Click here to see scanned entries from a trip Johanna and I took to Lapland, Finland - July 29-August 6

July 28, 2005
Thursday: (last entry for 10 days - Johanna and I are going to stay at her parents cabin in the north)

I had a hamburger for breakfast this morning, then spent a couple hours editing and getting a video online from the weekend at Mari’s cabin two weeks ago. I got an email from an old friend from junior high and high school, Zack Reed. I discovered a blog he was keeping yesterday and sent him a message. Johanna called to say that she got permission to take next week off work and travel. We are planning on going near the same areas that Lee and I had planned on before he messed up his knee and had to cancel his trip. Johanna and I will stay at her family’s cabin there for a while and hike and camp for a while also. The area is a 12 hour bus ride into the north of the country and we will be not far south of the border with Norway.
When Johanna got home from work, we played with our bouncy ball and drank a couple cranberry and vodkas. We have invented a new game where the ball bounces off a wall and the person who gets control of it gets a point. That little ball has been getting a lot of use, as we have been playing with it since we bought it at the Russian border last weekend. I guess we are easily entertained. We would probably beat up any little kids that tried to take our ball.
We left the apartment around 6:30 and went to Satu’s apartment to borrow her bike. Her guy friend was there again that we had wanted to meet the last time we were at her apartment. This time Satu invited us in to meet him. He has red hair and looks like someone I used to know a long time ago.
Johanna and I left after just spending a minute or so inside of Satu’s apartment. We got on the bikes and headed downtown, stopping at the university to use the bathrooms. I also pushed Johanna around on an appliance trolley while we were there. Downtown, we parked our bikes by the river and went into a clothing store so Johanna could look for some comfortable pants to hike in. She couldn’t find what she was looking for at the first store, so we went in to the Stockmans mall and found some there. We also got a couple more drinks at the liquor store in the basement, then got a bag of chips at a small store by the river. There were some video gambling machines in the store and a group of kids were using them that didn’t look any older than 13. The cashier was yelling at them and Johanna told me that she said “I told you already, your not 15”. So, I guess you have to be 15 to gamble….how did they come up with that age limit? After leaving the store, we went to sit by the river and wait for Mari, whom we were planning on meeting there. We sat in the grass and started drinking the drinks we had just bought at the mall. Mari arrived about 20 minutes later and we ended up sitting there for another hour. I had filled my backpack with beers from home, so we had enough drinks to last.
We next walked across the river to the area where the bar boats are. There was a big tent sat up along the bluffs there and some kind of music festival was going on, which had drawn a few thousand people to the area. We went on to one of the crowded boats and amazingly found an empty table on the third floor. Mari bought a cider that she shared with Johanna, and I drank a beer from my backpack.
Johanna wanted to go home after we left the boat, and Mari and I headed to a bar where a band was playing that she wanted to see. The bar is on the ground floor of a hotel right across the street from the downtown marketplace. This very plush bar contains multiple rooms and has room for hundreds. The bands were playing in an area in the back and there was a 12E admission charge. We wanted to sneak in and we almost did. One part of the wall was just glass panels that were designed to be easily removed. I was able to detach the bottom of one of the panels by just pushing on it. I then held it open as Mari entered, but a black curtain on the other side slowed her process. Just as I was about to enter behind her, a guy in plainclothes came up to us and yelled at some other employees to come over. Mari and I quickly walked away into another room and the guy just ignored us. It appeared that his only concern was securing the door and not kicking us out.
We ended up paying to get in and the band started soon after we arrived. We watched them from the dance floor. I still had beer left in my backpack, so we didn’t need to buy any. It would have been nice if we had been able to sneak in, then also not have to pay for beer. The band was good, but some of their songs did not really make good dance music.
We left after this band played, then walked to the spot that the bike was parked. I then rode the bike towards Mari’s apartment as she sat on the rack at the back of it. The bike doesn’t have any gears, so I couldn’t even begin to get both of us up the large hill that her apartment is on.
I then rode home and went to sleep after walking her to her apartment.

July 27, 2005
Wednesday:

I got an email from Lee this morning that said his injured knee had doubled in size overnight and that he would have to cancel the trip. I was planning on meeting him in Helsinki at the airport at 8:50 on Friday morning and spending some time showing him the city before we headed off to the north by bus. I was disappointed by the news, but I think he felt much worse about it. It was going to be his first trip out of the country and he has been talking about hiking and taking pictures in exotic areas of the world for years. Even worse, he might not get his money back for his plane ticket, which I am sure is a thousand dollars or more.
I had been planning on going out to finish my camping supply shopping later in the afternoon, but there was no longer a need to do that. I did call Johanna and see if there was any chance that she could take some more time off work and go camping. She is going to talk to her bosses.
I spent a couple hours in the morning doing laundry and cleaning up the apartment. I started working on Johanna’s website in the afternoon, but didn’t accomplish anything. I was trying to install a popup menu system that she wanted, but after a couple hours of unsuccessfully trying to get it to work, I decided that it would be too difficult for her to update after I left; even if I ever was able to get it working.
I was reading the news afterwards, and I saw that a city in India got 37 inches of rain yesterday. That is over one yard of rain! But, the article said that the same area got almost the same amount one day in 1910.
Johanna had taken the train to work this morning, so she got home a bit earlier than usual. We both fell asleep for a few minutes, then I went to the nearest grocery store while she studied for her statistics test. I bought us material to make hamburgers, and came home and cooked them with some pasta we already had.
She then continued studying until the Simpsons came on. She went off to bed as soon as it was over, which is at 9 o’clock; way early for me to go to bed. I watched a bit of the movie ‘Poolhall Junkies’ before going off to bed myself.

July 26, 2005
Tuesday:

I left the apartment around noon today to shop for camping supplies that I would need on my upcoming 10 day backpacking trip with Lee. I rode the bike to City Market and found that they just happened to have all the camping supplies reduced by 30 percent or more. I got a tent for 34E, a sleeping bag for 10E, a heavy duty air mattress for 13, and a couple aluminum water jugs for 1E each. The sleeping bag and air mattress were over 50% off and the jugs were over 80% off. What great timing.
I was not so impressed with the rest of the store today, which is almost the size of a Super Walmart. They didn’t sell any kind of rope or cables, which I needed to tie my things down to the back of the bike, and some other items I wanted were terribly overpriced; like a regular notepad for over $15! I couldn’t believe it when I saw that price, as there was nothing special at all about these notepads. They wouldn’t cost more than $5 in the States. And, if you wanted a little soft-plastic shoebox-sized container to put your office supplies in, it would cost over $20. Stupid.
I was again happy when I went to the checkout, as I found that all of my camping supplies cost less then 75E. Although, I will still have to find a small camp stove because City Market did not have the kind I was looking for. I didn’t have as much problem as I though getting the things to stay on my bike. I couldn’t fit the tent and air mattress inside my backpack, but it just so happened that a built in clip on the back of the bike held them perfectly.
Back at home, I opened up my camping supplies to make sure everything was intact, and to get rid of all the extra paper and plastic that they were packaged with. I will be borrowing Johanna’s backpack for the trip, so I got that out and figured out how it works and how my things will best fit in it. Everything fit great and I have quite a bit of room leftover for food and whatever else I bring.
Johanna did not get home from work until after 6 because she went to an exercise class with Mari after work. I spent that time getting our St. Petersburg pictures online. She brought some food for dinner home with her, and we had pasta, vegetables and potatoes. I got a couple bad emails in the evening. One of them was from my dad and confirmed that my grandma on my mother’s side had died. She had a stroke a couple years ago and had been unable to communicate ever since then. The other email was from Lee, who said that he had just badly injured his knee playing basketball, which may leave him unable to hike. I sent him an email back suggesting a canoe trip.
Johanna left again after dinner to go meet with Satu for a while. I stayed at home and watched the Simpsons, the reality travel show and the x-files. On the reality show, they made a family that takes hard partying trips and a family that takes yoga trips go on their vacations with each other.

July 25, 2005
Monday:

Everything was back to normal today. I got up at 8:30 and ate some bread and noodles for breakfast and unpacked my things. I spent much of the day writing journals from my trip this weekend. It takes so much time to catch up from busy weekends, that I think I will start writing the entries on paper and scanning them. I will surely do this during my 10 day trip to the north with Lee, which starts on Friday. I will just write clearly so it is easy to read.
Johanna was really tired when she got home from work around 4 o’clock. We took a walk to the second-nearest supermarket soon after she arrived home. There, she put some money on her bank card that I use to do laundry at the apartment’s facilities, and we shopped for dinner. We decided on mushroom pasta and watermelon for dessert….or should I say she decided on that. I always want meat with the meals, but she is usually anti-meat. I don’t think that she is that way for health reason, but because she honestly doesn’t like meat. I have repeatedly reminded her that she is an omnivore, but I can’t seem to get through to her.
The sun had gone behind clouds and it was a bit chilly on the walk home, maybe even less than 60 degrees. I have heard that temperatures in the Midwest US have been above 100 this week, so I guess I am not missing much there. However, when I am back home and enjoying the beautiful fall weather in October, it will be arctic here. I think the perfect migration schedule would be to spend summers in Finland, winters in the southwest US and spring and fall at home. Maybe someday…..
Back at the apartment, I made the dinner as Johanna studied for her statistics test, which is on the 8th of August. Later in the evening, we drank a bottle of wine as we watched the Simpsons and what I think was the last episode of the X-files.

July 24, 2005
Sunday(Leaving St. Petersburg):

Our bus was scheduled to leave at 10 this morning, so we got up at 8:30 and packed up all our things and took our bags downstairs to enjoy the free breakfast once more. I was not sure if I would be allowed in the restaurant because I had lost a card that must be shown at the door. But, Johanna still had hers and the doorman let us both in when she showed it. The harp player that been present during our first breakfast was again absent from her position and the harp had been moved to the side of the stage. After our meal, we went out to the bus, which was parked in front of the building. We put our bags underneath it then took our seats. I am glad we got on board early because it filled up and a few people that were traveling together did not get to sit together. One very drunk man stumbled onto the bus carrying 3 beers in-hand. He began periodically singing short tones and verses as the bus began its journey.
We had a couple stops before reaching the Russian border. Our first was in a luxury neighborhood that was about 30 minutes outside of the city. This area was along the shores of the Gulf of Finland and was filled with many multimillion dollar homes (maybe not that expensive in Russia), many of which were designed in the same types of architecture that is popular in the city. Among these homes was a magnificent white church that looked kind of like the castle at Disneyland. Our bus stopped at the church for 10 minutes and everyone was allowed to go take a look. The sun happened to be out from behind clouds at the time and I got some great pictures of the building. We went inside for a few moments, but church services were going on and there was barely room to move with all the tourists and worshipers. I felt bad being inside as soon as I realized the choir music emanating from the building was coming from a real choir that was trying to perform for a real congregation. Back on the bus, the drunken man was getting drunker and we realized that he was not the only one. A couple other men were now drinking and had joined him in short bursts of song a couple times.
Our next stop was in the old captured Finnish city that our bus had passed through on the trip to St. Petersburg. Johanna went shopping at the large marketplace at the center of town and I walked down the hill to the old castle. I was disappointed when I got to the gates because I realized that I did not have any Rubles to pay the few cents that were required to enter. I wasn’t too disappointed because I still got some good pictures of the outside of the building. I next walked into the center of town and came across an old crumbling clock tower that tourists were allowed to go up into for 30 Rubles. Two girls were sitting at the base of it collecting the money and selling some crafts. Since I didn’t have any money, I walked into the marketplace and looked for Johanna as I browsed the vendor’s booths. Johanna gave me a few Rubles when I saw her and I took it back to the girls at the clock tower. I went up several flights of old wooden stairs to get to the top and found a couple other people and an employee up there. Two younger guys were using an old-fashioned film-plate wooden camera to take pictures of the scenery. The whole town could be seen from the top because the clocktower was on the hill at the center of the city, but the clouds were blocking almost all of the sun. I took a few pictures, then walked back towards the bus because it would be leaving soon.
I took a very interesting short detour along my walk. I passed one of the many old abandoned buildings and noticed it had its front door partially opened. I at first walked past, but then decided to go back and take a look. It appeared to be an old apartment building that probably had been abandoned since the end of the war. The lobby was full of shattered wood and trash and old clothes. It smelled strongly of urine. I was a bit uncertain to go any further because I though it could possible be some kind of criminals trap for any lone tourists that see the open door and curiously enter the building. But, I couldn’t resist at least going a little bit farther. The building appeared to have once been an elegant place to live. A wrap-around marble staircase went up 5 or six stories. The staircase appeared to be well intact, so I slowly walked up towards the second floor. As I passed the windows of the inner wall, I saw that the building was square with an open air courtyard that had trees, weeds and vines growing almost to the roof. This was truly a cool place to explore. The rooms on the first floor appeared that they could have been very dangerous to enter because the wooden floors were quite rotten. I badly wanted to go on up the staircase farther, but I just had a few minutes to get back to the bus.
I got back to the bus on time, then we continued on to the border. There was a line of trucks stretching a few miles from the border, and it did not appear to move at all as we waited in the car line for 30 minutes. This seemed like such a bad thing because trucks are so important for the economy, which was obviously not very good already. Russia may still have a long way to go before it gets rid of some of its old inefficient communist ways of doing things. It again took our bus a while to get over the border, but we were the first bus in line today and things happened much quicker. But, there was still just one customs agent stamping the passports of all bus passengers that passed through. The drunken man could not stand up in line without holding on to things. After getting our passports stamped, another agent outside checked all our passports again before we were allowed to get back on the bus. Our next stop was a duty free shop between the Russian and Finnish sections of the border, where Johanna and I bought some chips and a liter of Vodka for 9 Euros. Then, another mile down the down the road, all the non-EU citizens had to get off the bus and go in to a temporary construction building and talk to Finnish customs agents. A young man asked me how long I planned on staying in Finland and why. I told him that I had a girlfriend there and he asked me if she was Finnish, then let me go. He got on the bus after he had checked the non-EU citizens and made sure that all the other people on board were really EU citizens. He saw me sitting next to Johanna and smiled at us.
Our next stop was a 40 minutes lunch break just over the Finnish border, where we had also stopped for lunch on the way to Russia on Thursday. Johanna and I did not eat because we had just each had chips and chocolate, but we did do some shopping at the grocery store there. We killed the rest of our time by buying a bouncy ball, called a Super Pallo in Finnish, and playing with it in the building. We just bounced it back and forth across the floor until it was time to get back on the bus. Very exciting.
We both slept most of the way from the Russian border to Helsinki, which took at least 3 hours. Our only other stops were to let most of the other passengers off in Helsinki and a 15 minutes break at a convenience store 45 minutes outside of Turku. Just outside of Helsinki, the drunken man went to the front of the bus and sat next to the driver while he drank. I thought that there was a real chance he was just going to fall over the steering wheel and wreck the bus. At this time, the driver told the man that he would be kicked off the bus if he got one more complaint. He had been harassing a few people, especially an older man and the teenage-looking Russian girl in tight pants that this man had picked up in Russia. The drunken man twice asked the couple in Finnish how long that they had been together. Johanna told me that the first time the man said 5 years, then it was 2 years the second time. I am sure both numbers were a lie, but he probably changed it so he didn’t look like a child molester. Johanna and I had been watching the interesting forced interaction of this couple during much of the bus trip because they were sitting two seats in front of us. They even got into a little fight once. It reminded of seeing the hundreds of sex-tourists in Thailand; all older men accompanied by unhappy little 18 year old looking Thai girls.
As our bus entered the city of Turku, I asked Johanna to go ask the driver if he would stop as he passed an area that was very near the apartment. He told her that he was already planning to stop there and let the drunk man off, so it would be no problem. This saved us about 25 minutes of extra walking from the bus station. The bus stopped right next to the big statue of the pink pig-duck. The bus was pulled over on the edge of the highway and we had to get our bags out of the side that faced the busy roadway. I thought the stumbling drunk man, who was now barely able to walk, would surely get hit by a car, but I never heard any screeching tires or anything.
Back at the apartment, Johanna and I watched the last half of Cheaters and ate some instant noodles for dinner. Cheaters featured a cheating nymphomaniac lesbian/bisexual tonight. I watched Taken afterwards. It is a ten part series and I will miss the final two episodes because I will be traveling with my friend Lee then. But, our plans are a lot more fun that watching Taken. I checked my email after the show was over and saw that Carolyn had forwarded me an email from the manager of Schnuck´s, Tom, which asked if I would like to start working again when I return home. It is nice to be invited back.

