ed are in there buck naked. Hannah and I sit outside and let them enjoy their guy time, complete with lots of laughing. I start thinking that as a Finn, Ed has probably not spent enough time nude with his sons, but that ages 10 and 12 is a good time to start. Ed says being in this sauna with his boys has been his first truly religious experience.

After they have finished bathing in the sauna with a ladle and bucket of freezing rainwater, and after Hannah and I have finished pretending to hide their clothes, they march out of there in a Zen-like state to retire to the cabin.

Hannah says she is going in the sauna too and disappears for a moment, then reappears in a bikini. I am too cold to want to even get wet, so I go in there with her in my clothing until I get hot enough, and then run out to get my suit too. After five minutes, Hannah decides to dart through the grass and across the flat rock slabs, past the marshy reeds and into the cold river where her great grandfather used to bathe. I run in too. Ana sees us and grabs the camera. We bolt back to the sauna. Moments later, Hannah has washed with the cold rainwater and ladle method and returned to the cabin, but I am enjoying a few more minutes in the sauna alone.

Until Ana joins me.

She is nude.

In America, this would be downright weird, unless you were visiting your hippy Cousin Moonbeam on her commune in Oregon. But in Finland, it has been de rigeur since the beginning of time, and continues today. In fact, as a Finn in her 60s later tells me, she has been on business trips where after a meeting, a co-ed group will retreat to the conference center’s sauna and continue talking business with no clothes on. And it is absolutely normal.

It’s funny because I am comfortable right off the bat with Ana’s nudity, but I will not be taking off my bathing suit anytime soon. (It’s my special, Lands End Tummy Minimizer, and as I have recently lost 15 lbs., I am feeling a little vain and want to preserve the illusion that I have an even flatter stomach than I really do at 44, after three kids.) She seems absolutely comfortable with that, and in fact doesn’t even glance at my pretty flat stomach even once. She is busy tossing big heaps of water onto the stove to make steam, and when she is ready to bathe, she turns a valve on the stove and hot water comes out, which she pours into the bucket of rainwater.

“Oh!” I say, having taken the ice bath version myself.

“Oh?” she says.

“Hot water,” I say.

“Oh!” she says, as she gets it that we have all taken freezing cold rainwater baths in here. She slaps the side of her face and browbeats herself aloud in Finnish (I imagine). And then she starts laughing.

I laugh too, “It’s okay. I like it,” I say. In truth, a little screaming from the shock added to the  fun. And the sauna was as warm as a baby’s belly.

At night, Art makes a fire in our cabin and it seems to take the edge of the bickering. We sit around it discussing a vast array of things, including wishing you could run away sometimes when you’re a kid. It starts out innocently enough, with Isaac saying he wishes he could and maybe he even will next time he gets really mad. And it turns into Ed giving him advice on the smartest way to pull it off.

Um, hello?

I mean, he’s telling them stuff like, “You could call a pizza place right before closing and order three pizzas to a fake address. And when they bring them back to the pizza place and throw them in the dumpster, fresh, hot pizza!”

I am holding Ben’s clothing as close to the fire as possible without it bursting into flames, trying to calm myself with the satisfaction of watching the water rise off of it in mini wafts of steam.

Isaac is loving every minute of this, of course, and everyone is chiming in their very own creative idea on how to survive on the streets. And then I remind them of the movie August Rush, a film we all watched on DVD recently (and hated), in which a bunch of New York runaways have a very tough life. And Ed says that while it may have sounded like he was promoting the runaway lifestyle, he was kidding because being a runaway is truly a terrible thing (despite all the good dumpster pizza and absence of annoying parents) and that runaways are often raped and get into drugs and prostitution. There is nothing like a good campfire in a dark cabin in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do, to get those important tween conversations out of the way.

Two nights was the perfect amount of time to spend here and I’ll admit that the outhouse wasn’t even that bad. (Miraculously odorless and the black styrofoam seat was not even one bit cold. Such an invention!) How the dishes were done, is still a mystery to me, because after each meal in Ana’s cabin, we wiped our plates with paper towels that were burned in the stove, and then the dishes were whisked off to a tiny room where more than one person would not fit.

Our next stop is dinner at the home of Ana II, the vicar’s wife in a little town I’ll call “U” followed by our last days in Oulu before we head to Katy’s in Kokkola. Stay tuned…

Family Reunion/Scandal (part II)

We will be spending two nights in Yokie, a place where nearly every member of Ed’s family has a rustic cabin down a dirt road on the river. A few of them live here full time as well in various types of homes ranging from 70s ranch with gold shag carpet to 1920s home that could make it onto the cover of Martha Stewart Living.

Ana has scored us a cabin of our own – her younger brother’s– and it is right next to hers. Before we head to lunch at the site of the reunion, we pull down the dirt driveway to our cabins to unload our things. And to let the kids reunite, regroup, and, of course, fight.

The view makes me understand why it is not possible to have running water here. It’s like  being in a wildlife sanctuary. Ana’s cabin, a modest two room shack painted red with 6′ ceilings, is perched on granite that gives way to river and marsh grass and the sea that could sweep you out to Sweden if you caught the current just the wrong way. I feel like I’m in a re-enactment of something on The History Channel and imagine Viking ships (and Ed’s pancreas) on the horizon.

Ana’s brother’s cabin was moved from Lapland and each porch column looks like the trunk of a gnarled tree. There is a bed-sized room for Ed and me, another like it for the boys to share, and a day bed in the kitchen/living room for Hannah. The kids confide that they would rather go back to Ana’s in Oulu and have their own rooms and computer games and The Simpsons.  We grind our teeth at them.

I pull Ed aside and share the juicy tidbit. “Wow,” he says. “Maybe the father thing is genetic.”

“Maybe.”

“I give you five minutes to get the full scoop on the scandal when we get there.”

I smile and nod. We hop back in our respective cars and head over to Cousin Pavo’s house. As we get out and walk around to the backyard, Ed, who is ahead of me, catches a glimpse of the 50+ people swarming the backyard.

“Oh my God,” he says, slowing, pushing me ahead of him.

