Hello Saint Petersburg

Every spring Lauri sets a day aside to go out to his secret bogs in the wilderness of Finland.  He goes to check and see how the plants are faring.  If he does this, he’ll know exactly where to pick later in the summer, when the plants are just right.  On harvest day, he leaves home very early so as to not give away his secret or be followed – his neighbors know he harvests.   Lauri said he would lead a friend astray before sharing the location of his secret bogs, his beloved cloudberries. 

Cloudberries!!!  Who knew there could be such a delicacy?  Our first night in Helsinki we stayed with the parents of a friend of a friend’s, Lauri and Ulla.  They served us cloudberries, and, yes, their name (and even their shape) lives up to the experience of letting one float over your tongue.  It turns out these berries are something of a national treasure in Finland and are highly priced and sought after even in Europe.  Lauri hand picks them every summer all by himself – a very difficult task because for one, they are very hard to find, and for two, they only grow in bogs, and three, they are very fragile little things – little clouds.  Lauri hunts them year-after-year and we were privileged to have had them served over German ice cream. 























The hospitality and kindness that Lauri and Ulla showed us were the introduction to our whole experience in Finland.  Most Finns speak both Finnish and English, which is a good thing for us because Finnish is not a language you mess around with as foreigners.  When words start getting up into the 15 letter range you stop trying to sound them out anymore and you’ve given up hope for a cognate long ago so you just ask politely, “Excuse me, do you speak English?”  You’re always met with a smile.  We had a restful and fun time in Helsinki, Espoo and Porvoo.

We visited the great Sea Fortress, Suomenlinna

These guys are the guardians of the train station

                   EMMA museum in Espoo










Helsinki is beautiful, has that special charm that you only find in northern European cities, and is riddled with art deco style architecture.  Public transportation was great, and there were stellar views off the gulf of the many wind-swept forested little islands.

On Friday, we took the new high-speed Finish train, Allegro, from Helsinki to Saint Petersburg, arriving into Finland station in only 3.5 hours.  The train ride was amazing and, in my opinion, too fast.  I wanted more time to see the groves of aspen and birch and lakes flying past us out the window.  I wanted more time to read Tove Jansson to Hazel.  I wanted the train to go slower so I could see those quaint red and white little homes that are pervasively scattered throughout the countryside.  And (this is the kicker) we discovered halfway through the ride that the train actually had a playground in the last train car - we only had time to play there once between lunch, tea and lounging about.

Shortly after arriving, Dave set out with a real estate agent to find and secure an apartment while the girls and I settled down at a friend’s house.  The waiting was painful but, of course, Dave came home with great news about a wonderful apartment close to a metro stop.  Dave’s my hero.  We are now at home on the 8th floor in Saint Petersburg.  We have internet, we have a good water-filter system under the sink, and a balcony that wraps itself around the building and affords amazing views of the sunset – which is increasingly later and later each evening, much to my happiness and much to the confusion of our girls, who have to try to go to sleep with what seems to be hours before bedtime.  Dave will start working right away.  And I’ll start planning museum trips.      

                                       Hazel in our new kitchen with the sunset behind her