July 23, 2005
Saturday(In St. Petersburg):

Johanna and I got up earlier this morning than yesterday so we would have more time to see the city. We got to the hotel’s free breakfast around 8:30. The harp was still on stage, but nobody was playing it this morning. There were a lot more people eating today and the staff had set up another buffet at the other side of the large restaurant.
Our first business of the day was to get yesterday’s pictures put onto a CD so we would not run out of space on the camera’s memory card. I have been using Johanna’s camera all summer because mine takes low-quality still pictures. Her card is only 125 megs, and it fills up quick in a 4 megapixel camera. The first photo store we found was supposed to be open at 9 o’clock, but we arrived after 9 and it was still not open. A couple customers were outside angrily beating on the windows and doors, but nobody came to let them in. We walked on another block and found a large camera store with some friendly girls that put our pictures on a CD for about $4. They forgot to give the memory card back and I realized that just before we were about to leave. We also bought a couple extra batteries for the camera because I forgot to charge the rechargeable ones last night.
We next walked back the hotel and got on the subway there. At the downtown station, we transferred to another line and went to an area on the edge of the city where a large cemetery was located. I had not heard anything about the cemetery, but I wanted to see it because I had seen how huge it was on a map. The area we got off the subway at was much rougher looking than the downtown area, and Johanna did not like it or the idea of going to a cemetery there. She at first tried to find it with me, but we had some trouble and had to return to the subway station a couple times. I could tell that she was really not enjoying herself, so I convinced her to take the subway back downtown and do some shopping while I looked at the cemetery.
I then quickly found the cemetery using a map that was posted near the subway station. It was just a couple blocks away in a very rundown residential area of ugly high-rise apartment buildings. I was completely shocked at what I found in the cemetery. I came to a black metal fence with a thick forest behind it and I figured that the cemetery must be back there according to what I had seen on the map, so I walked along a path into the woods. Nothing about the area looked friendly and I did not like the idea of being seen with an expensive camera there, so I carried and empty wine bottle that I found lodged in the fence. Just as I was beginning to wonder where the cemetery was, I realized that I was in the cemetery. The graves were all back in the woods, completely over-grown and deteriorating. There were some very small paths leading into the woods off the main path, and I walked back to take a closer look at the tombstones. Most of the graves had some kind of a stone or metal cross marking them, and about half of the crosses had fallen over. Many of the markers were homemade using pipes or wood. The whole area was littered with a large amount of trash, and it appeared that homeless people had been living on some graves. One grave had charred wood from a fire on it and a pair of blue jeans had been hung to dry on the cross. I just couldn’t believe it. I have been visiting cemeteries whenever I travel and I have never seen anything like this, especially not in a cemetery this size. Walking on, I realized that there must be tens of thousands of graves here, almost all of which were being overgrown in the woods like what I had first seen. I was so engrossed in what I was seeing that I barely noticed I was being eaten alive by swarms of mosquitoes.
I began to see a lot of other people as I neared the center of the cemetery, so I put the wine bottle down. There were maybe a couple hundred local people out visiting graves and laying flowers and lighting candles. So, well kept graves with candles burning could sometimes be found in the woods among the wasteland of deteriorating graves. One of the most extreme things I saw was an old mausoleum near one edge of the cemetery. This once-nice brick and metal structure was about 30 feet high and must have been the tomb of a very rich person. Three sides of the structure were open to the air and the inside was sprayed with graffiti. The metal roof was rusting away and wood had been torn out of the inside to build small fires next to the structure. There was just a hole filled with trash in the center of the floor where the where the casket and body should have been. I wondered if the family had removed it or somebody else had. There were also many other collapsing metal structures in the cemetery, which had been built over some graves in certain sections. Each and every one of these metal structures was rusting and collapsing onto the graves they housed. I will never forget this cemetery.
There were also a couple newer areas where most of the graves were being taken care of by family members. I did see a couple grounds keepers using a tractor from the 1950’s or 60’s, and it appeared that the place was just grossly understaffed and underfunded. Almost all of the work being done to maintain the graves seemed to be done by family members. All that I could tell that the staff had been doing was putting a few rocks on the muddy paths. To their credit, I also saw some of them weed eating a treeless area where the graves had been completely overcome by high weeds and bushes. But, their powerful weed-eaters seemed to be doing even more damage to the already pathetic looking gravestones. I recorded some video footage of this cemetery, and I will get it up as soon as possible.
It began raining again as I headed back to the subway station. I sent Johanna a text message when I arrived downtown. I didn’t dare actually call her because the woman in charge of our tour group had warned us that using our phones could cost us up to 3 Euros per minute. While staying in the country, I received about 10 automated text advertisements from phone companies advertising their great services. They better be great. Johanna replied to my message saying that she had not gone shopping after all, but had decided to visit an island that she wanted to see. She was already back to the hotel by the time she got my message, and agreed to meet me in the subway station a bit later.
In the meantime, I decided to do some shopping for her birthday, which is tomorrow. I first took a picture of an advertisement with a picture of a cat that she said looked ‘psychotic’. I then went to a photo store near the subway station entrance to have the picture printed out. They charged me less than a dollar and asked me to come back in 40 minutes. During that time, I walked around a huge mall that is in the same building that the subway station is. The mall wraps around 2 levels of this very long building and must contain over 500 small stores and couple larger ones. I needed to use a bathroom and eventually had to ask an employee where one was when I could not find it on my own. I was not too surprised when I found that each bathroom visit cost 10 Rubles. There are not too many free bathrooms in this country. I next spent some time shopping and eventually decided to buy Johanna a box made out of pine wood with designs printed and carved onto the lid of it. I then went to pick up the picture of the cat, which unfortunately turned out to have a bright reflection across the middle of it.
Next, I got lost for a few minutes in the mall as I tried to make my way back down into the subway station, where I had planned on meeting Johanna on the platform. Once I found her, we got on a subway headed to the northern part of the city, where I wanted to go and see some buildings that were mentioned in our book. The rain was still falling when we got off the train, but ended quickly after we began walking. We stopped to eat at an Italian restaurant that advertised pizza and pasta on their sign. We had planned on ordering the pizza, but discovered inside that they did not actually sell pizza. We ordered two waters to drink from our waitress and she brought us two carbonated ones in glass bottles. She had asked if we wanted carbonated or uncarbonated, but she must have misunderstood us. I ordered lasagna to eat and Johanna had spaghetti.
After the meal, we went out in search of the things we had come to see. A few blocks away, we passed a gigantic 700 foot long square building with a sculpture of the old communist logo on top of it, called the House of Soviets. A courtyard in front of the building contained a big bronze statue of Lenin. We walked on hoping to find the Chesma palace and church, but did not see it. I showed the picture of the church in our book to a couple people on the street and they pointed us in the right direction. The first guy I showed the picture said “me woman know”; his wife was in a porta-poty and told us where to go when she got out. We eventually found the church behind the House of Soviets building. It was much smaller than we expected but was a completely unique kind of building. It is pink and white in color and has a clover shape, high walls and an intricately designed roof. Johanna laughed because it was so small and we had spent a lot of time trying to find it. We didn’t look for the Chesma palace because at that time we incorrectly thought it was the House of Soviets building. And, like all other things in this city, this church cost money just to look inside, so we didn’t go in.
We next decided to take the subway back downtown so Johanna could do some shopping at the mall in the building that I had been to earlier. We accidentally went three subway stops too far and had to go back to get to the mall. Once there, we split up so we could both look at things we were interested in. I also wanted to split up so I could try and fix the reflection on the picture of the cat that I was planning to give to Johanna for her birthday tonight. I bought some markers and used the red one to color in the white reflection, which was on a red background. It didn’t look perfect, but not bad considering the circumstances. I wrote a short note on the back of the picture and it became a kind of custom birthday card. Shortly after we had split up, Johanna sent me a text message saying that she was already ready to leave. I met up with her outside and bought a carton of cigarettes from a vendor next to the subway entrance for 75 Rubles, which is less than $3. That is just as cheap as Chinese cigarettes.
We then went back to the hotel, stopping at the store in front of it to buy a couple more drinks. Back in the room, I said I was going outside the room to smoke, with the real intention of getting Johanna’s gifts ready. The pine box had been wrapped in paper by the cashier I bought it from, and I unwrapped in and put the card and some things I had brought on the trip with me to give her inside, then rewrapped it and returned to the room. I then had to get even with her when I got back to the room. She had been ‘scoring’ all day by touching my stomach with her head, and the score was 16-1 in her favor. I had been promising all day that I would get even when we got back to the room, and get even I did. After a few minutes of wresting her down and wearing her out, I pinned her in a position that allowed me to score 30 times consecutively. I couldn’t let her win just because it was her birthday.
We next went out for her birthday dinner at a Japanese restaurant just across the street from the hotel. It was a really nice place, but not many people were eating because we arrived after 9 o’clock. I asked our waitress how to say ‘thank you’ in Russian because Johanna and I were feeling bad that we did not know. A family with a little dog came in as we were finishing our meal, and the dog was flipping out. The restaurant manager was sitting at a table nearby giving the it bad looks. I tried to pay for the meal with my Visa debit card when the bill came, but the waitress said that they did not accept credit cards. This was the second nice restaurant we had been in today that did not accept them, which seemed weird considering almost every small business did. So, Johanna had to pay for her birthday dinner because I did not have any more Rubles left.
We returned to the room after the meal and had the drinks we had purchased earlier as Johanna open her gifts.

July 22, 2005
Friday(in St. Petersburg)

We had the free hotel breakfast at 9 this morning. They had breads, cookies, vegetables, fruits, juices, sausages, eggs, pancakes, bacon and other things to choose from. It was set up in the main restaurant on the bottom floor and a harp player performed on a stage during the meal.
It had rained all night and was still raining after breakfast. The rain had mostly stopped by the time we arrived downtown on the subway. We decided to walk along the main street today, which is called Nevsky Prospect. The subway station we got off at was in the middle part of this 2.5 mile long street, so we decided to first walk one direction, then take the subway back to the center and walk the other direction. The first direction we walked took us all the way back to our hotel, which is at one end of Nevsky Prospect. The sun was starting to emerge from the clouds by this time, so we picked up our sun glasses from our room before taking the subway back to the center of town. We then walked the other direction on Nevsky Prospect, which is where most of the tourist attractions are. We first took some pictures and went inside Kazan Cathedral, which we had seen last night. The beautiful inside of the building was full of both tourists and worshipers. We then walked to the nearby Church of the Spilled Blood, which has kind of the same roof design as the Kremlin. It would have been really great to see the inside of this huge church, but it cost almost 10Euros to get in and we decided that there was plenty else to see. A wedding had just taken place in the church and the wedding party was walking out as we passed.
We next ate lunch at a café near this church. We sat in an outdoor section of the building that was underneath a tent and had a grass turf floor. Johanna ordered Chicken Kiev and I had beef stroganoff. Like yesterday, we were surprised at how tiny the portions were when they arrived, but it was at least good. There was a lot more sun after the meal, but the clouds were still blocking the light about half the time, which was not good for some of our pictures.
Walking on, we came to a 4 story tall arched passageway built into the side of a building. After walking through it we realized that it led to another one of the most famous sites in the city, which was the massive courtyard in front of the famous Hermitage Museum. The museum was the most impressive of the buildings that surrounded this courtyard, but all of them were beautiful. We walked into the courtyard of the museum and took a break as we looked at our book and decided where to go next. This massive building and its courtyard are probably the nicest areas of the city. The building is painted in light green and the many intricate fixtures on the sides of it are painted white. We decided not to go in the museum at this time because we had heard that the queue to get in is long between 10 and 3 o’clock.
Walking on to see other sites, we passed a building where a few large statues were designed to appear to be holding up the roof. Multiple weddings had just taken place in the building and at least 3 brides were outside having their pictures taken by the statues. I next stopped at one of the city’s many pay-porta-potties, which cost about 30 cents per visit. Porta-potty visits are almost never pleasant, but this one was my worst ever and I will not even describe the terrible scene inside. We next passed a couple more cathedrals, one of which is called St. Isaacs and is another one of the main tourist attractions here. It may be the largest of all the cathedrals in town and also has the unique roof design that we have seen on many of the other buildings here. The center of the roof is designed kind of like the US Capitol building, and the spires on the two front corners of the roof have large gold spheres at the top of them. Again, it would have been nice to go inside, but we didn’t do that because of a large line and another entry fee of nearly 10 Euros.
We then walked around looking for chocolate pie in cafes. Johanna had seen chocolate pie in all of the other cafes we had been in earlier and had now decided that she would like some. It turned out that we could no longer find a café with chocolate pie as soon as we tried to look for one. We ended up buying ice cream from an outdoor market place that we came across. As we ordered the ice cream, I watched an employee in the booth making herself a snack out of two pieces of bread and a whole uncooked fish that weighed probably a half pound.
There was a subway terminal at this marketplace, so after eating our ice cream, we took the train towards a place called Peter and Paul’s Fortress. We got off the train a few minutes walk from this place and came across a church that was decorated in blue ceramic tile. The design was a bit different than the other churches and I think it had Arabic writing above the doors. Johanna sat down in grass at the front of the church and realized that she had ants all over her when she got up. Because of her fear of some insects, mainly butterflies, I was surprised that she made a gentle attempt to get the ants off without killing them.
We then walked on to the small island which is the Peter and Paul Fortress. The main attraction on this island is a church with an elegantly designed interior, which is called St. Paul’s Cathedral. The outside of the church was nice, but nothing compared to some of the other building we had seen earlier in the day. The interior of the church was already closed for the day, but I am sure it would have cost 10 Euros to enter anyway. We walked along the outside walls of the fort after taking a couple of pictures of the church. The shoreline there had been paved with smooth rocks, and many older local people were using it as a beach. More people were swimming and sunbathing in the grass near the front of the building, which did not look very comfortable considering the grass was about a foot and a half high and there was almost no sand.
We next took the subway back to the hotel and saw a large fire burning across town from our hotel room window. Black smoke was filling the air above the city and 30 year old fire trucks were sputtering towards the scene. I don’t think any city or emergency vehicle here is newer than 1980. We have even seen the police working on their cars when they break down on the side of the roads. Ambulances are no better. The city’s street rail cars and buses look like they have never been washed and both the interiors and exteriors are falling apart. I looked in some as they would stop, and could see that the floors and walls were covered in dirt. But, they’re cheap.
We next left our room to go out in search of dinner. After casing a few restaurants and deciding against them, we choose a Chinese place that did not have any Chinese employees. Our waitress barely knew a word of English, but the menu was in Russian and English, so we were able to work things out. We were expecting the portions to be as small as they had been on our previous two restaurant visits, but they were not and we ended up ordering too much. We had sesame chicken, pine seed beef and rice with vegetables. Johanna got full before half the food was finished and I almost finished the rest of it by myself.
On the way back to our room, we again stopped to buy a couple drinks at the same store we had bought them from last night. It had just started to rain again, and as I was ordering, some kind of electrical short happened in the power lines at a business behind where we were standing, which made a loud bang and buzzing sound for a couple seconds, but didn’t seem to cause any real damage.
As soon as we got back to our room, some kind of amateur fireworks display took place on in front of the building. It happened on grass that was on a small median between 4 lanes of heavy traffic, and the display had at least a hundred different powerful explosions. Two guys were lighting the fireworks constantly until they ran out about five minutes later. It would have been a nice show if it had actually been dark out.