“Oh no,” I say, linking my arm in his. “This is YOUR clan.”

Hands are thrust forward and everyone introduces themselves, rapid fire. I notice some of them (particularly the tall cute fellas), when they get your hand, don’t let go. I am feeling a little like the Rock Star American Cousins, despite the fact that we are grungy in jeans and sweatshirts and several of them have come directly from church. Cameras flash and we form a receiving line that lasts for 20 minutes.

It’s so overwhelming that I don’t remember anyone’s name except for Katy, Ed’s cousin’s  wife, who has been corresponding with Ed by email for six months. We will be staying in Kokkola with Katy and Cousin Eric in a few days. Katy is tall and hip and 40-something with a bit of a Shirley Partridge haircut and funky black eyeglasses. I like her immediately and zero in on her as my target. Yes, she will be the one I will ask about the Eino scandal, though it will take me substantially more than five minutes.

First comes the handmade buffet luncheon of cinnamon rolls, bread and butter, beet salad, potato salad, cole slaw, cheese and sandwiches, The highlight is “Sandwich Birthday Cake,” which looks like a gorgeous white wedding cake decorated with edible pansies, but it is, in fact made up of lox sandwiches and slathered in a type of cream cheese /sour cream. Dessert is several large bricks of deliciously super-test high fat Finnish ice cream with bananas and chocolate sauce.

While consuming all of the above, Hannah and I chat with some of the 20-something cousins. One of them, Miri, has studied in the U.K. and speaks English with a great London accent and British slang. She is a gentle soul; the daughter of a Lutheran vicar in a small town about 90 minutes away and one of five children. Somehow, we get on the topic of Finnish reticence, and she says when she was in London, friends would make fun of her for being absolutely quiet while they talked. “You know,” she says,”For some reason they expected me to say, ‘right’ or ‘oh yes’ every minute for feedback or something. They would actually ask what was wrong with me and I would say, ‘In Finland we call this listening.’”

I laugh, realizing how often I too feel I have to prove I am listening when maybe I would listen better by doing it like the Finnish.

Ed is deeply engaged in conversation with three men who look like they could be his brothers. Isaac and Ben are running around like the race-horses-on-crack that they are, but I decide to chill about it because we are in the great outdoors; at last, a perfectly appropriate place for them to get their “yaya”s out. Ben runs over and tells me that one of the cousins is throwing soda at his sister and not even getting in trouble for it! Is this the best country in the world, or what?

“Can I do it too?” he asks.

“Um,” I pretend to consider, “No.”

The verdict is in: I am the least fun parent in the world. He runs back to Isaac and they continue raising hell, sans soda.

Miri’s mother, Anna II, has joined us. She is lovely and has prepared most of the food. I tell her the cinnamon buns are amazing, which they are; sort of a cross between bread and dessert. She bags up the rest and tells me to take them back to the cabin with us.

Someone mentions that every year at this gathering, one of the kids falls in the icy river with his clothes on. And as if on cue, Ben tries to jump from a dry rock onto a wet one and promptly falls in. It is sunny but very chilly out and of course, he is wearing his only sweatshirt and sneakers. (Later, it will start to rain and turn very cold and suddenly no running water and no flushing toilet will seem like no big deal compared to NO DRIER. How do these civilized people live like this? What if there are extenuating circumstances, like you are wearing your only sweatshirt and sneakers and you fall in the river and it is freezing out and you need to continue playing with your newfound Finnish cousins immediately, rather than sit in the house wrapped in a towel for a few days until your clothes dry? It must have something to do with the Finnish word “Sisu,” which is  the motto of this land of strong people who have endured the Russian army, avalanches, bright nights and days in which the sun does not shine. Sisu roughly translates to “Suck it up, you spoiled American.”)

Anna II, mother of five, snaps to attention as I tend to Ben. She runs into Pavo’s house and gets my son some dry clothes. I thank her profusely as I hang his wet ones on the clothes line in the sun, not hopeful at all that they will ever dry. Ever. We laugh about boys (she has two who are grown) and she invites us to dinner at her house the night we will leave Yokie. I tell her I must check with Ana, but that we would love to.

Inside, Pavo is on the computer, showing the family the pictures he has been taking for the past two hours. There have been many questions about Ed’s art work while we’ve been here, and – ever his publicist– I tell one of the cousins that there is a web site on which they can see some of his work. Pavo goes straight to it, and everyone seems really impressed. There are many questions about what various things in the work represent, and Ed seems really happy to talk about it. Aside from us, none of his family has ever been to one of his gallery openings and yet here he is with his work and his peeps and not only are they interested, they seem really proud of his talent and what he has done with it. As am I (if you haven’t seen it, email me and I’ll give you a link to the site).

As the end of the party nears, I help bring empty trays to the kitchen and I spy Katy putting things away.

“Can I ask you something?” I say softly.

She steps in close. I want to tread lightly, of course. Don’t want to be the brash, too direct American nosing around for the 100 year old family dirt.

“Yes?” she says.

“Well, this is is a little awkward,” I say, and rehash my conversation with Rita in the car.

She laughs. “So you want to know what was the scandal?”

“Oh yes. Would you feel comfortable telling me?”

“Of course,” she says, busting the stereotype of the reticent Finn.

Eric and another cousin or two step over and she rehashes, in Finnish, what I’ve said. Then she tells me that Eino’s father, Herman, was in charge of maintaining the town church, and was the only one, besides the vicar, who had the key. “Slowly, over the winter,” she says, “he drank up all the church wine.”

This is the scandal? Maybe to a Finnish librarian it constitutes one, but not to a native New Yorker who has spent the past decade in Louisiana and regularly watches “Gossip Girl” with her teenage daughter. I mean, considering the long, dark winter, the six kids and the fact that the man had no running water, no proper toilet and no DRIER, for god sakes, it doesn’t seem that, that bad. Given the key, I’d probably suck down all the church wine too.

But here is how the rest shakes out:

“Well,” she says, “he was so ashamed, he rode the only horse on the farm to the next town, sold it, and went to America. So he left Eino’s mother with six kids and no horse on a farm and never sent anything home to help.”

