Finns have a somewhat smug saying: "It is like winning a lottery to be born a Finn". Well, it seems that statement has never been as true as in 2020...
Back in March 2020, our family was happily going on about our lives in San Jose, California. I, Pia, worked typically long Silicon valley hours in a med technology company building marketing data dashboards. My husband Joel juggled two different part-time graphic design jobs with his full-time role as Mr. Mom. Both of us, especially Joel, spent most of our "free" time in the car commuting to work and shuffling kids to-and-from school and between activities. The 3 kids, 12 and 10 year boys and a 7 year old daughter, were busy with competitive soccer (read "very expensive and time consuming hobby with practices all across town"), violin/cello/viola lessons, gymnastics, before school drama club and after school orchestra. I enjoyed my OrangeTheory classes and Joel following sports. Ours was very much your typical overscheduled US family life. Occasionally the kids' schedules even allowed us parents to socialize with adult friemds for dinners or fun evenings of cocktails & playing cards. And then Covid happened... Wednesday March 11 was my first day of working from home. That Friday we held the kids back and by Monday schools in our area had officially closed. The poor kids never even had a chance to pick up their belongings from school. We joined most other parents in the US in collectively sighing "shit" as we scrambled to figure what to do with the kids next. The first few weeks of the lock-down were a void with nothing organized offered by the school district. We improvised and came up with our own home-school schedule that involved a combination Khan Academy (math), Duolingo (language learning), art lessons by daddy and science/history etc videos and online lessons found by mommy. Planning the schedule and keeping the kids learning was effectively a full time job in itself.
As schools finally restarted, online and with limited hours, we settled into what seemed like the movie Groundhog Day existence. We all sat in front of our own screens and got on endless conference calls for work/school and even soccer trainings during the day. In the evenings we'd go for a family walk around the neighborhood, eat dinner, watch a tv show or a movie, go to sleep and then repeat it all the next day. Our interaction with non-virtual outside world was limited.
Joel did all the grocery shopping: true to his zany self, he entertained himself and the grocery store employees by wearing different masked looks at the grocery store. The rest of us only left home for jogs, walks or bike rides around the neighborhood. Now keeping the kids entertained to prevent them from spending all their day in front of screens became the full time job. By the time "school" (if you want to call it that) ended in June, we'd had enough. When I heard that schools would continue online in September - at the time for the first 6 weeks only - I was depressed. I didn't want the kids to continue with school that to me felt like a waste of time; they seemed to be just going through the motions vs really learning. (Granted, the online school and its limitations bothered us adults more than the kids. Kids adjust incredibly quickly and oddly they didn't seem to even miss their friends much. School was easy and they got to play more video games than normal so they were pretty happy.) At the same time, family worries hit us: We lost my beloved mother-in-law to dementia at Easter in Colorado. It was sad that, because of Covid, Joel couldn't fly to Colorado to see his mom when she was moved to assisted living the week prior to Easter. Even his dad and sister who were local in Colorado weren't allowed to visit her. Luckily my mother-in-law only had to endure that isolation for a few days. Meanwhile, my mother back in Finland was also showing serious signs of memory loss but was in denial about it. I was anxious to see her and get her diagnosed and figure out what next. We started toying with an idea: would it be possible to travel to Europe late summer despite Covid and go to school there? From what I could tell, Finland was handling Covid well and Finnish schools had only been online temporarily in the spring. My logic was that since the kids would likely learn little in the first few weeks of online school back in CA, if they were able to visit a school in Finland they'd at least learn something about Finnish schools. If we were luckly they'd pick up a little bit of Finnish language, culture and normal school learning along the way. After a little research we learnt that yes, travel to Finland or EU in general, was possible even in the middle of Covid... but not for Americans! They were barred from entering Europe. Only EU citizens and their immediate family members were allowed in. I also needed to see if I could get the kids into a school: I emailed the principal of a school that the kids' friends, who'd moved back to Finland a year prior, were at and pleaded my case (in Finnish): "Our kids would really benefit from connecting to their roots and getting a taste of the life of a Finnish kid, might they be able to attend a school as guests for a few weeks?" Because the kids have dual citizenship (they were born in the US where they've lived their whole life but I had had the lucky foresight to also take care of their Finnish citizenship which they get since I'm Finnish by birth), the principal agreed to accommodate my unlikely request!
Next thing we knew, it was July 28th and we were all packed up with our masks and hand-sanitizers on our way to HEL. (HEL really is the airport code for Helsinki!) First a packed United flight from San Francisco to Chicago and then a nicely spaced out Lufthansa flight from Chicago to Helsinki via Frankfurt. Traveling was actually surprisingly easy given how few people there were. No lining up for anything. Especially the Frankfurt airport was well set up to enforce social distancing... except for the insane smoking area that had maskless people stuffed in like herrings. Is nicotine an effective antidote to Covid-19?! At the check-in in Chicago we had been asked about our citizenship by the airline personnel. My and the kids' Finnish passports were an automatic "pass" but we had to produce further documentation for Joel. We had our marriage certificate from California and a statement from the Finnish population registry (concept to be explained in another post, I'd registered our marriage before applying for the US born kids' citizenships) showing that he really was part of this "Finnish" family. We were a bit nervous but it all worked out. Meanwhile we saw another traveller get declined entry onto the plane, for lack of an EU passport, even though he was apparently only transfering through Frankfurt on his way to India! When we got to Frankfurt we went through official immigration and customs. The kids and I waived our Finnish passports, and received a "willkommen". Joel, the "suspect" American, got questioned further but was allowed in once he again proved his Finnish family connection. That's all there was to it. Once we made it to Finland, we just walked out of the airport after collecting our suitcases since flights within EU are basically like domestic flights within the US. On this trip, the Finnish passports really seemed like a rare treasure. I jokingly called them our "Willy Wonka Golden Tickets", given how few there are thanks to Finland's small population; having one felt like once in a million chance you had to get the golden ticket in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. Indeed, when we got out in Helsinki, we felt like lottery winners!
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