July 21, 2005
Thursday:

Johanna and I got up at 3:45 this morning so we would be on time to catch our bus to St. Petersburg at 5:00. We left the apartment at 4:15 and it was already quite light outside. The sun was already coming over the horizon by the time our bus left at 4:53.
We had to change buses 1 hour later at a small gas station somewhere. I don’t really know why we had to do this because the other bus was with the same tour group and traveled with us throughout the trip. Our new bus was almost completely empty until we got to Helsinki, then it was mostly full after picking up more passengers there. One American woman got on in Helsinki, which was the one of the first Americans I had seen in months.
The buses stopped just before noon at a big food and souvenir store near the Russian border. The store was separated into several different businesses and had a cafeteria style restaurant, a grocery and hardware store and a couple small souvenir shops. I ordered a double cheeseburger and fries from the restaurant and Johanna had mashed potatoes and a hot dog. The cashier dispensed Johanna’s mashed potatoes into a dish by putting it in some kind of machine under the counter that sounded like a garbage disposal. When the machine was finished, she had something in her dish that resembled grits, but she seemed to like it. My helping of French fries was huge, but they and the double cheeseburger were not at all good. I am not even sure that the patties were really made out of meat. We walked through the souvenir shops after eating and saw a moose head for sale for almost $4000 and antlers for nearly $1000.
Crossing the Russian border took over an hour and a half and Johanna told me that truck drivers are sometimes forced to wait for days because of the inefficient system. We first had to wait for the passengers of several buses in front of us to wait in a single passport checking line before we were allowed to enter the line. The process could have been sped up a lot if the Russians had been making use of the other 3 passport inspection lines that went unused.
Our bus had to stop again at Finnish customs after we had passed the Russian part. There, an agent boarded the bus and looked at everyone’s passport again. He put Finnish exit stamps in the passports of all passengers who were from non-European Union countries. EU citizens don’t get stamps when they travel to and from EU countries because a passport is no longer required for that kind of travel. They can enter other EU countries with any other kind of official ID.
The Russian landscape was quite a dramatic change from the Finnish side of the border. The first few miles of our trip was just through rural areas, where the only real differences were the poor condition of the roads and the many local people sitting at the side of the road selling berries out of buckets. The differences became more obvious as we passed through some small towns, where the buildings were crumbling and trash littered the ground. We stopped at a small store in one of these towns and we found that the prices of most things was now less than half of what it had been a few miles back before crossing the border. We got a bottle of water there for 30 cents, and looked at some CD’s at a booth outside that were 1.5 Euros each.
Another one of the towns we passed through really caught my attention because of its many large decaying buildings that appeared to have once been very nice. The lady in charge of the tour group said that it was once a large Finnish city that had been taken by the Russians during World War II. The downtown area was built on a hill and an old castle was at the base of the hill. The city appeared to have never really been the same after it came under Russian control. Many of the abandoned buildings downtown did not look to have repaired since the end of the war, even though the city now has a population of 200,000 Russians.
The drive to St. Petersburg took about another hour and a half. The highway between the border and the city of 5 million people was just two lanes in most places, and there seemed to be no such thing as illegal lane usage. The shoulder on both sides of the highway was used as an extra half-lane, and there seemed to be no problem with passing and running oncoming cars off onto the shoulder. Most of the large trucks and buses just stayed on the shoulder unless they wanted to pass another vehicle. I can guess that the soft sandy ground on the edge of the shoulders has led to many accidents. The bus had seatbelts, and we put them on after watching the chaotic highway scene for a few minutes. I later was not surprised when I noticed that dozens of roadside memorials were scattered along this stretch of highway.
A tourist book that Johanna rented from the library had warned us to avoid the police if at all possible because they have history of taking advantage of people, especially tourists. This appeared to be true as we traveled along the highway, as each of the many police cars we saw had one or multiple vehicles pulled over. Our bus was even pulled over once, but I never found out what for. Two police men were sitting at the side of the road and leaning against their old worn-out police car. One of them motioned for the bus to pull over as we passed them. The bus driver took his wallet outside and talked to the cops, but I could not see if he gave them any money. We were back on the road about 5 minutes later. We also saw a lot of military personnel after we had crossed the border, some of which were standing at the side of the road and holding automatic weapons. They were still present as we traveled farther from the border, but they no longer seemed to be brandishing their weapons so obviously.
We hit the outskirts of St. Petersburg around 3:30, passing through residential neighborhoods that were a wasteland of large disintegrating homes. Most of these old homes still appeared to be inhabited. There were also a few very nice new homes behind tall fences in this area. Every few hundred feet along the highway here were entrances to old fallout tunnels. They were little round buildings with a radiation symbol and the word ‘Tunnel’ written on them. There were many roadside vendors in this area that were selling flowers.
The areas closer to downtown were a mixture of long-abandoned industrial areas and much nicer large buildings. We arrived at our hotel near the downtown area at 4:30, and the check-in process for our group took 30 minutes and was handled by the woman in charge of our group. She kept all of our passports after she had shown them to the staff at the counter. The hotel is called the Hotel Moscow and has over 500 rooms. The bottom floor contains a large two-level restaurant, bowling alley, and a couple bars. The upper floors have a grocery store, hair salon, restaurant and several souvenir stores. The rooms are nothing too special, but they are decorated with hard wood and each one has an alarm system that can be activated each time you leave the room. The best part about our room was a view of a big canal. We each paid about $35 per night for the room, which was probably quite expensive by Russian standards, but it was nice to travel with a group because neither of us had ever been to the country before.
We were exhausted after getting to our room and we fell soundly asleep for over an hour. We then decided to find a subway station that was supposed to be nearby and go downtown. We did not find the station on our first attempt and spent an hour walking though some industrial areas in the rain. The mostly-light rain had begun soon after we had arrived at the hotel and continued the rest of the night. Once back at the hotel, we realized that the subway entrance was in the same building as the hotel. We at first did not understand how to get through the subway turnstiles and had to go back to the hotel and ask a girl at the front desk. She wrote ‘We want 4 tokens’ on a piece of paper in Russian and told us we could show it to someone at the subway ticket booth. We did this and an old woman at the booth gave us 4 coins. We each had to put one of the coins into the turnstile before it would allow us to enter the subway system.
The escalator down to the trains was the longest I have ever seen. I had thought the escalators I had seen in the Helsinki subways must have been some of the longest in the world, but the ones in St. Petersburg are much larger. They move at regular speed and the ride seems to take about 5 minutes. You can barely see the people at the bottom from the top. The subway platform we arrived had steel doors that opened when a train arrived. The train we got on looked to be about 50 years old and was made partly of real pine wood. The lights flickered and the whole train shook violently as we left the station and hit full speed, which was not too fast. The sound in the train car was deafening and hearing another person talk is very hard unless their mouth is next to your ear.
We walked around in the rain for a while after arriving downtown. Johanna had at least thought to bring an umbrella. I stepped in a deep hole in the middle of the sidewalk that was filled with water, which made some women behind me laugh. In our search for a place to eat, we came across one of the main tourists attractions in town, called Kazan Cathedral, which is a huge semi-circular shaped building that is lined with several dozen pillars. A crazy woman was marching in the rain on the lawn in front of the building. The grass was dead in the pattern that she was marching and I thought that maybe she had been marching long enough to kill the grass.
We found a café to eat at on a street across the road from Kazan Cathedral. Its menu was on the wall and was printed in both Russian and English. We both ordered a chicken fillet and fries with a soda. We sat at a high table in by the window and our food was brought to us a few minutes after we had ordered it at the counter. We had originally though the price was good, at 3 Euros, but the small size of the portions changed our minds.
We took the subway back to the hotel after eating, then bought 4 beers from a little store just outside the entrance. All of the stores by the subways have their products displayed behind glass walls. The cashier talks to the customers and the exchange happens though a window that is barely large enough to fit a bag of chips through. Tonight, I just said “cold beer” and the cashier luckily understood me. There are very few people in this country that seem to speak any English, and the ones that do have such heavy accents that I am sometimes not sure if they are even speaking English at first.

July 20, 2005
Wednesday:

I rode the bike to the post office to mail a couple postcards and letters at 11:30 this morning, then went to the library so I could scan my passport on a computer. Rain began falling on the way there and came down harder after I arrived. The library did not open till noon and I had to wait a few minutes. I don’t know why they wait until noon to open because there were at least 10 people waiting to get in today, and people were trying to get in almost two hours before opening time yesterday. When the librarian opened the door, I was the first person in line to request a computer, but all the other people had already reserved computers before opening time. There was one computer available, but it was not the one with a scanner, so I signed up to use that computer at 2.
I then came home for an hour and returned just before 2. An old lady was still using the computer I needed because I was 5 minutes early. She left just on time, but forgot her umbrella and I handed it to her when she came back for it. I tried to leave as soon as I was done scanning the passport, but the rain had started coming down hard again, so I used the computer until it stopped. I then rode to the area of the bus station to run an errand before returning home.
The heavy rain came again soon after I returned home, and then continued on and off all day. The giant mushroom I was drying on the balcony got wet and I noticed that dozens of maggots were crawling out of it and onto the side of the building. I sprayed hair spray on the mushroom and shut the window. I thought hair spray would run them away, but I don’t think it made much of a difference.
After Johanna got home from work, we made dinner of the things that were left in the fridge because we are leaving at 5 AM for our 4 day trip to St. Petersburg. I helped her begin building her website after dinner, but we didn’t get very far. Satu came over for about 20 minutes to give Johanna a birthday present. Her birthday is on Sunday and her Name Day is tomorrow. She did not open the present tonight because she wants to open it on her birthday.

July 19, 2005
Tuesday:

I got up at 7:30 when Johanna went to work, then had leftover horse sausage sandwich for breakfast. I still have two horse sausage links left to eat. I spent much of my time today getting about 200 pictures and a video online. I want to get caught up on all that stuff before school starts again, because I won’t have a lot of time for it then.
I walked to the library across the street at 10 because I wanted to scan all the pages of my passport. It is always a good idea to keep copies of a passport, and it would also be nice to have a copy of all the stamps I have collected. I keep good track of it all the time, but you never know what can happen. I could not make the copies today because the library did not open till noon. I sat by the door and wrote a couple letters because it looked like it was about to open early, but it never did.
I ran some new statistics software when I was working on my site today and found a lot of interesting things. The best information was that it has had hits from almost 20 countries, many of which were repeated. One person had found the site by typing the word ‘dyed poodle’ into their search engine. I tried the same search on Yahoo and Google, but it didn’t work. Maybe my dyed poodle picture from Bangkok has been published somewhere in the world….I would probably never know. Another interesting thing to see was that robots and spiders have been to the site repeatedly over the past couple months. These are kinds of software that are used by search engines to discover and categorize new web sites. They just randomly follow links on the Internet and discover new sites that way. They can only find a website if it is linked by others. I never registered my site with the search engines, but they all seem to know about it know by using this kind of software. The statistics software also made me aware of a couple people I know that have websites that they were keeping secret or just hadn’t bothered to tell about. I even discovered my sister had such a site the other day!
Johanna and I took Satu’s mattress back to her around 5 o’clock. Satu had let us borrow it while we had guests last week. Johanna and I were being like the gossipy neighbors tonight because Satu had a guy over and we were trying to peek in the door when she took the mattress from us. We didn’t even get a glimpse of this mystery man.
We next went on a rollerblading trip downtown to run some errands. We first tried to go to the currency exchange and get some Rubles for our trip to St. Petersburg on Thursday. The line there was long, so we decided to first go to a pharmacy, then back to get our money. I exchanged 50 Euros for about 1500 Rubles. Our next stop was a grocery store across the street, where we bought some chicken, peas and potatoes for dinner. Johanna also bought some fresh peas at a booth outside the store.
Back at home, I started our dinner cooking. Johanna had thought she picked out chicken leg quarters at the store, but I was happy to find that she accidentally got chicken breasts. I helped her with her website while the chicken cooked. We have not started building the site yet, but almost have finished with the setup.
Johanna went walking with Mari after dinner, then I watched the Simson’s, that vacation reality show and the X-files.