“That’s pretty bad,” I say.

“But seven or eight years later, he showed up and asked his wife to take him back.”

“And she did.”

Katy nods. “And Eino was furious. Herman was handsome, lots of charisma, and he comes back speaking fluent English and with romantic stories of how he helped build the railroads in America and how he saw Haley’s Comet with his own eyes, sleeping in a tent with his feet sticking out one side and his head sticking out the other.”

“Wow,” I say, thinking now that I’d want to kill him too. Or at least wake my mother one morning and tell her I was running away to America and never coming back.

“Oh, and tell about the box,” one of the other cousins pipes up, smiling.

“Oh yes, the box,” Katy says. “Herman came back with a small, sealed wooden box that he said was filled with treasure from America. He told his children when he died, it could be opened and shared among those who had treated him well. But nobody was allowed near that box while he was alive. And everyone talked about the box, the box, the box.”

“So, what was inside?” I say, skeptical, and yet hopeful that in the smallest way the man might have tried to redeem himself.

She looks at me and arches her eyebrows so they peek above her funky glasses. “Empty.”

We hit the road to at 11 in order to make it to the family reunion in Yokie by noon. I can tell that Ed is terrified. As I have mentioned, Ed raised himself from age 14 on, and aside from our wedding at his father and stepmother’s house 19 years ago (a failed attempt at a father/son relationship) we have had little contact with his family, aside from his sister. Any and all family reunions have been with my extended family. And over the years, Ed, whose college roommates nicknamed him “the old goat,” developed the practice of sneaking to a quiet room with The New York Times at my family gatherings until the commotion was over. Not this time.

Ed rides with Ana, Art, Hannah and Isaac, while Benny and I ride with Cousin Rita. A new day, a new cousin driver. Rita is in her 30s, a slight brunette, no make up, sweet and shy. She is the stereotype of a librarian, minus the bun. In fact, she is a librarian. I fold myself into the front seat of her subcompact car and mentally cross myself, despite being Jewish. Living in the south, I have a handful of friends who are Catholic praying regularly for me, so I’m just sealing the deal in a car the size of a roller skate, in a foreign country where I am now separated from my husband and two of my children with a driver I don’t know, going to a place I’ve never been. The place, incidentally, is site of the former farm where Ed’s late grandfather, Eino, grew up. The site of the farm that he left at the turn of the last century, never to return. Ben stretches out across the back seat and Rita reminds him to buckle up, which he has already done. This puts me at ease.

Rita’s English is very good, and we quickly blow through the small talk in the first 10 minutes, while Ben hangs out in the back seat, the quietest he’s ever been. Good thing I am comfortable with my newfound ability not to have to make small talk. I look out the window and watch as 10,000 birch trees per minute pass by. I try to read signs for towns whose names use every letter of the alphabet. I see a pheasant. I see two small moose and nearly jump out of my skin pointing them out to Ben. Rita is as nonplussed as if we’ve passed a pigeon and two squirrels.

More silence.

Okay, I can’t stand it.

“So do you think there will be many people there?” I offer.

“I”m not sure.”

“What about kids?”

“Maybe some kids.”

In my family, all the mouths move at the same time, every one talking and nobody listening. I know Finns have a reputation for being quiet and reserved but I’m having a Woody Allen moment; if it gets any quieter in this car I am going to have to dig Rita’s Nokia out of her purse and call my shrink.

I know, I’m a journalist. I’ll ask questions. I’ll ask questions about the family history. You know, dig around a little for info and then report back to Ed.

“Ed told me Eino left Finland because he was poor and couldn’t make a living on the family farm, so how were his brothers and sisters able to make it?”

Rita takes her eyes off the road for the first time and looks at me. “That’s not why Eino left,” she says, then turns back.

“What?”

More silence. Then, a sigh. “Eino left Finland because he didn’t get along with his father.”

I feel like I am seeing another moose, this one large and with a rack of antlers. “Really?!” I say. This is particularly weird because of Ed’s non-relationship with his own father. Now I want to dig Rita’s Nokia out of her purse and call Ed in the car ahead of us to give him the scoop.

“Yes,” Rita says. “His father, Herman, left his wife and six children and went to America for eight years and when he returned, Eino fought with him every day. Then one morning Eino woke his mother and told her he was leaving and he wasn’t coming back. And he never did.”

“What?” I say, “Why?”

“It’s a bit of a scandal. I think I should not tell you. But when you get to reunion, of course, you can ask some of the other relatives.”

Leave it to the librarian to let me do my own research.

Day 1

SEASIDE MARKET: More amazing outdoor food under tents in a beautiful seaside setting. By the time we get there it is nearly 2 and we have not eaten lunch and the kids look faint from hunger. But Ana wants us to see some of the shops before they close. Shops in wooden buildings that are 200 years old. Shops that sell handmade candles, fur coats, hats and bear skin rugs, none of which we can afford. But it is fun to look.

Our noses steer us to one of the food tents hawking salmon, pork, garlic potatoes, meatballs and salted, fried smelts (a little fish that is cooked totally intact, with skin, bones, eyeballs and all). A young woman who speaks The King’s English beautifully thrusts one at me for a taste and I feel simultaneously grossed out and obliged. “Eat it,” Ed says. “They’re amazing.” I can’t even look at it so I close my eyes and go for it. I can’t believe how good it is. It tastes like a salty potato chip, with a bit more body. But when I look at them in the giant wok again, I realize, I am a one-smelt-girl. Ed pays Benny a Euro to try one. He too goes for it, but it is clearly the hardest $1.50 he has ever earned.

Ed and I treat Ana, Art and the Translator Couple to lunch at this food tent, despite their protests. It is surely the very least we can do. Especially since we will not be renting a car as we had originally discussed with Ana through a translating relative by email. No, Ana in her extreme generosity has arranged rides with other relatives for every excursion we will take during our stay. This way, not only will we save money, we will meet as much of the family as possible at close range.

