What's Baltic pine look like closer to home?

Here's a pic of a floorboard (and my size 8 foot) just to show you how wide their Baltic pine boards are compared to those we have in down town Kensington.

WWOOFing at Villa Westergärd

The first WWOOFing place I worked on was Villa Westergärd on the central south coast of Finland, near a town called Tammisaari (or Ekenaas in Swedish).  It is not an organic farm but rather a  ‘Tantric retreat’ where they do (you guessed it) Tantric yoga retreats and grow some organic veggies to feed themselves, the retreaters and the wwoofers.  

While I was here there were no retreats on the program, so I still don’t know what they involve, and there was just one other wwoofer.  We spent most of our time raking, weeding, getting stones and rocks out of the vegetable garden and picking nettles.  The nettles are dried and eaten over winter or, in my case, fried on the day in olive oil with garlic and chili and eaten with rice, a bit like you would do spinach.  They turned out to be surprisingly tasty (but that could have been helped by the copious amounts of garlic I tossed in).

This is what Villa Westergärd looks like

When I first arrived on 1 May, the surrounding countryside looked like this

and less than a fortnight later, it looked like this

There are chickens, dogs, cats and a goat (who turned out to be my favourite)

There are also Icelandic horses, not ponies,

including the oldest horse in Finland (37 years)

  

She’s the mother of the brown one above on the left and the one on the right is the dad.  When they told me she was the oldest horse in Finland, my immediate thought was ‘Please don’t die while I am here’.  Can you imagine the trauma?

This is what the wwoofers do - chop fire wood and build the wood pile 

and weed the garden

And this is the location 

which, in case you were wondering, is close to

neither of which is more than a dot on the map.  Mostly it’s trees and water around here, in fact lots of trees

and lots of water

as well as some non-organic neighbours

It wasn’t just the fluro green lawn that gave them away - it was also this (unless of course they are a not so secret terrorist cell)

These are some sunset pictures taken from about 9.45 to 10pm out of my bedroom window

Pretty isn't it?

Things you notice when travelling around

Travelling around a place like Finland, where the language is so far removed from English, you get used to not understanding most of it 

It even took me a while to figure out the place is bi-lingual Finnish and Swedish

 
Then occasionally you see something that is recognisable but obviously doesn’t say what you might think of immediately

or else has been helpfully translated into English but is so bizarre that you wonder what could possibly have inspired it

And then there are those occasions where the translation is surely superfluous  

Moomin heaven

Finland, particularly around Tampere, is Moomin heaven.  In case you don’t know, this is Moominmamma, one of the Moomin family, as imagined by Tove Jansen back in the 1940s.  All the Moomins are still going strong (even without the help of Disney)

As well as going to the Moomin museum in Tampere, you can also buy lots of Moomin treasures.  This is just a small selection of what’s available

 

And yes, much of it is clearly aimed at children.  But not all of it - there are the saucepans

 the towels

and if that's not enough, there are cups, bed linen, pencil cases and also scissors

 
(I bought a towel and was very tempted by the scissors).

A couple of other towns in Finland

From Helsinki, I caught the train to Tampere, Finland’s second largest city, where I stayed a night.  This is what the countryside looks like on the way to Tampere, before the spring time really kicks in

Tampere used to have a lot of manufacturing so there are a number of old mills,  warehouses and factories, particularly along the river.  Today most of these have been converted into shops and restaurants for the tourist trade

It was a weekend when I was there and the sun was out so there were lots of people sitting around waiting for something to happen

Some of them were working quite hard on this

Next day, I went to Turku down on the south west coast.  Turku is Finland's oldest city and was the capital before Helsinki.  Like Tampere, it has a river running through the centre, a brown muddy river right after the snow melts 

and on this river, there are a number of boats converted to bars.  Strangely enough, the liveliest of these was the Aussie Bar

There are lots of old buildings

and although it's a city, it feels more like a large town.  It even has a central market place where you can get 10 tulips for €2 

where you can get pots of daffodils, pansies, geraniums and even petunias (in April)

You can also get more types of potatoes than you would think possible

and (Spanish) strawberries by the truck load

There are also local handicrafts at the market, things like these 

and these

and even somewhere to put that one single apple you might just have lying around

Here are some pics of the locals, sitting about

standing about

riding about

and walking about

On 30 April, students all over Finland celebrate the end of their studies by getting out in the streets dressed like this

and then getting together in the main street where they place a white hat on a special monument at 6pm and put on their own white hats.  Graduates also get to share in the fun.  This is what it looked like in Turku just before 6pm with everyone trying to get up that hill in the distance

At 6pm, on go the hats

and afterwards the fun really begins

White hats on everyone

White hats of every kind

even on those who look a little young to have graduated

Well, almost everyone had a white hat

But be careful, here's what might happen if you play up in Turku