July 18, 2005
Monday:

I got up about 8:30 this morning and had noodles and a ham sandwich for breakfast, then started cleaning up the apartment and doing laundry. It took quite a while because I didn’t do any of that stuff last week while people were visiting. There is a sign up sheet in the laundry room for each of the two washing machines that are available. It just so happened that the only time all week that anyone had reserved a machine was at the exact same time I wanted to use them today. Someone had signed up for machine 2 at 10 o’clock, so I used machine 1 to wash the first load, then put the second load in when I went back to put the first load into the dryer. I didn’t dry the second load because it was just mostly towels that I could easily hang on a drying rack that is on the wall of the bathroom.
I spent most of the afternoon catching up on journals from this weekend. I was surprised to notice that my website got a hit from Bosnia/Croatia this weekend. I don’t think I know anybody there, but maybe a cat just jumped on a keyboard or a stray bullet hit a computer and caused it to malfunction. I will probably never know, but I assume it was some kind of accident.
I did not expect Johanna to get home from work until the normal time, but she arrived just after 3 o’clock. We later took a walk to the second-nearest supermarket to turn in some empty bottles and shop for dinner. I had a big sack of all kinds and sizes of cans and bottles. We put them into the recycling machines that automatically scan them somehow and determine how much of a deposit you get back. The 1.5 liter soda bottles are worth 40 cents and other things are usually worth 10 to 20 cents. The machine would not accept some of our plastic water bottles. In total, we got back 3.5E.
I saw a sign by some sausage in the store and I asked Johanna what it meant because I thought the sausage might be on sale or something. She just made a weird face and said that the sign was advertising a new product….horse sausage. To her dismay, I had to buy a package. We also bought some pasta and vegetables for dinner, then walked back home. Johanna would not touch the horse sausage without extensive coaxing. I cut up 4 little pieces and put it on her plate among her other food. When she was finished eating, all that was left was the 4 pieces of horse sausage. She said that she could not eat anything with a name, but I eventually got her to eat a very tiny piece. I didn’t think it really tasted much different than pork sausage.
We watched the Simsons after dinner, then I helped Johanna start to get a website set up. We used the same hosting service I do that cost $4 per month, and we registered the name johannamaki.net for $4.99. She wanted johannamaki.com, but that site was already taken by some young Finnish violinist.

July 17, 2005
Sunday:

Johanna and I slept in until noon today, and the others were already up and had eaten breakfast before that time. I made myself eggs, toast, ham and coffee, but Johanna wanted none of that and just had some bread. Anu and Jenni packed up and left sometime around 1 o’clock.
I went down to the lake and sat on a swinging bench for a while. I recorded some video of clouds passing that I want to put into time-lapse. I then took a boat out onto the water by myself for a while and agreed to pick up Mari and Johanna on the beach after they spent some time using the sauna and swimming. I saw them waving at me after I had been on the water for about 30 minutes. I picked them up then, but they got cold after just a few minutes, so I took them back to shore and docked the boat.
Mari’s mom and her boyfriend arrived at the cabin around 3 o’clock. Her mom teaches English and talked to me quite a bit, but her mom’s boyfriend spoke very little. Her mom told her that she now has an American accent after hanging out with me during this summer. We had some sausages, potatoes, watermelon and ice cream for lunch, then Mari’s mom took us to the Parkkano train station.
After an hour, we had to transfer to a different train in the city of Tampera, which is one of Finland’s main cities and has about 200,000 people. The train to Tampera had been nearly full, with probably 1000 people on it, but the train to Turku had a bit of empty space on it. Mari fell asleep on the ride and I took some pictures of her, which Johanna said would make her mad if I put them on the Internet.
We arrived back in Turku at 8 o’clock and decided to share a cab because we had a lot of things to carry. We were the first in line waiting for a cab, but we were standing in the wrong place and a few other people got in front of us before we realized where the real line was. The cab driver took Mari home first, then Johanna and I. The short ride cost nearly 15E. Just getting in a cab here cost 7E.
We had the driver drop us off at the nearest grocery store, and we bought some bread and hot dogs for dinner. We got home in time to watch part of the second half of Cheaters. We ate our dinner afterwards, then I watched Taken, bit it didn’t all make sense to me since I missed last weeks episode.

July 16, 2005
Saturday:

I got up that 10 this morning and Stefan was the only other person awake yet. He said he had already locked himself out of the cabin and that Mari had heard him knocking and let him in. I used the coffee maker to make some coffee for us, and we also ate some bread. We watched some TV after the food, then the girls got up around 11. I had a sandwich as the girls ate breakfast, then we all headed down to the lake. There, we walked out onto a long finger of land that stretched out into the water. There were lots of biting flies there and lots of dead flattened frogs on the path. After our walk, we stopped at the lodge for a few minutes before returning to the cabin.
We had expected Mari’s friends Jenni and Anu to meet us around noon, but Mari called them around that time and they said they were running a couple hours late. We all had a couple more snacks, then went back down to the lake to use one of several free row boats that are available there. The boat we choose was just large enough for four people and had one set of oars in it. Stefan was the first one to row, and I took over after him. There was a small rock sticking out of the water near an island at the center of the lake. The rock was just big enough for one person to stand on, so I got out of the boat, then had the others row away and take some pictures of me standing on the rock. The pictures looked like I was surrounded by lots of water, but the island was actually within 30 feet of me. The others took their time getting the boat back to me, then we all went onto the small island, which did not even have the land mass of a football field. There was a small one-room cabin in the woods at the center of the island, but a window had been broken out and the inside was trashed. We found a coat rack at the far end of the island and Stefan joked that we must have entered the island on the wrong side. I videotaped Mari putting her coat onto the rack.
We next rowed back to the cabin so we could meet Mari’s friends when they arrived. They arrived mid-afternoon with a fuzzy little 17 week old Chihuahua. They are a couple in their 20’s that Mari has known for the past few years. After they unpacked their things, Anu, Johanna and Mari all took their car to the grocery store to buy food for tonight and tomorrow. Jenni stayed and sat at the picnic table with her little dog, and Stefan and I walked back down to the lake because he wanted to see it once more before he left. We had heard thunder for the past hour, and it began raining hard as soon as we got to the lake. We went to the lodge and stood under an umbrella while it rained. I then went inside and bought a pack of cigarettes and Stefan bought a coffee. We tried to sit outside while he drank his coffee and I smoked, but the rain was getting us wet and we moved inside.
The rain eventually stopped and we walked back to the cabin and I helped Stefan pack all of his things into the car. The others had arrived back from the store at that time. Stefan said goodbye to everyone around 6 o’clock before heading back to Helsinki, where he will stay tonight and leave on a flight home to Germany tomorrow. The rest of us all then sat out on the porch and talked for a while as more thunderstorms passed. The power briefly went out a couple times and one strike of lightning was close enough for us to hear a tree being shattered. Anu was joking around about eating his small dog before dinner, and I told him that the price per pound would probably be too much to do that. He then told me that the little Chihuahua was currently worth about 1000 dollars per pound at its current weight of 2 pounds. I told him that I had never petted a 2000 dollar dog before.
We spent the first part of the evening drinking beer and talking on the porch while the dog slept between us on the table. We later moved inside and Anu and Jenni put it into a little cage on the floor. I don’t think it ever stayed awake for more than 30 seconds. While inside, I converted the game of 20 questions into a drinking game and we all played a few rounds before going to the lodge. I snuck in several beers and the rest of the whiskey, which we all shared as we sat in a room with live local music and dancing. The people dancing were mostly all older couples who were doing some kind of traditional dance. I went out to dance with Mari a couple times and we ran into several people as we attempted to imitate their moves.
We went back to the cabin after the bar closed, then Anu, Mari and I decided to go swimming. I got ready to swim, then waited for the other two on the porch. They never came out, so I walked to the lake by myself after waiting a few minutes. There was a group of about 15 drunken people my age skinny dipping at the lake. I got in the water with them for a few minutes and joined in a splashing war that they were having. I then walked back towards the cabin and saw Mari on her way down, so and I went back into the water with her. She talked to some of the skinny dippers on our way out of the water. The one that was doing most of the talking was just wearing a white cowboy hat. He told Mari that they had thought I was very rude because one of them had earlier asked in Finnish to borrow my towel and I just walked away. I did not even know that anyone had been speaking to me. I let the guy who had wanted to towel borrow it and he told me I was ‘alright after all’.

July 15, 2005
Friday:

Stefan and I went to Mcdonald’s this morning because there was little left to eat in the apartment. There were some sprinkles this morning and it was the first unpleasant weather that Stefan had seen during his trip to Finland. After eating, we went to a lake that we had seen earlier in the week along the highway on our way to the city of Rauma. The lake was about 20 kilometers north of Turku and the clouds and sprinkles were moving away by the time we arrived. We first sat on some grass next to the lake and I build a tiny little cabin out of sticks and leaves. We next went to the beach area of the lake and sat there a while longer. There were only a couple people at the beach because of the clouds earlier.
We next went back to the beach on Ruisallo island that we had been to yesterday, and today went to the same rocky area, which was next to two lone pine trees. A strong breeze coming off the lake made the air feel almost chilly at times, but the sun usually made it just warm enough to be comfortable. We watched some wind surfers as we sat on the rocks. Stefan used to be a very good wind surfer and he told me some things about how the sport works. He said that the wind surfing speed record it about 75 kilometers per hour, which really made we want to try it out. One of the surfers we watched was having a terrible time with his board, so I videotaped as he repeated fell off.
We left the island around 3 o’clock so we could come home and pack our things for the planned weekend trip with Johanna and Mari to Mari’s family cabin in the north. Johanna was already home when we arrived because she had left work early and taken the train home. We left the apartment around 5 o’clock to pick Mari up before leaving town. In the parking lot, I wrote down the phone number on a car that was being sold for 100E, which I thought could be a good way for my friend Lee and I to get around Northern Finland when he comes for a visit at the end of the month. I called the number and the lady who answered did not speak very good English. I was at least able to understand that there was some kind of serious problem with the car, which I had highly suspected before the phone call.
Our next stop was Johanna’s and Mari’s hometown of Pori, which I had been to my second weekend in Finland when I met Johanna’s parents. There, we first went to Mari’s mother’s apartment. Her mother had been gone for 3 weeks on a trip to France, so mail exploded everywhere when we opened the outer door of the apartment. Once inside, I looked for pictures of Mari, and she quickly went around hiding all of them as soon as she realized what I was doing. We next met Tuomo downstairs so he could deliver our alcohol from Estonia. Johanna and I had given him our leftover currency the day we left Estonia, and he had agreed to purchase as much alcohol with it as possible and bring it back to Pori with him. He had a friend with him and they were getting ready to go see the new Batman movie. We gave us two cases of beer and a bottle of whiskey before going off to see the movie with his friend.
We next walked to a nearby grocery store and bought some food and supplies for the evening and tomorrow morning. On the walk back to the car, we noticed that an old Mercedes was being sold in the parking lot for 250E. I also wrote down that phone number. It was another hour and a half drive to the cabin, and Stefan’s small rental car was not filled completely with luggage, food and alcohol. We passed a couple interesting things on our drive today. We had earlier seen a town called Nasti as we were leaving Turku. It is pronounced just like the word ‘nasty’. I was thinking that there must be a Nasti sewage treatment plant, Nasti Mcdonalds, etc. The other interesting thing we saw was an area of the highway that doubled as an airport runway, which was probably large enough to handle a Space Shuttle. The highway was only two lanes, but the shoulder on either side was also at least that large. I at first thought that Mari was joking when she told me it was a runway, because it was in the middle of miles and miles of forest. She said that it was an emergency runway built just in case any planes ever have to make an emergency landing. We joked around about how weird it was to build a giant runway in the middle of rural Finland in the very off chance that a large plane would someday have to land there. We said that they should also build a hospital to treat any wounded, and a restaurant and hotels for the non-wounded. The lucky staff could then work there a whole lifetime and probably never see a single patient or customer.
Mari’s family cabin was a few miles from a small town called Parkkano. It is a time-shared log cabin in a pine forest with several dozen other identical cabins. The cabins surround a good-sized lake and there is a lodge next to the lake which contains a restaurant and bar. Mari’s family gets the cabin for 4 weeks out of every year. We first had to pick up a key at the lodge, then went to the cabin and unloaded our things.
We did not arrive until sometime after 10 o’clock. Mari first built a fire, and Stefan and I went down to the lake to take some pictures of it and the sunset. Johanna then cooked us all some sausages on the open fire and Mari cooked some potatoes on the stove. Johanna and Mari cut out Taro Cards from a Cosmopolitan magazine after dinner and we played with them at a picnic table on the porch. The back of them was in Finnish and I read the text of the ones I picked up. I had no idea what I was saying, but I was surprised to find that the girls could actually understand most of what I said. I used to read to read to Johanna in Kaisa in China, but they would understand almost nothing.
Stefan later went in the cabin’s sauna, and Johanna and Mari went in it after him. The girls teased me about not going in, but I don’t think I will ever get used to the concept of summertime saunas when the temperature is over 70 degrees. We all walked down to the lake after everyone else had been in the sauna. The girls had also teased me earlier because I had said that I wouldn’t swim because it was not quite warm enough. But, at the lake, everyone chickened out except for Mari. Back in the cabin, everyone but me went back into the sauna at least one more time before going to bed.