SHOPPING: We head to Stockmans, Finland’s most renowned department store because Hannah is jonesing for a little shopping, bless her heart, and Ed heads off to a different store around the corner to get the boys each their own Finnish Puckka knife.

A Puckka knife is the gift every Finnish boy gets as a rite of passage and Ed has been given the one that belonged to his late grandfather, Eino. Understandably, he wants the boys to have theirs as a memento of our trip to Finland and so they can whittle their way into manhood. I do not mention that that their behavior has resembled the Terrible Twos more than Manhood recently. I do not remind him that, in fact, today they have been docked all desserts for backtalk and backseat scuffles in front of Finnish relatives, so why would we give them each a sharp tool with which to potentially kill each other next time they have a tangle over whether the car window should remain open or closed? I do not remind him that the Jewish rite of passage, Bar Mitzvah, occurs at age 13 for a reason, and we are a year away from that for Isaac and 2 and a half years for Ben. No, I figure, let him get them their premature Puckkas, because this will be a terrific thing to take away next time they misbehave.

That is, if I remember. Which of course I will not unless they are wielding their knives while misbehaving. Which they won’t be because this is not their brand of misbehavior. Hence, the reason Ed is buying them now, I guess.

Hannah flips through many things Marimekko but nothing strikes her fancy in a reasonable price range. I am hit by a wave of exhaustion and say I need a coffee at the cafe so we head there with Ana, Art and the Translating Couple. I sip my coffee and enjoy some people watching. One thing I notice is that the mullet seems to be a pretty big hairstyle here among men and women alike. It can be found in virtually every age group. Another thing is that if you have naturally blond hair, you dye several chunks of it dark, and accordingly, if you have naturally dark hair, you dye several big chunks of it light. Done well, it’s punk. Done badly, it’s skunk.

Hannah orders an ice cream in the cafe and when Ed and the boys rejoin us, after getting the knives, the boys want ice cream too. I have to explain to the relatives that the boys can’t have ice cream because they are punished. Sorrowful looks all around followed by “boys will be boys” sayings. Well, I would rather they find me and Ed the bad guys rather than our misbehaving children, so perhaps the kids have not been all that bad. Perhaps we are just totally burnt out on togetherness. Perhaps we are deep fried smelts in a wok, the five of us. There does seem to be a level of respect for the fact that we punish our children though.

Ed takes the boys upstairs to the electronics department where they play Wii tennis and then take a wrong turn coming back and somehow disappear for close to an hour. The relatives are drumming their fingers. They want to take a ride on a mini train that goes around the city. I pray Ed and the boys won’t get back any time soon because I do not want to take a mini train ride around the cit, though I don’t want to be impolite or ungrateful about it. The fact is, I am pooped. Where do these 60-somethings get their energy? I feel like I’m in an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is spending a week with his retired Finnish parents and their friends in Oulu. The Translator wants to know if we would like to come back to their home for coffee. I have just had coffee, but it sounds preplanned, so sure, more coffee. It’s not like I’m going to sleep anyway with the sun blaring in my face all night.

THE BEACH: On the way to the Translators house, we stop at the beach. The locals call it “The Norwegian Riviera” because it draws bathers from even farther north (those unable or unwilling to hop a flight to Spain). It is a beautiful, if freezing place, where people with Polar Bear in the genes are actually swimming and windsurfing without wet suits.

Isaac and Ben take off their shoes and follow suit by running in the frigid sand. There are modern wind turbines along the shore that generate energy and they look really space age cool. We discuss how ridiculous it is that in America people don’t want these on their beaches when they are actually good for the environment, while all along the Gulf of Mexico there are hideous offshore oil rigs which are oddly enough very well tolerated. I guess it’s all about the ca-chingage, as Ben would say.

We walk out to a tower on a jetty and Ed starts asking our translator questions about the Vikings and artifacts and excavations. Her English is very good but not this good. She gives him a blank stare as she struggles to understand. Earlier, rather than saying that he cannot eat sugar because it makes him sick, he goes into an involved explanation about having had mumps on his pancreas as a child. Another blank stare.

I have been thinking about how hard it is to speak and understand French and it makes me want to cry that he has dusted off his best, most complicated vocabulary for this incredibly kind woman who is doing an amazing job, considering she has never even been to a country where English is spoken.

Hannah and I catch each other’s eyes. She whispers, “Is he KIDDING?”

“Tell her about your pancreas again,” I say to Ed.

I can see on his face that suddenly he gets it. “What?” he says. “Are you being mean to me?”

For the rest of the trip, whenever Ed speaks to a Finnish cousin with a fledgling English vocabulary, Hannah and I torture him with Viking excavation and pancreas jokes.

The next day is the big family reunion. We will head out to the small town where Ed’s grandfather was born. A town I’ll call “Yokie,” just so you people don’t swarm it and ruin the flavor of an incredibly scenic place where the river runs into the Sea of Bothnia, a place where the mosquitoes fill the sky like rain in a squall, where the toilets don’t flush and the water don’t run.

Exchange of the Day:

“I’m bored,” says Isaac.

“If you’re bored, then you’re boring,” I say, pleased with myself for remembering this retort that another mother shared with me long ago.

“That’s not true,” Isaac says. “You’re not bored and you are boring.”

So I’ve mentioned the rule about house guests and fish by now; after three days, both stink. And yet, somehow we have planned six days with our 60-something hosts, Ana and Art.

Ana, who stayed with us for only one night in Louisiana, was pushing for us to stay even longer (as she and her daughter spent an entire month with their Finnish speaking host in Texas). She has subsequently sent us post cards from Portugal, brochures about Finland and left answering machine messages in broken English counting down the days until our arrival. Not only that, but she has set up a family reunion so that all the related Finns within a 100 mile radius might have a peek at the Americans. In short, she makes us feel like visiting royalty.

Our train pulls into Oulu after the seven hour ride from Helsinki and I for one am ready to see if there’s a nice Scandinavian adoption agency that can take the kids. But when I see Ana in the station, she is so happy to see us that there are with tears in her big blue eyes and I shelve my frustrations.

