Here we are in Finland. That's me in front of our rental car, a VW Golf. We had to get the Avis Rep to show us how to open the hatchback, that's the level to which we are experiencing culture shock.
This is the first country I've visited where I really can't decipher the written language; in other countries the words resemble either English, German, or French closely enough that I can figure out what's going on, but Finnish is a whole other animal. What's more, the place names are so longwinded, and to our eyes, similar, that it's hard to remember and distinguish one from another. Fortunately, many signs are in both Finnish and Swedish (Finland is a bilingual country like Canada), and Swedish is close enough to English and German to be understandable, eg Finnish: Sinna oelet taeaelae. Swedish: Du aer haer. German: Du bist hier. English: You are here. See what I mean?
Fortunately, everyone we've dealt with so far speaks English pretty fluently.
We are not off to an auspicious start. One of our bags got lost in transit, and rather than follow our initial plan to take off immediately from the airport heading north to Lapland, we are staying in the airport Holiday Inn for two nights. So far no sign of the luggage, but we'll be leaving tomorrow and will instruct them to forward it. Luckily, the missing bag is the smallest of the three and so far we've got along without its contents. And we have insurance.
Nevertheless, we managed to have a pretty good day today. We hiked around nearby Nuuksio National Park.
Vegetation here is similar though not identical to Canada. What the landscape ŕmost reminds me of is Scotland, if Scotland hadn't been deforested.
Typical Nuusio landscape. Rocks, Scots pine, heather, and
birches. They grow straight and very tall here.
We saw lots of birds, too, including our first European woodpecker, and the bird of the day, the hazel hen, actually a kind of grouse.
No comments:
Post a Comment