July 14, 2005
Thursday:

Stefan and I had last night’s leftover chicken for breakfast this morning. I also ate a leftover cube steak from a couple days ago. We then drove to Ruisallo Island, which is where the RuisRock concert was last week. I did not realize we were looking for the same island until we got there. It would have saved us a lot of time if I had known, because we spent a while lost on the way there while we tried to follow a map. We drove all the way to a beach at the end of the island today, which is 5 miles, at the most. There were just a couple dozen people there at first, but more and more were arriving all the time. A camping area was located behind the beach, which was just a large mowed field that did not allow campfires. Camping is just not camping without a fire. Rocky areas were on either side of the beach, and Stefan and I walked along that area for a while until we found a nice spot to sit under a couple pine trees. The weather was even better today, with barely a cloud in the sky and temperatures in the low 80’s. Yesterday had been nice too, but the temperature today was a few degrees cooler.
After sitting on the rocks for a while, we decided to go out in search of lunch. Our first stop was at a hotel restaurant a short drive from the beach, but we did not eat there because it looked quite expensive and not all that nice. Our next stop was a yacht club near the middle of the island, where we found a very peaceful restaurant next to a pier filled with yachts. Lots of things at this restaurant were also very expensive, but we found a small lunch buffet available for 6E. It was set up in bowls on a table, and had potato salad, vegetable salad, regular salad, breads and pickled herring. It was not the kind of buffet I was used to, but it was good and I ate a lot of it. We had our food at a deck outside, then walked down to the pier to ask about renting a small boat for a couple hours.
Nothing was available to rent, so we drove on down the island, stopping at the area where the RuisRock concert had been. That spot was still in the cleanup process, which was a huge job considering there had been 25,000 people a day there for 3 days last week. Most of the trash had been picked up and all the massive stages were long gone, but some fencing and porta-potties remained and were being loaded onto trucks as we walked along. Every blade of grass in the entire park had been trampled and killed, and it did not look like the area would fully recover before the end of this country’s short summer. The beach looked especially pathetic because it has very course and rocky sand, which was surrounded by the brown wasteland. I found a huge mushroom on the ground as we were walking, which appeared to have been ripped off a tree in the woods sometime during the concert. Surprisingly, it was unbroken, so I wrapped it in a towel and put it in the car on the walk back. We also sat by the water for a few minutes and I took some pictures of the barren landscape, which I plan on putting together with my concert pictures to show the ‘before and after’. I took some of the pictures in the exact same spots as I had taken them last week when thousands of people had been in the area.
We next left the island and drove back to the apartment. We stopped along the way so I could stop and pick up my Russian Visa from the travel agency where I had applied for it last week. I had the option of having it delivered to me when Johanna and I get on the bus to Russia next week, but I did not like the idea of someone else having my passport for that long. The visa takes up a whole page of my passport, which is probably going to be full of stamps and visa’s before it expires. I have heard that passports are invalid once all the pages are full, and that I will have to get a new one.
Stefan waited for me in the car while I went to get the visa, and the mushroom was really smelling up the car by the time I returned a few minutes later. Stefan is bothered by strong smells and looked like he might get sick if we did not get out of the car soon. Back at the apartment, I put the mushroom out on the balcony to dry in the sun. I plan on making it into a wall decoration if it dries well and quits smelling.
Next, Stefan and I walked to the river and rented a canoe at a small business by the dam. A woman and a younger girl where working there. The woman tried to get the girl to wait on us when she heard our English, but the girl was too shy. Stefan showed the woman his passport and filled out a short form before we were given oars and life jackets out of a shed, then led down to the canoes by the river. We were told that we had one hour before closing time and that we had to carry our canoe back to a shed when we were done with it. Stefan and I turned out to make quite a clumsy rowing team because we had a constant problem keeping the boat moving straight. We were constantly having to switch our rowing arms, but our inefficient methods did at least get us down the river. We rowed against the very slowly moving current for about 30 minutes. We came to a hand-cranked ferry just as we were about to turn around. There was a pedestrian path on both sides of the river and the ferry was how people crossed it. The ferry had 4 cranks on it and crossing the river appeared fairly easy if all 4 cranks were being used. We once saw a guy on a bike trying to cross by himself, though, which looked like a very slow process. Near the ferry, we found a small drainage canal, which we tried to get the canoe down. We passed within 5 feet of a family of ducks there, which did not even bother moving off of the log where they sat. We came to a culvert underneath a highway after going down the drainage canal for about 75 feet. I tried to convince Stefan to row into the culvert, but he said he was too claustrophobic for it, so we turned around and rowed back towards home. We stopped once along the way to climb onto some rocks, then got back to the dock just before closing time. We carried our canoe to the canoe shed, then took our oars and life jackets back to the other shed.
We next went home and got ready to go out for the evening. We went back downtown at 7 o’clock and met Johanna at a Chinese restaurant there, which is the same one we got take-out from last week. We had the buffet today, which is upstairs. It was the smallest Chinese buffet I had ever seen, but the food was great. We were given fried bananas for desert. An employee brought the desert before we were finished eating from the buffet, which I think might have been to slow us down. Whether or not it was intentional, it did work on Johanna and I, who did not end up going back for our planned second helping. Stefan was not a fan of fried bananas, so he ended up just eating the ice cream and going back for seconds.
Johanna went off on her own to meet with Mari after the dinner, and Stefan and I went onto one of the bar boats to have a drink. Tonight, we decided to try out the boat that always is playing dance music and has younger people on it. We had a hard time finding an empty table and had to borrow chairs from other tables. I ordered a beer for myself and Stefan had a cappuccino or something like that.
Next we went out in search of the gay bars in town, which I had told Stefan earlier in the week that I would do with him before he left town. I have known he was gay since I first met him in Florida and I know he usually likes to check out the gay bars in places he visits. I took him to Club Traz one night when he was in Carbondale last summer. Although these bars can at times be difficult for a straight person to endure, I long ago got over my fear after being taken to them by friends and living in an apartment above one in Key West for three months while I worked for the owners construction business. Our search tonight almost ended up a failure, but we did eventually find the only gay bar in town. Stefan had a tourist book which listed two of them, but they both appeared to be closed. We walked to the areas that they were supposed to be and Stefan asked about them, but the people did not seem to know anything. He also had gotten the name of a third one from the Internet, called Studio. We at first couldn’t find that one either, and a guy on the street told that there was no bar called Studio on the street we were looking. We briefly walked into a small bar that was in the same spot where we thought Studio was supposed to be. It was full of weird looking locals and looked like it could be an interesting place, but we wanted to walk back downtown and look at some of the larger bars there. We had pretty much decided to give up on our gay bar search when Stefan noticed the word Studio a couple doors down from small local’s bar we had just left. We at first thought that Studio was no longer in business because dusty black shades were pulled down over the windows and nothing about the place looked open. I then noticed that a red light was on behind the shades and we heard some music coming from inside. A sign on the door said that the bar was open from 10-2 each night. It was almost 10 o’clock at that time, but the door was locked. We noticed a doorbell on the door, and Stefan rang it after a couple moments of hesitation. Nothing happened and we started walking away. A few feet down the street, I suggested that we wait a few moments and see if there is any activity. A tall, skinny, middle aged guy dressed in all black came walking down the street a few minutes later, and Stefan said, “There comes a customer”. I wasn’t so sure about that, and I told Stefan I would really be surprised if he was right. The man walked on past the gay bar without even a slight pause and continued down the street. Just after I told Stefan that it looked like he was wrong, the man did an about-face and went directly to the gay bar and rang the doorbell. The door opened a couple seconds later and the man went in. We then went back to the door and rang the bell again. We were buzzed in this time.
The bar was almost completely empty except for the bartender, who spoke very good English. The main room of the bar was not very large and just had a few stools by the bar and 5 or 6 tables. There were a couple other rooms in the back and the bartender told us that there was also a downstairs ‘dark room’, which Stefan said is a common concept in European gay bars. He told me that porn is usually played at the entrance to the room, and inside is a pitch-black area where people just have all kinds of group sex. I would hate to have to clean such a room at the end of the long night.
We sat at stools at the bar for the whole 4 hours it was open. All drinks were only 2E during the first hour, so I ordered a few cranberry and vodkas. The bar had a couple dozen men in it after the first hour. I did not dare explore the other rooms after hearing about the existence of the ‘dark room’. The only person we talked to during the whole 4 hours was the bartender. I was scared to talk to anyone else because I feared that I would have to flee the area if any men invited me ‘downstairs’. I was probably the youngest person in the building and I tried not to notice that several of the men kept looking over at me. If you are a normal looking young guy and you ever wanted to know what it must feel like to be a beautiful woman, then just go to a gay bar for a few minutes and see how the old guys look at you. You will forever have sympathy for good looking women everywhere.
We walked back downtown after the bar closed at 2 o’clock. We stopped at another bar there that is just across the street from the marketplace. This bar had many tables and people sitting outside, and karaoke going on inside. Stefan wanted me to sing ‘Born in the USA’, but the queue was too long. We then noticed that lots of people were going up and down a stairway that led to the basement. We walked down and were surprised to find a big nightclub with a few hundred people in it. I checked my bag, then ordered a beer, which I could not believe was only one Euro. Stefan and I went onto the dance floor for a while and noticed that not many people in the club appeared to be over 18 years old.
We left the club sometime after 3 and went home.

July 13, 2005
Wednesday:

For today’s sightseeing adventures, Stefan and I went to two towns north of Turku. We had some bread and coffee for breakfast at the apartment, then left sometime around 11. The first town we went to, called Rauma, is a World Heritage site because of its historic downtown area. It is 85 kilometers north of Turku, so it took us a little over an hour to get there. The weather was perfect today, so the drive through the countryside was great.
Once we arrived in Rauma, we parked the car in a lot and walked around looking for the old section of town. There was a map at the lot, but we ended up walking a little bit off course and had to stop at a bakery and ask for directions. A lady there gave us a free tourist map and told us where to go. Stefan ordered some cheesecake and ate it at the store before we left.
The old downtown area was only a couple blocks away. We first stopped at the church and had a look inside. We noticed that the doorway to the large steeple was open as we were leaving, so we walked up the narrow spiral stairway to have a look. The first room was just after 10 steps or so, and was filled with dusty objects that looked like they could have been a couple hundred years old, like an antique organ, tools, etc. The area didn’t look like it was supposed to be open to the public, but there were other tourists coming down the stairs. We walked up another flight of stairs and a woman was standing at the top of it to block any more people from going up. It appeared that some tourist may have opened the steeple door and was then followed by many others before the church staff knew what was going on. Although the lady who stopped us wouldn’t let us go any further, she was friendly and opened a door next to her to show us a room full of clock tower parts. She wouldn’t let us in the room, but told us about the stuff before we were sent back downstairs.
We next walked to the center of the old downtown area. There was a small marketplace there that was surrounded by old buildings on all sides. These old building stretched out 3 or 4 blocks in all directions of the marketplace. Rauma is not the oldest city in Finland(Turku is), but they have preserved their downtown area better. Other cities also have many old buildings downtown, but they are often mixed with newer ones.
Next, Stefan and I went to the edge of the old downtown area to look at a cemetery and church ruins. The cemetery was large, but not as old and as nice as the big one in Turku. I did find a couple graves from the 1790’s, but most of them were new. We walked into a small stone church at the center of the cemetery and I noticed that the basement door was propped open. I walked down the stairs and found a very dark room that was about 30 degrees colder and full of black wooden caskets. We next went on to the church ruins near the cemetery. There was not much left of the old building, except for about 3 or 4 feet of the walls and several grave monuments in the yard. The oldest grave had a date of 1763 on it.
We walked back towards the car at 3 o’clock, stopping to have lunch at a Hesburger near the parking lot. The old-style automatic doors of the building opened in my face when I entered and shut on me when I left, but my pita burger meal was great.
We next drove almost all the way back to Turku, to a city called Naantali, which Johanna and I had rollerbladed to a few weeks ago. I was glad to be going back to the city because Johanna and I had never really explored much. Today, we found a place to park a few blocks from downtown, then walked to the central church, which was much more massive than any others I have been in. The inside was not as finely decorated as some of the others in this country, but the huge size made up for it. We saw the date 1793 on the outside of the church, but that was probably just the last time it was rebuilt.
The church sat on a hilltop overlooking the town and the pier. We found a very nice little yellow lookout building at the highest point of the hill. We went up and took some pictures and there were only a couple other people there. Next, we walked to a small beach that was on the opposite side of the hill from the pier. There were a hundred or so people there swimming and sitting around. A lot of kids were enjoying some diving platforms that had been built in the water. We ended up sitting on the beach for about an hour, and I fell asleep for at least a few minutes.
After leaving the beach, we walked along the pier on the other side of the hill. The area is lined on one side with several nice restaurants, and on the other side by dozens of large pleasure boats. We walked back to the car after leaving the pier, then drove back into Turku. There, we picked up Johanna at the apartment and then went to the Turku public pool, which Stefan had been wanting to go to after seeing some pictures I had taken there. We found a parking area near the pool, then walked up an extremely steep shortcut path that led up the backside of the hill that the pool is on. The bottom part of the path was just dirt and falling would have probably meant sliding back down the whole hill. A stairway and a real path were at the top of the hill, and it was a shortcut directly to the pool.
Once we paid our fees and got inside, we sat on the grassy area above the pool. Johanna and Stefan both swam, but I was just happy to sit in the shade. We stayed there for about an hour, and left just a few minutes before the 8 o’clock closing time. On the walk back to the car, Stefan took a stairway path down the hill, but Johanna and I went back down the steep dirt path. Going up had been hard, but the other direction was even more of a challenge, although we never fell down.
We next took the car to a supermarket that is a few blocks from her apartment. There, we bought a reduced package of marinated chicken drumsticks and boneless chicken breasts, frozen vegetables and potatoes. We also got some frozen berries to make a desert with later. I was going to buy a bottle of Vodka, but the liquor store in the building had already closed at 8 o’clock.
Back at the apartment, we ate our food about 9 o’clock, then had our ice cream and berry desert about 30 minutes later. We then took turns using the Internet and watched parts of a movie called ‘Birthday Girl’ on TV. Johanna later turned the channel to watch ‘Sex in the City’. I may have mentioned before that we only get five channels because Johanna’s TV is old.