Ana’s grandmother was Ed’s maternal grandfather’s sister. And Ed’s grandfather left Finland for America at the age of 17, more than 80 years ago, never to return. It’s special because Ana has only just visited America for the first time and Ed has never visited Finland. But it’s especially special because Ed’s parents divorced when he was a child, his mother died when he was a teenager, and Ed raised himself from age 14 on. And Ana knows this. Ed has fond memories of his mother’s large family and the old world Finnish customs they brought with them to Massachusetts, like taking steam in the backyard sauna with cousins, taking care of business in the double-seater outhouse alongside his Finnish grandmother, and taking coffee with Nissu, a sweet Finnish bread that his mother used to toast for him.

So even if Ana and Art only speak 20 words of English, to our six words of Finnish, six days seems like it will be okay. These are extenuating circumstances and overnight accommodations in Finland for the length of time it will take to meet the family would blow our travel budget. It seems there is something bigger here than language and the possibility of overstaying our welcome with three bickering children.

Fortunately, Ana has brought along another 60-something cousin of Ed’s and his wife who speaks impeccable English, despite the fact that she has never visited an English speaking country and says she has not used her English in more than a year. Ana and Art take me and Ben in their car, and the other couple takes Hannah, Isaac and Ed.

In the car, Ana says, “How are you?” and “Good trip?” and “I happy you here!” multiple times, because it is all she knows how to say. I say, “Kiitos” multiple times, which means “thank you,” because it is all I know how to say. She and Art point out the school and the symphony as we pass them. Aside from that, it is relaxing not to make small talk. I like small talk and never realized before that it is work.

We have no idea what the sleeping arrangements will be when we get there, or even if there will be something resembling beds. We have no idea what the washing machine situation will be and our bags are filled with dirty clothes. It is an interesting exercise in middle age, to let go of controlling details like this and rely on the kindness of newly met relatives. Comfort and cleanliness move off the must-have list and down to the nice-to-have one. But while I find this freeing, the kids find it rattling.  Apparently, we have turned them into mini middle aged Americans.

“So we might have to all sleep on the floor in the same room for six nights?” Ben whispers to me across the back seat, his voice dripping with dread.

I shrug the shrug of the truly and blissfully ignorant.

When we get to the apartment, which is in a stack of boxy white condos with balconies on the outskirts of the city, the accommodations are palatial compared to the Helsinki situation. The boys will share the grown sons’ room (complete with computer and computer games), Hannah will have the grown daughter’s room, and here’s where it gets tricky: Ana and Art give us their room and will sleep on the delicate pull out sofa bed in the dining room. I am ashamed to admit this, but we do not put up much of a fight; they are half our size (we are both taller than 6′ with a combined weight upwards of 400 lbs.) Ed says even if we would fit, there is no way that sofa bed would survive the night. We both feel totally guilty, which is too nuanced to translate.

Dinner is a hamburger-helper like macaroni dish which Ben proclaims the best home cooked meal he’s had had since leaving America. Our translator conveys Ben’s pleasure and Ana and Art beam. On the table are also staples that we will soon find on the table in every Finnish home: a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce, a basket of assorted Finnish rolls, most of which resemble pumpernickle English muffins, and a tub of Finnish margarine. And there are plastic vats of creamed mushroom salad, creamed beet salad and creamed cole slaw. Art squirts ketchup on his macaroni casserole and the boys follow suit, then devour  seconds when offered.

After dinner, Ana pops in an episode of The Simpsons for the kids, in English with Finnish and  Swedish subtitles, while the adults talk, through the translator, about American politics, and the fact that there is a bit of a scandal in Finnish politics for the first time involving the Prime Minister. The language barrier makes it unclear whether it is over kickbacks or campaign finance reform.

The translating cousins say they will go home now but will return in the morning to spend the day with Ana and Art, showing us around. Is there anything we need to tell Ana, through them? I decide to speak up about the laundry and ask if there’s a laundromat nearby that we might use tomorrow. But Ana insists we can use her washing machine, and another in the basement (since we have more than one load).

The next morning, Ana helps us get the wash started. After I load the machine (medieval machine #3), she pulls half of our clothing out and stuffs it back in the laundry bag. Apparently, I have overloaded. She points downstairs. I reach for my wallet and say, “Money for the machine?” She shakes her head vigorously. “No money. No money in my house!” I hope she does not mean that it is she who will be putting coins in the machine for our laundry. I don’t quite know how to fight her on this, so I decide I will wait until we get down there and then I will lunge at the coin slots and make sure I pay before she does. There are at least 30 apartments in her building, so I am expecting a laundry room with several machines, and perhaps even driers. After all, this is Finland. In winter the clothing would freeze solid if you hung it up outside, right?

We ride down to the first floor, then journey through a labyrinth of locked rooms, which remind me of walk in refrigerators. If I weren’t with a cute little Finnish lady who is humming and smiling and continuing to say, “I so happy you here!” I would be sure I was in a horror movie. Except that in horror movies there is always dust and cobwebs and here everything is immaculately clean, right down to the cement floor, as if elves scrubbed the labyrinth daily. And then, Ana unlocks The Laundry Room and there it is. “Very old,” she says.

On a small pedestal in the middle of a vast, empty room stands a lone washing machine. It is not medieval. It is paleolithic. And it’s not that she won’t let me pay, it’s that it doesn’t even take coins. It predates coins. I load it (again, she takes out half) and she walks over to the wall and turns a knob. The machine fills with water and then she turns a crank to get it rotating. I feel like I am in a washing machine museum.

On the way back upstairs, Ana gives me a key, says something in Finnish and points to my pocket. I take it and smile. When I was an exchange student in France 24 years ago, the lady I lived with first (not the Gregoires) would not give my room mate nor me a key, so I am flattered that I get one right off the bat, no questions asked, with Ana. While the wash is going, we explain in English and sign language, that we will take the kids and go for a walk while the clothes are washing. Just outside their building is a biking and hiking path through a forest of birch trees around a pond to some athletic fields. It’s amazing how even on the outskirts of a city, it’s like being in a national forest.

