"Wow, clouds!" our son exclaimed once we got outside the Helsinki airport after 21 hours of masked travel from San Francisco. I'd never thought of it before but back in Northern California it's almost always sunny with clear blue skies. Clouds were actually a novelty to the kids! Awesome. It was end of July, 2020, and new experiences and learning more about Finland for kids (7, 10 and 12) was why our family had come to Finland for a 6 week visit... Oh yeah, and to escape rising Covid cases, online school and the infinite boredom of Covid lockdown in the US!
As always, we didn't travel light. We had a violin, a viola, carry-ons and two huge suitcases with us. We'd been frugal and as a consequence the rental car was small. Ends up it was so small our suitcases didn't both fit in. We had to check one of the suitcases in at the airport storage, then drive 25 mins to Klaukkala to my aunt & uncle's house to drop off my husband Joel and the kids. I then spent another hour driving back and forth to the airport to get the suitcase in a jet-lagged haze. Back in Klaukkala I set up the newly bought pre-paid Finnish mobile phone card, gobbled down my first Carelian pie (karjalanpiirakka) and forest mushroom salad (sienisalaatti) in a long time - thanks to my thoughtful aunt who'd left food for us - and collapsed into bed. We'd made it to Finland! Finland had no official quarantine in place, no one to check what you actually did after leaving the airport. And no free Covid tests at the airport were offered at that time yet. In fact, there hadn't been much communication about Covid at the airport either because we had arrived from within EU having transfered and gone through immigration in Germany. In typically trusting Finnish manner, there was a recommendation for incoming passengers to do a voluntary 14 day quarantine and the assumption was we'd automatically do the right thing. This probably works with generally highly responsible and rule following Finns pretty well... at least we as a hybrid Finnish-American family took the guidance to heart.
The plan was for us to sleep the first few nights at my relatives' house about 30 minutes north of Helsinki. They, like most of Finland in summertime, were at their lakeside summer cabin so we ran no risk of infecting them. From Klaukkala we'd head to an AirBnb summer cabin about 3 hours north in Rautalampi. We had rented it to have an isolated place to complete our 14 day voluntary "quarantine". After the quarantine we'd return to the Helsinki area for the kids to attend school as guests for 3 weeks until early September. We were optimistic, fueled by school district projections, that by then Covid would be better under control back home and kids would only have to do online school for a few weeks before the fall break and then staring school properly, in-person in early October 2020. (FYI - at the time of this writing March 2021, San Jose CA schools were still online...)
Finland has thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of lakes, and hence a lot of lakefront property. It would be uncommon to have a kesämökki with neighbors anywhere within eyesight so you can frolick around the cabin in any fashion that pleases you. Going to a cabin is very common as many families have them and Finns, like other Europeans have long summer vacations. They also in general love the solitude and being close to nature. My dad for example has a cabin and then bought an even more remote "back-up cabin property" in case the first lake got too busy. To Joel's dismay, playing loud music or being otherwise loud e.g. by waterskiing on beautiful "glass" would send shock waves of dismay around the lake - it just isn't done.
The summer cabin quarantine was fun. Definitely more fun than we'd had the whole lock-down spring. This was quite a luxurious dwelling with easy living as far as Finnish kesämökki (summer cabin) are concerned: it had electricity and indoor plumbing! (Both of which many cabins I've been to lack.) It even had a big, flat screen tv and since we don't have cable back home, the kids were fascinated with tv advertisements when it rained... I worked remotely: about 1/3 during the day and 2/3 late at night to match CA timezone. We picked abundant blueberries right outside the cabin and made blueberry pies, went out fishing in a row boat and enjoyed bonfires at night.
What this mökki didn't have a lot of - surprisingly - was mosquitoes. They are usually the bane of Finnish summer and they are abundant at mökki, especially before and after rain and in uncleared, bushy areas. However, at this cabin we were able to keep the insidious beasts at bay with a few mosquito coils (slightly smoking sticks you burn to deter bugs). We got to sit outside in peace and enjoy my favorite Finnish canned beverage "lonkero" (Gin Long Drink) in the long northern summer evenings with ~9:30pm sunset in August.
I'd bet every single mökki has one thing in common: a sauna. Saunas, the only Finnish word that has made its way into the English lexicon, are the heart & soul of a kesämökki! Naturally we also had daily saunas and swam in the lake - naked. For the unitiated, this is what happens in a sauna: you strip, go in and sit on sauna towels or butt pads to keep the benches clean. You then throw löyly (water) on the kiuas (stove with rock covered heating elements) and it gets very hot (80-100C which is 170-210F) and of course very steamy and sweaty. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you'll have a "bouquet" of specific type of birch branches that you "hit" yourself with called "vasta" or "vihta". The vasta works like a loofah and smells great in the process. (It leaves behind a big mess of leaves though so not for every day use.) For Finns it would be gross to get sweaty in the sauna wearing clothes, even a bathing suit, or sit with a towel wrapped around you as Hollywood seems to think sauna going happens. So you always go into the sauna naked whether it be at home, mökki, the public swimming pool (gender separated) or even a work team building evening. BTW, the American concept "dry sauna" doesn't exist in Finland. It would be considered an abomination by the Finns, like a non-alcoholic beer. What would be the point?
When we needed groceries we'd drive about 30 minutes to the nearest town and one of us would go in the store, garnering funny looks thanks to being the only masked shopper there. There was no water supply at the cabin. It took some work to find it but we eventually located the water well on the side of the road about 2km away. The driving directions to it had been a little fuzzy and the first time out Joel and the boys had stopped to ask a farmer for directions. The farmer spoke no English, the boys' Finnish was limited and Joel's non-existent so the water jugs didn't get refilled until a few outings later. We also found a ton of mushrooms in the forest thanks to the sporadic short rain showers, typical of Finnish summer. Mushroom foraging is a popular activity in Finland. Within my family we favor one type of mushroom (Haaparousku i.e. Common Lactarius) and given my limited experience that is the only one I would have been confident to pick. We saw none of those so we didn't get to eat any fresh wild mushrooms. We did see a fair number of the pretty but decidedly poisonous red and white Kärpässieni (fly agaric) though.
Beyond saunas, the other thing kesämökki have in common is makkara. Makkara (grilled sausage) is a mökki stable, basically like the national dish of Finnish summer. There are dozens of brands of sausage to choose from at any grocery store ranging in meat content from good to something that would be better just called flour... Finns cook the makkara either on a stick over a bonfire or a grill and enjoy it with sinappi (mustard), not ketchup.
Mustard by the way is a whole another story in Finland given it's the side kick to the ever-important makkara: The most popular brand is called "Turun Sinappi" which comes in packaging that might make Americans mistake it for toothpaste. A few years back, a multinational company which had bought the brand in the 90s, moved production to Sweden (and later to Poland). Almost overnight the makkara eaters of Finland switched to an alternative brand in protest and Turun Sinappi market share dropped from 60% to 40%. The "boycott" was so effective that in 2014 the production was brought back to Finland and now the Turun Sinappi is marketed with labing to remind people that it is "takaisin Suomessa" i.e. "back in Finland. Finns take their sinappi seriously!
After nearly two weeks of peace and quiet, plenty of saunas and overdose of makkara with sinappi, it was time to leave our forest safe haven. Onto the next phase of our adventure: heading back to civilization for the start of school!
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