July 12, 2005
Tuesday:

I got up when Johanna went to work this morning and used the computer until Stefan got up around 9 o’clock. I then made us scrambled eggs, toast and cooked ham for breakfast. We left the apartment at 11 because we wanted to go on a cruise that left the river from the downtown area at noon. We parked the car in a parking garage, then walked out to find the boat that the cruise was on. I had called a travel agency about the cruise earlier in the morning, but the information they gave me turned out to be wrong. We could not find the ship they had described, so I called them again and talked to a different person this time. This person apologized for the previous bad information and said that a ferry boat would be going to an island at 2 o’clock from the same area that the nonexistent cruise was supposed to leave from.
We had two hours before the ship left, and we spent the first hour sitting outside at a nearby restaurant, where I just drank some water and Stefan had latte. During that time one of the things we talked about was a new type of automobile speed monitoring system that the company he works for had bid on. The system is being built for the United Arab Emerates and will electronically issue speeding tickets based on a GPS calculation of a cars speed. The system will know the speed limit on every road in the country and may someday track every vehicle in the country at all times. Drivers are supposed to get two warnings from there car when the system had determined that they are exceeding the speed limit. A ticket would then be issued the third time. The country wants to put this system in place because of a history of bad accidents caused by speeding.
Stefan and I walked to a small store before getting on the ship so he could buy two rolls of film. The cruise lasted for a bit less than one hour, and we sat outside on a bench at the top of the ship. I ordered two pear ciders for us and discovered that it was actually beer when I got back to our bench. I took it and returned it for the cider. The route to the island was quite scenic after we left the industrial area by the harbor and then started passing small islands with nice homes on them. Many of the homes had very fancy little boathouses on their docks.
The boat dropped us off at the island at 3 o’clock, then left with a load of people headed back the other direction. The island had no roads at all, just paths that were big enough for people and a few ATV’s. We came to the “downtown” of the island after walking just a couple minutes. It consisted of a beach, restaurant and open grassy area. The open area had playground equipment, a volleyball net and two ping pong tables.There were only a couple dozen people in the whole area. We went into the restaurant and both ordered kebab pita, which is pita bread filled with meat and vegetables. The bathroom of the restaurant was a small outhouse behind the building. I used it before I ate and the smell almost took away my appetite. The was a pile of stuff down inside the toilet well that was a couple feet taller than the water line. The inside of the outhouse was plastered everywhere with stick-on Glade air fresheners, but it didn’t help much.
We walked to the beach after our meal, then sat down on some nearby rocks for a while. The sun had been shining brightly most of the day and the temperature was quite hot by this time in the afternoon. I had meant to change into shorts before leaving the house this morning, but had forgotten, so Stefan let me borrow a pair of swimming trunks that he happened to have in his backpack.
I ended up falling asleep on the rocks before we got up and continued exploring the island. As we walked on, we determined that the area was a small retreat where the guests stayed in some small a-frame cabins at the center of the island. The paths we took led us back to the open grassy area after a few minutes, and a guy playing volleyball there asked us to come join the game because they were a couple people short. Three of the people spoke a little bit of English, and the others didn’t seem to know any. There was one girl in the group and one older man. The rest of the guys appeared to be my age or younger and everyone in the group worked together at the same bar. My team won the first game, then the guys in the group offered Stefan and I a beer. We then played one more game and one of the guys on the other team was exposing himself to try and distract us. He had mooned us during the first game, but we got full frontal nudity in the second game. The guy didn’t mind at all that he was right in the middle of an open area with other people standing around, some of which were trying to eat outdoors at the restaurant. We did lose this second game, then a friendly wrestling match developed between the exhibitionist and the guy who had invited us to play. Someone else poured beer on the two guys as they rolled around in the sand. The one man’s exhibitionism continued after the match.
The group was getting on the same boat back to Turku that Stefan and I were, so we helped them carry a couple coolers back to the boat while the wrestlers went into the water to rinse themselves off. Those guys did not get back to the boat before it was ready to leave. They came running onto the dock after the ramp was already being pulled away from the ship, but they were still allowed to get on.
For the ride back, Stefan and I sat outside of the first level of the ship. The top level was too crowded and inside the ship was too hot, but our spot was just right. Some of the people we had played volleyball with joined us as the ship was entering the city. They asked me to yell “Mario” with them as we passed one of the restaurant boats. It turns out that one of the guys used to work there and Mario is the name of one of his ex-coworkers. Things got out of control as the ship was docking. The exhibitionist influenced to guy who had invited us to play volleyball to also become an exhibitionist. They hung their penises off the railing of the ship and yelled at passing boats. On the nearest one, was a middle aged man and a girl that was probably no more than 8 years old. The girl just stared at the guys body parts with no expression on her face. The man did not look happy. I saw a mother on the ship cover the eyes of her young son and push him along.
Stefan and I walked back to the car after the boat docked, then went downtown to buy a couple things. We first went to Clas Ohlsen so I could buy a wrench to take Johanna’s bike tire off with later. I was not sure of the size I needed and an adjustable wrench was too expensive, so I bought two wrenches. We then went to a supermarket nearby and got beef, salad and strawberry shortcake materials. We forgot to weigh our tomatoes and the cashier had to go do it herself. She didn’t seem to mind at all, but the girl behind us in line looked pissed. We bought our strawberries from a vendor outside as we walked back to the car.
I cooked the food after returning home. Johanna had already earlier eaten some things, so she only had the salad. I went outside and changed her bike innertube after the meal. I found that the probable cause for the deflation of the other one was that someone had not installed it straight. I asked Johanna who had last changed it, and she said she thought it had been done at a bike store. I made our strawberry shortcake after getting back inside, then spent a while using the computer before going to sleep.

July 11, 2005
Monday:

Everyone got up this morning when Johanna left for work at 7:30. I had expected everyone to sleep in later. Stefan said yesterday that he had only slept a few hours over the past few days, and Reko and Pasi had been at the RuisRock concert until after 1 o’clock last night. Reko and Pasi had never met Stefan before they woke up on the floor next to him this morning, because Stefan was already asleep last night when they arrived. I think that waking up next to someone is kind of a strange way to meet new people.
We all sat around in the kitchen for a while and talked while we ate bread and drank coffee. Stefan knew a lot about the company that Reko worked for, so they seemed to have a lot to talk about. Stefan and I left the apartment around 9 o’clock and agreed to meet up with Reko and Pasi later because they had invited us to go rock climbing with them. They said they would call me around noon.
Stefan wanted to see the castle this morning, so we drove his car out in search of it. It was hard for me to help him navigate the streets because I was used to traveling by rollerblade and just taking pedestrian shortcuts. We had to stop at a Hertz rental agency and pick up a free map of the city so I could be sure and not get us lost. We then found the castle with no problem and went inside to take a self-guided tour. There were no guided tours in English until after noon, but that wasn’t so bad because I had taken that tour last time, so I could tell Stefan what I remembered as we walked through the castle. There were a lot of Chinese tourists around the building today, and I always was spying on them to see if I could understand anything. I think I might have actually understood one whole sentence, “What’s this?”.
We spent a little over an hour walking through about 50 or so rooms of the castle and museum, then walked around outside the castle grounds and took some pictures, then went to a bar across the street and sat outside under an umbrella there for a while and waited for Reko and Pasi to call. The bar offered free little pieces of pastry with purchases. I drank a beer and Stefan had orange juice. Reko and Pasi had not called yet by noon, so we decided to walk along the river for a few minutes. We walked towards the downtown area and stopped at an area where two museum ships are docked. One is a wooden sailing vessel, and the other is a military gunship. We inquired about the prices at a booth in front of them, but decided not to go. I then sent Reko a message asking about the climbing, and he called me back to say that we could meet him at 2 in a parking lot by the train station that is near Johanna’s apartment.
Stefan and I had a few extra minutes, so we decided to go to Mcdonalds for lunch, where I had a Big Mac meal. We got to the meeting spot by two, then Reko and Pasi showed up a few minutes later. We waited a couple more minutes for another person to meet us, then headed to the climbing area. We followed Reko and Pasi to an area that was just at the edge of town by the sea. There was a small parking area next to the road and then a narrow path that led to a cliff, which was just about 100 feet from the parking area but not at all visible from the road. The cliffs were only about 30 to 40 feet high, but I thought that the area was unique because of many short tunnels that had been created by massive fallen rocks at the base of the cliffs. The rock was granite and Reko told me that some of the oldest rocks in the world were in Finland.
I climbed once during our visit to the cliff and spent most of the time watching everyone else climb. Stefan had never watched people use climbing equipment, so it was a completely new experience for him. We spent about 4 hours at the cliff. I walked off a few times to explore the short tunnels and once to walk up to the top of the cliff and take pictures of everyone from above. I made my climb about an hour or so after we arrived. Another friend of Reko’s came to the site at that time and let me borrow his climbing harness, and Reko let me borrow his climbing shoes. They had attached ropes to an area of the rocks that would not be too difficult for an amateur like myself. The spot followed along a crack and the first half of it was not at all difficult. My only problems occurred when I tried to pass a slightly overhung area near the top. I thought I might fall for a couple minutes, but eventually manage to stretch my foot up to waist level and use my sticky climbing shoe to get a grip on the rocks. One of the other guys was at the top and he helped my attach a repelling device to my harness, then I repelled down. I had not climbed anything with gear since I spent time in Yosemite National Park with my friend Aaron a few years ago. It is always a lot of fun, but the gear is too expensive for me to get any of my own quite yet.
Stefan and I left the climbing area around 6 and drove to a nearby beach that Reko had told us about. The beach turned out to be just almost within sight of the climbing area, and I had no idea that it existed before today. There were no parking spots left in the lot when we arrived, and cars were lined up along the road leading to the beach. We parked on the road, then walked in and found that the small beach was packed with a few hundred people. Some were in the water, the majority were on the sand, and a few more were sitting on grass behind the sand. We first bought some water at a small kiosk, then walked along the beach. It was only a few hundred feet long, and there were rocky areas on either side of the sand. We walked to one of the rocks for a few minutes, then took up a place on the grass behind the sand.
We decided to head home for dinner around 7:30 and stopped at a supermarket along the way, where we bought some potatoes, broccoli and strawberry shortcake material. We had to ask others customers for help a couple times. The first was to inquire about the directions on a box of vanilla whipping, and the second was to ask for the number of the potatoes, which is required to weight them. The number was on a sign near the potatoes, but I just didn’t know the word ‘potato’ in Finnish. At the register, I was surprised to find that the store didn’t take Visa cards. We bought strawberrys as we left from a girl that was selling them at a table outside the supermarket.
The rest of the trip home was a little hard at first because I did not recognize the area of the city that we were in. I eventually saw the central church and was able to use it to guide me into familiar territory. Back at the apartment, I began making our meal, cooking instant noodles with the broccoli and potatoes. I also prepared the strawberry shortcake desert as the other food was cooking. I had a problem getting the potatoes done in the microwave, and I eventually realized that it was because someone had turned the microwave down to one quarter power. Johanna got home as I was cooking and I only made her a strawberry desert because she had already eaten.
Stefan and I left the apartment again at around 10 and went back downtown to sit on one of the bar boats for a couple drinks. We parked by the central marketplace, then walked 5 minutes the rest of the way. Business on most of the boats was quite slow, except for one that had DJ’s and was playing dance music. Stefan and I sat on one of the more empty boats for about an hour. I drank a couple beers and he had a soda and a water. A police car and ambulance showed up to the party boat as we were sitting on the one next to it. It looked like two guys had gotten into a fight, but nobody appeared to get seriously hurt or arrested. Stefan and I took a few very nice nighttime pictures as we walked back to the car around midnight. The dimly lit sky and the lighted buildings made for some very nice scenes. A drunken guy stopped us as we were walking across the marketplace towards the car. He had heard us speaking English and he asked me if we were living here. I at first couldn’t understand him because of his accent and his drunkenness. He offered to take a picture of us and I was scared that he was going to drop the camera, but he managed to get one half-decent picture. He then told us about some girl that he had just met on the boat, that he described as an 8.4. He told us that she had given him her phone number and that he did not know if he should call her or not because he already has an Albanian girlfriend, that he described as a 7.3 with a nice personality.
After talking to the guy for about 5 minutes, Stefan and I drove back to the apartment. As we were walking towards the building, we saw a guy with long black hair running of the field wearing dark clothes and a black leather jacket. We saw him go into an apartment in another building, then start suspiciously peering out from behind his curtain. He was surely up to something.

July 10, 2005
Sunday:

Everyone got up between 10 and 11 o’clock this morning. Maria was packing her things to leave because she has to be back to work tomorrow. Reko is still staying another night. Johanna and I left around noon to go meet Kaisa in a field nearby and also to shop for lunch. We first met Kaisa, whom we found hidden in some tall grass by the river. She was just sitting there reading and getting some sun. I offered to go do the shopping so her and Johanna could just hang out and talk. I went to a store that I never knew existed before today, which is hidden behind the apartment management office. The store was so hot that all the chest freezers were covered so the ice cream would not melt. Almost nothing here has air conditioning, not even the public buses. I bought some water, lemonade and instant noodles, then returned to the spot Johanna and Kaisa were at. I noticed a miniature golf course on the way back, which I had also never seen before. There are a lot of things hidden among this massive student apartment area, including the 100 year old church and cemetery that I never even noticed before somebody told me about it.
Johanna told me that Stefan had called for me when I got back to the spot. Stefan is a friend from Germany that came to visit me in Carbondale last June. I met him when I was in Florida with my family for Christmas two years ago. At that time, I had told him to visit me in Carbondale if he ever wanted to see the more rural side of the US, and he took me up on the offer just about 6 months later. As planned for the past couple months, he arrived in Turku around noon today, and will be staying till the weekend. He flew into Helsinki last night and spent the night at a youth hostel there. His luggage had been lost by the airline, but was returned by 9 PM last night. He rented a car this morning and drove it to Turku. He was waiting at the entrance to Johanna’s building when I arrived, and I first helped him park his car closer and get his luggage in to the apartment. I then made us some instant noodles for lunch.
Johanna came back home about 45 minutes after Stefan had arrived. At 3:30, we decided to take a bus into the downtown area. The buses only run every 30 minutes on Sunday, and we ended up missing the 3:30 bus, so we sat on some grass and waited for the next one. We decided to get off the bus by the main church, but the driver didn’t hear us at first and kept going. Another passenger yelled really loud at him and he eventually stopped and let us off. We then bought some water from a vendor before entering the church. After Stefan had seen enough of the building, we sat on the grass in front of the church by the river. Some guys sitting near us were grilling sausages on a tiny grill, and they offered two of them to us that they could not finish. We accepted the offer and quickly ate the sausages.
We next walked to a supermarket by the central marketplace and bought some spaghetti and salad material for dinner tonight. We then got back on the bus and headed home at 6:10. I thought we might have to pay again for the bus, because a ticket is only good for two hours, and we had bought our tickets at 4:10. But, we got on the bus with two minutes to spare and did not have to pay any more.
I prepared all the food when we arrived back at the apartment. We all watched Cheaters together after the meal. Stefan had never seen or heard of it before and seemed to think that it was at least a little bit funny. One case showed a cheating woman who’s gay friend turned out to not really be gay at all. One woman threatened to beat up the host, and another said that the show was the ‘armpit of society’ and that she hoped it was cancelled. Stefan and I went on a walk together after the show was over. I took him to the spot across the river where the trails run through the woods and around the old farms. I showed him the disintegrating cabin that has the 1881 date scratched in it. We sat by the dam for a while on the walk back home, then returned to the apartment just after 10.
I stayed up for a couple hours using the computer after Johanna and Stefan had both gone to bed. I decided to go outside and smoke a cigarette sometime around 130 in the morning. Reko was just arriving back at the aparment at that time, and had a friend named Pasi with him, who was also staying at the apartment for the night. It was a nice coincidence that I had just gone outside at that time, because they did not know that the door to the building locked itself automatically at 10PM.