When we return, I show Art that I am putting the key on the kitchen counter. But somehow, moments before the translating cousins are to arrive, the spare key becomes lost. Ana shows me her and key shrugs, to indicate that the spare key is missing.  I try to tell with hand gestures, that I gave it back to Art when I came in, but can I truly trust my middle aged memory combined with the exhaustion of traveling with three bickering kids and the fact that I don’t sleep because the sun has not yet gone down once since we’ve been here? It has not even approached the horizon, but rather burns at the top of the sky, all night long.

Ana is humming and flipping through her little red Suomi/Englanti dictionary. “Keys? Keys?” she says, running around, looking, smiling.  It’s hard to know with the language barrier whether we are being blamed, but since we’ve been given a key, and now it is missing, this seems logical. Oh my God, she hates us already with five nights to go! I know I gave those keys back to Art. Or did I? Maybe they are in the pocket of my polar fleece or my jeans or on the floor of the Hissi, Finnish for “elevator.” (By the way, I wonder, is Hissy Fit something that happens when you have a fit that goes up and down like an elevator?)

Ana finds the keys. She is browbeating herself and saying, “I old woman” and “Sorry! Sorry!” which is such a relief because I feel like old woman about now. Ed and I are so glad she does not hate us already for losing the keys and taking over her bedroom and just plain being in her apartment with three kids for six days who only want to play games on her computer and watch The Simpsons in English. And have I mentioned that there is one toilet for the seven of us, and because it is that time of the month for me, I am in it way more than my 1/7th of the time? But Ana and Art are so nice. We spend the rest of the day on a whirlwind tour off Oulu.  Stay tuned for Highlights…

Oscar, it turns out, likes us so much, that he joins us for dinner out on our last night and for coffee at The Regatta Cafe the morning of our departure (Ed offers him an out but he does not take it). Maybe it is because we too like to think of ourselves as artists and have expressed genuine interest in his craft, his auditions and watching film clips of his and Laura’s performances. Or maybe he has talked to the cat and they are both just getting totally psyched about having their bedroom and bathroom back.

He even accompanies us to the train station and eats lunch with us there. As does Cousin Soy Latte. In her case, she takes the train into the city from her job 15 minutes away, just to say good bye, help us schlep our bags around and to give us a little going away basket (which I want to burn before I even see what’s inside because it is something else to carry).

The Finns have a reputation for being stoic, hard working, and reticent, but not for being phony. So I must accept the fact that these people are genuinely this nice. It’s almost too much to bear and too beautiful to accept, in this wretched, war torn world in which we live.

We find our seats in the last car, second story of the double decker train and it is really nice, with outlets to plug in laptops, little booths for privacy while speaking on cellphones and bathrooms that would suit Howard Hughes (and my mother).

We have four seats facing each other, and one across the aisle with three Finns in their 60s occupying them. Almost immediately, Ben starts driving Hannah nuts. We have just eaten lunch and the kids are riffling through the bags and fighting over sandwiches we have bought for dinner. Apparently there is not only a sandwich that is tainted with mayonnaise but also a slice of PEACH. Never mind that this is their favorite fruit as a standalone. Never mind that they ate a huge meal a nanosecond ago. There is a peach and mayo on the ham and cheese sandwiches, so they must all fight to the death over the chicken curry sandwich. Um, hello, chicken curry is teaming with mayonnaise, yes? But apparently, that’s different, because the curry makes the mayonnaise taste good. The train ride is seven hours long. I had one lingering assignment that I thought I might finish in this time, but no. For seven hours, Ed and I take turns grinding our teeth down to stumps .If only the train window would open all the way, I would jump out now and get it over with.

Isaac, for one, is in favor of this. He says so in many ways, both loud, wild and disrespectful.

“You know, people speak English on this train and you are embarrassing yourself,” I say.

“No I’m not,” he says. “I don’t care what these people think. I’ll never see any of them again.”

“Well you may be the first American child some of these people have ever seen. You are a representative of your country, and by acting like a spoiled brat, these people are going to think all American children are disrespectful and spoiled. So even if you never see them again, you are embarrassing America,” I say.

He rolls his eyes and flips back his greasy, surfer dude hair. Next year he will go into 7th grade. “I’m not embarrassing America,” he says. “George Bush has done that already.”

I know it is bad that I crack up when he says this. I know it means he may be a smart ass for longer than the requisite six upcoming years. But it’s so absurd that we took our three kids to Europe for six weeks and thought we would have the time of our lives, that I can’t help it. what kind of magic mushrooms were we eating?

I have to get away from him and the whole scene so I walk down to the cafe car to get a cup of coffee for myself and Ed. I walk through what seems like 20 cars to get there and when I do, the a/c is off and it smells like cigarettes and beer. Motley crews of tatooed and pierced characters with hair in various shades of red, black and purple, relax in semicircular high backed lounge sectionals with mugs of beer. They all stare at me as if it is I who looks like I’m in the Rocky Horror Picture Show and not them. I get two crappy cups of coffee at $3 a piece and walk back through the 20 trains to something I’m not sure is better.

“Don’t go there,” I tell Hannah.

“Why not?” she says. “I want to take a walk. The boys are driving me nuts.”

“Remember the bar scene in Star Wars?”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“No, I’m not,” I say, “Besides, I had this horrible thought that since we can’t understand the announcements, while the train is stopped, the cafe car might separate and one of us could end up stranded God knows where in Finland. And we don’t even have working cell phones.”

She considers this a minute. “Ben,” she says. “When the train stops, Mom says go check out the cafe car.”

We spend three nights in Helsinki, jammed into the chestnut sized room with our three children. On the first night, I think that Benny is going to blow. The fight is with Hannah, over a coveted pillow that belongs to Laura (of course, inflatable ones I have brought along for each of us are inadequate replacements during this fight. It is in the next fight, my fight with Hannah, that we fight over these).

My main concern is that the way-too-kind Finnish cousin and her boyfriend (who I can’t believe is not leaving her over our us) will hear the ruckus, from their pea sized room next door. Okay, that’s not exactly true. My main concern is that they will see that Ed and I are complete failures as parents.