July 9, 2005
Saturday:

Everyone got up at 10 o’clock this morning. Maria and Reko had spent the night sleeping on the living room floor. Reko had an air mattress of his own, and Maria used a twin mattress that Satu lent to us. I ate the rest of my leftover Chinese food for breakfast. Someone had left the refrigerator door partly open last night, which warmed up everything inside to room temperature. There was luckily very little spoilable food inside.
Satu came over around 11 o’clock, then we all piled into Reko’s car before noon. We stopped at Mari’s apartment to pick her up. Johanna and I went inside so I could help her get a soda bottle open without breaking the seal so she could mix tequila with it and smuggle it into the Ruisrock concert. There were then 6 people in the car for the rest of the ride to the concert grounds, which was a park on the edge of town by the sea. Johanna sat on my lap. Cars were only allowed to get within about a kilometer of the concert area, so Reko dropped us all off and we walked the rest of the way. He was not attending the concert because he was going rock climbing with friends, then attending tomorrow.
We walked into the park with hundreds of other concert goers. Narrow paths led through the woods into the park, and it was extremely packed with pedestrians and bikers. We arrived at the gates around 1 o’clock, then had to pass through security. A woman briefly looked through my backpack and a sack of food I was carrying. I had put the soda with the food to make it look more natural. I don’t even think the inspector even looked at the seal of my soda to make sure it wasn’t broken, and she did not even search all the compartments of my backpack. I did see another guard make a younger looking guy pour out a bottle of water that had been opened. The concert grounds were so vast that there was lots of empty space left when we arrived, even though thousands of people were streaming in. Two massive stages were set up near the main entrance, and 2 more were located next to the beach. We first laid our towels down by one of the nearest stages and watched a band that performed there at 1:25. I bought a couple bottles of water before the band started, then Johanna, Mari and I went into an area next to the stage where alcohol was being served halfway into the band’s performance. Johanna was almost not let in the alcohol area because she had forgotten to bring an ID. People 18 and over were allowed in the area, and the guards were not carding most of the people who were entering. I was surprised when they let me pass without asking for ID and then carded Johanna. Her and Mari were able to convince the guard that they were old enough to get in. Once inside, we each ordered a cider, then sat at one of many picnic tables that had clear views of the stage. While at the picnic table, I noticed some weird devices next to the porta-potties. They looked like plastic 50 gallon drums that had been cut in half. The top of them had an x-shaped piece of plastic attached that was several feet high. I didn’t think that much about the devices until I saw a guy walk up to one of them and start peeing into it. I started laughing and then Johanna told me that was what the things are for. It was so unusual because the buckets were not concealed at all. They were just right next to the picnic tables, where everybody sitting down could just watch. Weird. Using them must really be a problem for people that get stage fright.
We all went to the beach together after the first band was done playing. Johanna and Mari put on their suits and took a swim, but the rest of us just sat on the beach and watched. After sitting for a while, a fat naked man took up a position near us in the sand. The man had no shame at all, as he layed on his back with his arms and legs spread wide open. It was disgusting. I later noticed another ugly naked man making out with a decent looking girl.
Johanna, Mari and I again visited an alcohol area after sitting in the sand for a while. There was a bungee jumping crane set up near the area, and it was getting non-stop business. Inside the area was a karaoke tent with some very bad karaoke being backed up by a very loud sound system. A girl even tried to sing some Guns N Roses. We had our drinks in a grassy area, and Johanna and I started playing our stomach-ramming game after we finished them. It is the same game I have described before, where you get a point each time you touch the other persons stomach with your head. Mari started playing the game with us at this point, and we accidentally bumped a sleeping girl next to us twice, which really pissed her off.
I don’t really remember every detail that happened the rest of the day because we were well into our smuggled vodka and tequila drinks by this time. Mari had even had the bright idea to put vodka into a bottle of spray sunscreen, which she would periodically spray into our mouths. It tasted a bit like sunscreen, but I really like the idea.
We spent the rest of the day going back and forth between the 4 different stages and seeing all the bands that we wanted to. There were no American bands playing today that I knew, but Flogging Molly will play tomorrow. The German band, Ramstein, had played last night. One of my favorite bands of the day was Zen Café, whom I had never heard before. The lead singer of the band is a bald guy who appears to be about 40 years old. He really gets into the music and puts on a good show. His stage personality kind of reminds me of Les Claypool of Primus, but I like this guy a lot more. The lyrics are in Finnish and the band originated in Turku in 1992. I will have to get some of their music.
We saw a guy passed out cold in the sand while we were watching a band by the beach in the late afternoon. He was probably about 20 years old and was lying on his back with his arms spread out. Someone had put his possessions safely between his legs, but he appeared to have no friends around. After a few minutes, a group of random girls started to try and slap him awake. He slowly got up after about a dozen slaps and the girls helped him walk away, maybe to the medical tent.
Our group got separated from each other on a couple occasions later in the night. We tried to follow each other closely, but the crowds were so intense that people could get lost in a second. The narrow paths between the stages were sometimes so crowded that I thought there might be a disaster about to happen. A beer truck was parked in one of the main paths at one point, and people were getting crushed together very badly. I’m sure that anyone who had fallen at that point would have ended up in the medical tent.
The last band of the day, HIM, played at midnight. This is supposedly one of the most famous bands to ever come out of Finland and is quite popular around Europe. I have also been told they are popular in the States, but I had never heard the music before I met Johanna. All 25,000 people crowded to the main stage when H.I.M. went on after midnight. I tried to follow Johanna and Mari up to the front of the stage, but the crowd was too thick and I could not keep up with them. I ended up standing along a fence about halfway to the stage. People were climbing the fence to get a better look, and the metal looked like it was about to snap at any moment, but it didn’t. Towards the middle of the show, a guy and girl came up to me and stole the good spot I was standing in. The guy just shoved me down towards a ditch and pointed for me to leave. I said something to him in English about it, then his reaction made me think that he must be crazy. In very badly spoken English, he started telling he that he had friends from the States and asked me question about where I was from. He hugged me when he left. He was completely wasted and it was really pissing his girlfriend off. I went to a food vendor as the band was playing its last songs. I got a plate of French fries, salad and chicken tenders for 6E. The band played its final songs as I was finishing, then a decent fireworks display took place for a few minutes after the show.
I exited the concert grounds after the fireworks ended, then called Johanna. She and Mari met me a couple minutes later just outside the gate, then we began the walk out of the park. Getting out was even harder than getting in, because half the people couldn’t walk straight anymore. We met up with Maria and Satu while we were walking, and Maria informed us that Reko would be picking us up by a nearby road. We walked to the road and it appeared like another disaster about to happen. Thousand of people were walking and biking down the road and the drivers were not being very courteous. I saw one car weaving through pedestrians at about 40 miles per hour. The road was on a hill and the bikers were going down it at high speeds. I saw one bike-pedestrian collision, and I am sure there were more. Reko was already waiting for us when we arrived. It felt really nice to go home and get into bed after such a long exhausting day in such huge crowds.

July 8, 2005
Friday:

I got up when Johanna left for work this morning and spent a couple hours cleaning the apartment and doing laundry. I moved the table from the living room to the kitchen to make room for many expected guests this weekend. I also tried to put a new innertube on the bike, but I found that I had no wrench that could get the tire off. The one I bought yesterday turned out to be the wrong size. One side was too small to fit the nut, and the other was too large. I found another tool in the apartment that was designed to cut metal. I thought I might be able to use it as a wrench, but I could get a tight enough grip.
After the cleaning was done, I spent time studying Chinese and working more on the video of my Estonia trip. I may not get it done for a couple weeks because a friend is coming into town for the week on Sunday.
Satu came over after Johanna got home from work because we were all going downtown together to meet Johanna’s sister and her boyfriend (Maria and Reko). Another thunderstorm had moved in at that time and we decided to take the bus. We got a bit wet just walking to the bus stop, even though Johanna had recently bought an umbrella that she shared with me.
We went to the Stockman mall to meet Maria and Reko. They did not arrive until about 25 minutes after us, so we went across the street to another store so Johanna and Satu could go scarf shopping. I bought a reduced hat at the store for 3E. Back at the mall, we still had a few more minutes, so we went into a store selling decorations and clothes that were supposedly from India. I saw a very weird woman sitting on a bench at the base of an escalator. She had on strange over-colorful clothes and a lot of very tacky jewelry, but the best part was definitely the makeup, which looked like something a clown would wear. I asked her if I could take her picture, but she just put her head down and wouldn’t show her face for the camera. She was screaming into a cell phone when we came out of the Indian store. People everywhere where staring at her, and I took a picture of her at that time.
We had to wait a few more minutes for Reko and Maria to arrive, then we split up. All the girls went shopping and Reko and I went out for a beer at a nearby bar, Bohemia. We both had a Guiness there, then walked to the river and had another beer on the boats. The tables filled up after we arrived, and an old couple asked to share our table. I tried to talk to them, but they didn’t seem to speak English. The girls called us when they were finally done shopping, then we headed back to the center of town to meet them. Reko saw two of his friends drive by in a car on the way and we stopped and talked to them for a moment.
We then met up with the girls at a Chinese restaurant next to the central marketplace(by the way, I have a webcam link to the marketplace). We had to wait in the restaurant for about 20 minutes while they prepared our food. Reko’s car was parked nearby and that is how we all got home. He had Maria drive since he had drank a couple beers. She drives very rarely and was a little uncomfortable with the task. She at first had considerable trouble with the clutch and missed two green lights because she couldn’t get the car to move fast enough. She was doing better by the time we got home. Johanna hasn’t driven since driver’s ed class in high school.
Back in the apartment, we prepared drinks for the concert that we will be attending tomorrow, called RuisRock, which has 25,000 tickets sold. Reko will not go because he is going rock climbing with friends. People are not allowed to bring their own alcohol, so we put vodka into 1.5 liter soda bottles. We had to open them very carefully without breaking the seal, because all people entering the concert will be searched and no open bottles are allowed. I opened my bottle successfully with the help of a knife, then poured half of the Sprite into a big bowl and refilled the bottle with vodka. It worked perfectly. I hope it doesn’t get taken away at the concert gate.
Making our drinks finished off almost all of the 2 liters of vodka that we brought back from Estonia two weeks ago. There was a little bit left in a bottle, and I finished it off with cranberry juice after eating my Chinese food. I spent the rest of the evening talking to Reko, and he invited me rock climbing on Monday.

July 7, 2005
Thursday:

I couldn’t find anything to eat this morning, so I had microwave popcorn and a small portion of leftover pasta that Johanna had made for breakfast. I noticed the first news about the London bombings on the Internet at about noon. The first reports were of multiple explosion in the subway blamed on a power surge. But, seeing the pictures of people come out of the tunnels covered in ash and bleeding made it look more like a bomb from the beginning.
I left the apartment in the early afternoon and headed downtown to run a few errands. I took the bus to Clas Ohlsen, where I bought a new innertube for Johanna’s bike. I was also going to buy a wrench there to take the tire off, but they didn’t have anything cheap enough. I next walked over to the Stockmans mall, where I first bought some groceries for dinner at the supermarket in the basement. I decided to make tacos. I bought a packet to make the taco sauce with, but I could not read the instructions on the back of it because they were only in Swedish and Finnish. I had to ask an employee what one of the ingredients in the instructions was, and it was water.
I then went around the mall looking for a wrench and a few post cards to send back to the states. The cheapest post cards I could find anywhere were 1 Euro each. I also bought a small blue book to write addresses in when I purchased the post cards(I forgot my electronic address book in Illinois). I found a wrench at a store where everything costs one Euro. I couldn’t find an adjustable wrench, so I just had to guess the size. I hope I am right. The first thunderstorm of the year here happened when I came out of the mall. The thunder had been rumbling for the past hour and the rain started around 3:30.
I went to an ATM and took out 400 Euros before getting on a bus back home. I hope that is all the cash I need before returning home, because every ATM withdrawal always costs me an international fee of almost 9 dollars. I try to pay for things using my debit card whenever possible.
The rain and thunder continued for the next couple hours after I returned home. Johanna did not come home until 8 because she had planned on going to an exercise class with Mari. When she got home, she told me that she did not attend the class because they had accidentally gone on the wrong day.
I made our tacos for dinner and we watched the Simpsons while we ate. I tried to help Johanna make a website after the meal, but we discovered that the free hosting service I had signed up for yesterday was not going to work out. Free hosting services are always terrible. She will probably end up paying a couple dollars a month for a cheap service.

July 6, 2005
Wednesday:

I walked to a nearby church and cemetery to take some pictures around midday. I tried to air up the bike tire so I could ride it there, but it wouldn’t stay inflated. This area I went to is in the middle of the student apartment complex, but I only recently realized that it existed because it is hidden among trees. I had seen some of the gravestones a few weeks ago when I went to the apartment management office, and someone later mentioned to me that there is also an old church there, so I thought I should make a visit.
The cemetery was not as big and as old as the one Johanna and I rollerbladed through yesterday, but it was still very unique to anything I have seen before. There are a couple thousand graves scattered over a few acres of perfectly manicured land. The condition of the cemeteries I have seen here is impressive. Today I saw at least a dozen student-age employees hard at work all over the property, who seem to take care of every detail. The whole cemetery is built on a gradually inclining hill, and the church is at the top. Tombstones are located even right against the walls of the church, which was built in 1907. The oldest grave markers are steel crosses, and some of them are from the early 1800’s. These old steel crosses were mostly located directly around the church. The exterior of the church is build entirely out of huge stones, which makes it look even older than it is. The interior holds a couple hundred people and is decorated with carved and painted murals. A model wooden sailing ship hangs from the ceiling in one corner. The pulpit is an intricately decorated round booth that is suspended about 6 feet above the congregation. A stone tower built near the church is the main entrance to the grounds. I spent about 45 minutes walking around as I shot video and took pictures, then returned to the apartment.
The temperature today was again around 80 degrees. Dark clouds began to build in the sky as Johanna got home from work. We walked 10 minutes to the larger supermarket on the other side of the river, and it began raining on our walk. From the looks of the clouds, I thought we were about to get soaked, but it never actually rained that hard. I have not even heard the ruble of thunder since arriving here. We bought some marinated beef steaks, potatoes and some kind of premade cold salad for dinner, then returned home and cooked the food together.
We were planning on going out to have a drink on the boats downtown with a friend of Johanna’s and this friend’s boyfriend, but they cancelled on us because of the rain. Johanna did go on a walk with Mari after the rain stopped around 9 o’clock. I watched part of the movie ‘BeetleJuice’ on TV and spent time on the internet trying to find a free web hosting service for Johanna to use because she wants her own website to put her pictures on.