But worse still is my concern that my inconsiderate, bickering children will confirm the stereotype that all American children are spoiled brats. Here Laura and Oscar have graciously surrendered 9/10 of their apartment to us along with 100% of their privacy, but neither Hannah nor Ben is willing to surrender one stinking pillow for the common good.

I have blocked how this story ends. All I remember is that each of our cranky children continue to scrabble with each other over various things involving their discomfort deep into the night (which never really comes, by the way, because in the land of the midnight sun, broad daylight is blazing through the cracks in the shades at 11 p.m., further contributing to crankiness.) At some point, Ed gets out of the mini-bed we are sharing because his back hurts and ends up trading places with Ben who becomes my bunkmate for the next two nights.

The next morning, Laura, who is a dancer and performance artist, leaves early for her day job at the hospital filing records. Oscar, who is also a dancer and performance artist, has an all-day audition (I suspect this is a ruse, but a brilliant one. I figure he will be booked with rehearsals and auditions for the next three days straight. But it turns out I am wrong and ultimately, he seems as delighted as Laura to have us here).

Laura has told us to help ourselves to anything we want and left cereal, bread, butter and jam along with the Finnish equivalent of bagels, which look like half a smashed baked potato (though I’m told it is made of rice). She has also bought a quart of pourable blackberry/raspberry yogurt, which is thick and tart and sweet and delicious. We have obliterated her food supply in less than 24 hours, and make a mental note to go grocery shopping on the way home from our days’ adventures. These adventures include:

The Regatta Cafe: A little red shack on the Baltic where we watch from our outside tables as Oystercatchers comb the rocks with their long orange skewer beaks. I still can’t believe we are in a city. The college-kid staff is endearing, outdoorsy, and drop dead gorgeous, but the cafe itself is weird in an Adam’s Family kind of way; the door handle is an ax that has been chopped into the door and held there with a nail, the splintery wood ceiling is adorned with crystal chandeliers, there is a framed picture of some ceremony with the previous pope kissing the current one. And there’s the sign that states the cafe policy on refills – just ask and you’ll get one along with five cents for your troubles.

The National Museum: A great place that hits on everything from Moose habitats to chiminey-less cabins in Lapland to models of Finnish classrooms and pop culture. Did you know that Finland has a zero percent illiteracy rate since the 1920s? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, America!

Hessburger: The Finnish equivalent of McDonalds. Really no different, only cleaner. With mayo on everything.

Grocery Shopping: the checkout girl is so nice, she leaves her post to walk back to the vegetable section with me and demonstrate how the codes work when you weigh the vegetables. Nobody in line seems the least bit disturbed when she returns with me to finish our checkout.

Over the remainder of our stay, we also visit:

The Atheneum: An art museum that blows me away with the work of Pekka Halonen. Andrew Wyeth, move over or just get out. And whoever was in charge of choosing the colors for the exhibition walls is a genius. The snow scenes combined with that muted purple on the walls gives winter new meaning.

The Outdoor Market at the Harbor: Not cheap, but surely the best salmon I have ever eaten, on a paper plate or otherwise. And an ice cream called “salty licorice” that is black and sweet with a swirl of something salty and toffee like in the middle is totally interesting. Cool jewelry made out of boiled wool and trivets made of juniper wood that smell like the forest when you put something hot on them.

Synagogue: One of two spiritual homes to Finland’s 1,500 Jews. The nice guard behind the bullet proof glass out front calls in when I tell him I’d emailed in advance. We get a short private tour of this beautiful place. Although it’s conservative and the women sit upstairs, girls are allowed to become Bat Mitzvah. And despite what seems like heavy security, we are told that there is really no anti-semitism in Finland.

Dinner in a traditional Finnish restaurant: Laura’s two brothers want to meet us, and her older brother wants to treat us all to dinner. We meet at a lovely restaurant where we eat Reindeer, smoked salmon and white fish (though the boys have their second hamburgers of the day). The children meet their cousins, age 3 and 6, and it is quiet at first. Then, Benny finds out how to say “Gotcha!” in Finnish, and says it to the 3 year old while poking him lightly. A raucous good time ensues for all (except for the waitstaff) for the next hour. The 6 year old proclaims in Finnish that Ben is her new best friend.

They say that house guests, like fish, begin to stink after three days. So I am glad we are boarding the train to Oulu after the third night, and I am hoping that Laura does not regret her extreme generosity. It is at 5 a.m. (the sun is STILL shining) that I realize being a house guest stinks after three days too; I find myself really having to use the bathroom and although the door is open, it is occupied by a cat standing in the litter box, deliberating. “Sorry Bud,” I tell him and pull the door closed behind me. While I fully expect him to be as incensed as any American cat would be, trapped in the bathroom with a strange human at a private time, this Finnish cat is every bit as generous as our Finnish hosts. He takes care of business and does not even pressure me to open the door and let him out. He seems absolutely delighted to have me here. Talk about hospitality.

Blue 1 is a really nice, and inexpensive Finnish airline with a lot more legroom than US Air’s fleet. It costs us less than the equivalent of $100 a ticket to get to a place that would take several days by train and boat at more than triple the cost. The flight takes three hours and as we approach the city, it seems to be a city of trees with the occasional Ikea-like warehouse. I bet the air pollution here is nil with all of nature on the city’s side, filtering away. Something we might try in Louisiana to stay on top of those pesky EPA standards.

Ed’s cousin, Laura, who we met for the first time when she and her mother, Ana, spent a night with us in the U.S. last November is there to meet us at the airport. When she said she would come to pick us up, I expressed concern that we all would not fit in what I assumed would be her small car. But she clarified that she does not have a car, does not even know how to drive one, in fact. She is coming to meet us by bus and will usher us back to her apartment the same way. She has been joined by another 30-something cousin by the name of Soyla, who has left work early just to come and greet us. (Later, Hannah tells me she is only able to remember the name by thinking “Soy Latte.” So we tell Soyla and she laughs and asks if a soy latte is good, because Starbucks has not yet invaded the Great White North. We say it’s the best and formally christen her, “Cousin Soy Latte.” )

Soyla, whose late grandmother was Ed’s late grandfather’s sister, looks like Ed’s sister, Kim. But she looks even more like like pictures I have seen of Ed’s mother, who died more than 36 years ago, when Ed was 12. I am all choked up about this; aside from Kim, Ed has had little to no contact with the surviving members of his family in many years and many have never met our kids. I adore Kim and I am instantly comfortable around Soyla, as if she is really just the Finnish version of my sister in law. Her hair is so blond that I think it can’t be real, but it is lighter still at the roots. Her eyes are as big and blue as Finnish lakes and they curtsey at the corners when she smiles, which is almost all the time. She has an extra Pepsi in her purse and offers it to us, in case anyone is thirsty. She confesses to being a sugar addict and loves candy. Instantly, I see the genetic link to her and Isaac and Ben.

We take two buses from the airport to get to Laura’s apartment, where we will stay for three nights and it costs only $20 for the five of us (1/3 the price of the metro from Charles de gaulle airport to the Latin Quarter). Contrary to popular belief, it seems things here in Scandanavia are less expensive than they were in Paris.

Laura and her boyfriend, Oscar, have generously offered to house us for several nights, as Laura checked out the hostels we were considering (at $200 a night for the five of us) and said they were so small, we would do better to camp out in her apartment. They live in a gorgeous neighborhood with big, boxy buildings down the street from the Sibelius monument where bus loads of tourists come daily (I am not exaggerating) and the Baltic Sea.

Laura and Oscar’s apartment is two rooms, one the size of a chestnut, the other the size of a pea (there is also a bathroom and kitchen, each, respectively invisible to the human eye.) I do not realize they have given us the big room, and have obtained three sleeping pads to throw on the floor for the kids and we get the bed, which is about one and a half times the size of a twin bed. It is not until several hours later that I realize there is no other bedroom that they will be sleeping in. They will be sleeping on the pea sized room, Oscar on the tiny sofa jammed in beside the dining room table, and Laura on some folded up blankets on the floor. I feel horrible about this but they seem genuinely thrilled to have us. Laura, a vegetarian, has prepared pasta and sauce for dinner and I ask what i can do to help. She shows me she has bought chicken and asks if I will cook it in a pan on the stove. We snuggle up side by side in the microscopic room and I fry while she assembles.

I am enthralled with the kitchen cabinets. They are directly over the sink and there is a drain at the base of the cabinet and wire racks for shelves. You open the cabinet, put the wet dishes in the racks and a stream of water soon trickles out of the bottom of the cabinet right into the sink. In an apartment with no dishwasher, this is so impressive to me that it negates the fact that the refrigerator is literally smaller than the one I had in my college dorm and the freezer can hold nothing more than a mini ice cube tray and a three dixie cups of ice cream.

The kids are enthralled with bathroom because the entire bathroom is the shower! There is just a drain right in the middle of the bathroom floor next to the washing machine (which is identical to the medieval one we left in France). There is a curtain to shield the toilet from the spray of water, but it does not protect the washing machine, on which Laura places her bath products when she is not doing laundry. There is a squeegy on the floor besides the kitty litter box (somehow it stays dry) that is used to make sure all the water makes its way to the drain.

So here we are, 7 people who barely know each other and two really sweet old cats (who will jump out the window and land three stories down if you open it too wide), in a microscopic apartment for the next three nights. The company is instantly good, I will tell you that. And I only hope that they feel the same way about us. To be continued…

Our last night in France is really nice with another visit to the Gregoires, this time to dinner at L & his family’s. L.’s wife, S. serves us a most kid friendly menu that includes hors d’oeuvres of pigs in a blanket, potato chips and the like along with our aperatifs, followed by home made quiche lorraine, lasagne topped with a bechamel sauce and a giant apple tart. The kids devour all. This time, their children are available to play and our boys hit it off big time with A. While they do not share more than five words of each other’s native tongue, they do share the Universal Language of Wi and stand before the flat screen tv, whooping each other’s butts at alternating electronic matches, followed by taunts that go misunderstood unless I am asked to translate. Later, Ben says that his time playing with A. is what he liked best of all about France (what he liked second best, he says, is leaving France).

I casually offer to have A., who is 10, come visit us in the U.S. L. says to just give my address and he will do the paperwork for the passport. He is not kidding. He wants to know if July is good. (As in, one month from now). I say this July is not good but next July would be. I cannot imagine putting my 10 year old on a plane alone to a country where he does not speak the language and will have to change planes. Surely, S. will say no. But S. nods her approval for next July. The only thing I will have to worry about is that A. is allergic to mosquitos. (Those of you who live in Louisiana with me should be rolling on the floor by now). Aside from the fact that A. will have to spend the month with us swaddled in netting, I have to say that the more I think of it, the more the idea grows on me. Okay, so it was a slightly fake offer in that I was hoping A. would come when he was older. Like 20. As I was the first time I came alone to Europe. But the truth is that A. is a lovely boy who seems very well behaved and it could be really fun to have him and give him a crash course in English. There is a chance we will be tent camping in Maine next July (no mosquitos there either…ha ha) and he is totally up for that. More so even.

Leaving France is bittersweet. Bitter in that it was a stupid idea to try and recapture a romantic time in my life for my children through a place, though I know the concept of boulangerie is nestled in their hearts and stomachs forever. Sweet in that we are on to the next adventure, a place none of us has ever been to before and discovery, for me, is travel at its best.

The next morning, after we take our wet laundry (still wet) off the line conceding defeat to several days of crappy weather, we head to the Laverie and spend the Gross National Product for 30 minutes use of a drier. (If you have to go to a Laverie more than once in Europe, you may as well invest in a drier, so why does nobody have one? My spoiled Inner American is warding off a tantrum over this after two weeks).

We return the rental car in Nice and hop a flight on Blue 1 to Helsinki. I’m playing a few days worth of blog catch-up and my computer battery is running out, so stay tuned for the next post as the adventure continues…

Quote of the Day: “You know, Mom, what I’ve learned about our family from all of this is that traveling really brings out the a**hole in each of us.”

Hannah, 15