July 5, 2005
Tuesday:

The temperature actually hit 82 degrees today, which was the first day over 80 all year. I left the apartment in the early afternoon to exchange our broken fan. I called Johanna to ask about the bus schedules, then took bus 4 from the apartment to the downtown store where we bought the fan, Clas Ohlsen. The fan was completely dismantled and put into its box. A guy at the service desk took the motor out of the box and tried to turn it on before giving me an orange return slip. I was then told to get another fan and show my receipt and the orange slip to a cashier.
I decided to come back later and pick up the fan because I had another errand to run. I needed to go to the travel agency where Johanna had booked our St. Petersburg trip and fill out an application for a Russian visa. A cashier directed me to an application on a shelf in the small lobby. Some of the questions on the application were quite unusual, like “Not including your current employer, list you previous two, include job title, supervisors name and employment dates”. I gave the application to another cashier when I was finished, then I was told that I needed to fill out a second part of the application. This second sheet had even stranger questions, including “Name all cities in the world you have visited over the past 10 years”, “Name all educational institutions you attended after grade school, including address and phone number”, and “Have you ever been in an armed conflict?”. I of course didn’t remember things like the phone number of my Junior High, but was told that would be OK.
After leaving the travel agency, I walked back to Clas Ohlsen and picked up my fan. I also purchased a bicycle pump to air up the flat tire on Johanna’s bike. I then had to wait a few minutes outside to get back on the bus that I had come on. I then spent some time studying Chinese back at the apartment. Johanna wanted to go to the swimming pool with Mari when she got home from work. We had a quick snack of instant noodles, then put on our rollerblades and headed to the pool. Mari was already there when we arrived. There were a couple hundred people lying around the pool and in the grass, but it wasn’t as crowded as weekends are. We sat by the pool for about an hour and a half and there was not a cloud in the sky. Johanna and Mari got in the pool once, but I stayed on land to watch our things. The sun was still beating down hard when we packed up our things at 7:30. At that time, they opened the high dive for the last 30 minutes that the pool is open. There are three sections to the high dive, and only one guy had the guts to go all the way up to the 30 foot jump.
We stopped at the small grocery store near the apartment on the way home. I waited outside while Johanna bought some potatoes and vegetables. A little tied up poodle barked at me for the whole 10 minutes I waited. It must have barked 500 times in that short time. A older man walking up to the store said something to me about the dog in Finnish. I said that I didn’t speak Finnish, then he opened and closed his hand as he made a barking sound.
I made our dinner when we arrived home, then we watched the Simpsons and the X-Files as we drank a couple cranberry and vodka’s. Throughout the evening, Johanna continued playing a strange game with me that she recently made up. She gets a point if she touches my stomach with her head, and I get a point if I do the same to her. The game seems dangerous because someone is always getting hurt. The only way to “score” is to get the other person by surprise. It is otherwise very hard to get stomach-head contact without getting kneed or elbowed.

July 4, 2005
Monday:

I ate a leftover chicken leg quarter for breakfast this morning and later had a ham sandwich for lunch. It was a bit hot in the apartment today because our fan quit working a few days ago. It passed away in the middle of the night last week, and I woke up as it took its last dying spin. It had so many problems from the beginning. First of all, we had to exchange an incorrect part of the base, then we realized that there was a problem with the motor. The blades never spun completely freely because there was something rubbing inside the motor. As soon as I turned it on the first time, I told Johanna that I gave it a maximum of one year to live. We hadn’t done anything about the problem because it came with a two year warranty. So today, I didn’t even open the curtains all day in fear that the sun would heat up the apartment. I did at least have the windows open, of course.
I spent the first couple hours of the morning catching up on this past weekend’s journals, then studied Chinese for an hour later in the afternoon. I tried to make some phone calls using the Internet around 4 o’clock. I was unsuccessful in contacting my dad, brother and Mike and Carolyn. I was able to get ahold of my Grandma and Jennifer McClafferty(Rufus’s wife). I talked to Jennifer for about 20 minutes, but she didn’t get Rufus up because he had been awake very late. I talked to my grandma for about 30 minutes, and she was doing well other than being bit by a poisonous spider recently. My brother, sister and I have planned on going up to see her when I return home.
Johanna and I both had instant noodles for a snack when she got home from work. We then set out on a two hour rollerblading trip. Yesterday when our bus was coming into town, we had seen some very smooth looking new paths out in the direction of City Market. We wanted to go there today because smooth surfaces are very easy to skate on. We passed a huge cemetery on the way there and I reluctantly got Johanna to skate through it. Everything there was in very nice condition and all the paths were pathed. It is inside of an old forest with some very big trees, and all of the landscaping is perfectly manicured. There were tens of thousands of headstones, many of which dated from the 1700’s. Almost every stone was about 3 times larger than the typical one you would see in America. I tried to take some pictures, but when I tried to turn on the camera, I realized that I had left the batteries at home in the charger.
By the time we reached the smooth skating paths that we had come for, my feet were starting to hurt. We had to turn back because I would have otherwise gotten blisters. We stopped to shop at City Market on the way home. Skating is against the rules in most stores here, but we have regularly been violating that rule lately because taking off the skates is too much of a hassle. We had a hard time deciding what to eat for dinner, but eventually got some pasta, vegetables and potatoes.
I cooked the dinner and made us cranberry and vodka’s as soon as we arrived home. We both had two more drinks after dinner as we watched the Simsons and the X-Files.

July 3, 2005
Sunday:

After waking up and eating breakfast up, we packed up and cleaned up the apartment. We left around 11:30 and took the subway downtown. We put our non-essential luggage into locker there, which cost 3 Euros. There were hundreds of the lockers available, and just about every one was full, which is making someone a ton of money.
I had brought all the empty beer bottles left over from last night with me to give to a homeless person. Each bottle can be returned to grocery stores for a dime, but none of the stores were yet open and I did not want to carry the bottles any longer. Yesterday, there had been dozens of homeless people outside of the train station, but we had a hard time even finding one today. We walked around the outside of the building and were about to give up the quest when we saw a hairy man sticking his hand inside of a trash can. I walked up to him and opened the sack to show the contents. He looked out of the corner of his eyes like he was buying drugs or something, then muttered something and took the sack.
We next walked through a mall and went into a store selling sporting goods for a few moments. We were surprised that little bags of dry pasta with seasoning were selling for up to 8 Euros. They were labeled as being specifically for camping, but we wondered what the difference was from the kind in the grocery store that sell for one Euro.
After spending a while longer walking the streets, we decided to get some ice cream at the pier and sit in the grass nearby. On the walk there, I took a picture of a statue with a gull sitting on its head. We went to the market by the pier to buy our ice cream, and Johanna then changed her mind from ice cream to strawberries when she passed some that were for sale. We then took our strawberries to some grass next to a pedestrian path that is near the pier. The path is a very popular place for people to hang out, and like yesterday, there were thousands of them sitting around the area. A female street performer there was putting on a dog a cat trick show. The grass along the edges of the path is actually fenced off with a very short fence, but people seem to ignore it. We went onto the grass because we saw other people there, then watched as other people looked at the fence and made the same decision for the same reason we did. Anything is OK as long as a lot other people are doing it. The grass was a little wet, so we had to sit on manhole covers while we ate our strawberries. The berries on the top of the package were some of the best I ever had, but they were concealing ones on the bottom that were small and mashed. I was amazed at the quick response of the seagulls when I threw on of the berries to the side. The gulls were circling quite high overhead, but obviously were watching all the human activity very closely. I gull dove in for my berry just seconds after it had landed. That attracted several more birds, which screamed at us when they realized there were not enough berries to go around. A Chinese family sat next to us and I was able to understand that they were talking about getting water to drink, I think.
After eating our berries, we talked about what to do the rest of the day. We had originally planned on staying in the city until 4:30, but decided we could not do anything we really wanted to do and then be back at the bus station by that time. We decided to get on the 2:30 bus instead of just aimlessly walking around the downtown area. We first had to retrieve our things from the locker at the train station, then proceeded to the bus station. We arrived there about 25 minutes before our bus was leaving. I bought a can of Pringles at a small snack booth there. Our bus left with only 5 or 6 passengers on board, two of which got off the bus about 10 minutes after it left when they realized they were on the wrong one. The trip back to Turku was only 2 hours because the bus was an express that did not stop at any other locations. On the walk home, we stopped at a small grocery store near the apartment that I had not been to before. Some of the produce was rotting on the shelves.
We got home a bit after 5 and started dinner. We had chicken leg quarters and potatoes. Johanna told me that the cooking instructions on the chicken said to cook the meat for an hour an a half, which was an obvious mistake. We had planned on taking a short rollerblade trip after dinner, but didn’t end up going because the food took longer to cook than expected(but not an hour and a half). We watched Cheaters at 8 o’clock. This week featured a young Christian girl that did not believe in sex before marriage. She was worried that her boyfriend was cheating because he had not begged her for sex in a long time. She was not as conservative when she confronted the cheating boyfriend and his girlfriend. She flashed her breasts at the boyfriend, saying, “You’ll never get to feel these!”. I watched Taken before going to bed at 11.

July 2, 2005
Saturday:

I got up and went to a store by myself this morning to get some food. The store was only about a 4 minute walk away. I got some sandwich material, instant noodles, pizza, frozen vegetables, juice and beer. I asked the waitress how much the beer cost, but she didn’t speak a word of English. I really need to learn some basic Finnish, but the pronunciation is terribly hard. After eating and waking up, we took the subway downtown. The downtown subway station is underneath the train station. We went to a tourist booth in the train station and thought about what we wanted to do for the day. We decided to go to a place called Suomenlinna Island, where an 18th century fort is located. Ferries to the fort left from the downtown pier all day long, so we took our time getting there. We stopped along the way and entered two churches. The first, Temppeliaukio Church, is the large white building that we had photographed last night. I was surprised to later learn that is was just built in 1969. The large hill it sits on is surrounded by a staircase that may be 75 or a hundred large steps tall. Several 20-something aged tourists were having a violent water balloon fight at the base of the stairs. The inside of the building was much smaller than I had expected it to be. Seeing the outside of the building, you expect the inside to be huge, but that’s not the case. Still, that’s not to say that being inside the building wasn’t cool. The incredibly high windowed ceiling and the light coming in through it was impressive.
The second church we went to, Uspensi Cathedral is an Orthodox Cathedral that is made of red brick. The top of the exterior of the building was being renovated and had scaffolding on it. It was built in 1868 and is said to be the largest Orthodox Cathedral in Western Europe. The inside of the building was much more impressive than the first church we had been to. Almost every inch of it was painted in murals and covered with gold decorations. Choir music was playing softly in the background and the rear of the building was dominated by two massive marble pillars.
We next walked down towards the pier that our ferry would be leaving from. We stopped to take a picture of ourselves in front of a cruise ship and were run from that area by police. We then walked into a market nearby and spent a few minutes looking at the vendor’s booths, which were selling souvenirs and vegetables. Johanna bought 3 liters of peas, then we sat on a bench and ate some of them. She loves peas.
The ferry ride to the island with the fort took about 20 minutes. We sat on the deck of the boat for a while, but the wind made us chilly and we moved inside. It had felt hot on land, but it felt much different on the water. We spent about 3 hours at the fort. It is built onto at least 3 different nearby islands that are all connected by short pedestrian bridges. There are about 800 people living on the islands. Many of them are working in the tourism industry and upkeeping the fort, but there are also regular apartments for rent there. There were probably at least 10,000 tourists and locals on the islands today. The locals use the area as a public park, and just sit on blankets and picnic and party all day. This season must be quite a shock for the residents of the island, as I can imagine it is a very desolate place in the winter. The main island has a small village on it, with a church and some small businesses. One island has a military academy on it, and another contains most of the fort. We first walked through the village. We attempted to get to some of the fort walls on this island, but they were closed to the public. We briefly entered the church, but didn’t get to really see it because a wedding was about to take place. We walked over to the island with the military academy and sat on some rocks next to the high stone walls there. The rocks were between the walls and the water. Next, we went back to the village and bought some ice cream. We ate our ice cream on a pier, and that is the first time I realized that the island was covered with drunken teenagers and young men. They were everywhere, even though alcohol was not supposed to be permitted in public areas. The alcohol rule appeared to be violated by everyone of all ages all over the island. Johanna translated part of a conversation on the pier as we ate our ice cream. A young drunk guy was telling some others about his last bathroom visit in detail. He had pooped.
We next walked on the island where most of the fort is located. There were many caves and passages built into the stone walls. Some of them were not accessible to the public, but many of them were open, and some of them led deep inside the walls. The deep passages where very dark and it was almost impossible to see without a flashlight. I used my camera light when I had to. The floors were wet and there were many puddles and large slippery rocks. I can imagine that a lot of people have been hurt here. It was very cool.
After going through several passages, we walked on around the walls and to a large open grassy area where there were several hundred people out partying and picnicking on blankets. There were young families on some blankets and groups of young people on others. This area appeared to be the main spot for the local people to hang out. We climbed a steep hill nearby and took some pictures. There was a museum built inside the hill, but people were allowed to climb on top of it. It was so steep that getting down was a bit difficult. I thought some little kids were going to get stuck up there, but they eventually managed to get down.
We decided to take a ferry back to the mainland around 5 o’clock. The ferries were leaving twice an hour, and we missed the first one. We spent a few more minutes walking inside the walls before getting on the next one. Johanna fell asleep by the time the boat got back. Next, we decided to have a cheap dinner at a Mcdonalds downtown, where I got a Big Mac meal. I was disappointed to find that the bathrooms there required money or a key to open. The key was available to customers for free, but the restaurant was large and crowded, so I decided to get into the bathroom by putting money into the door. The door took my money and did not open, so I just ate my food. Johanna went to get a key after she finished her meal. The “key” was actually just a fake 50 cent piece. She didn’t end up using the “key” because someone was leaving the bathroom as she tried to get in. She gave the key to me and I propped the door open after I left the bathroom.
We next decided to have a cider before returning to the apartment. We first went to an outdoor terrace bar on the tenth floor of a building. The elevator to the bar had no inner door, so anyone inside could just see all the floors going by, which seems dangerous. Someone with a doorstop could really cause problems…for themselves and others. The terrace bar turned out to be too windy to be comfortable, so we went back down to an outdoor ground-level place. It was just a roped-off area in an open spot next to the street. Inside the ropes were tables, chairs and a small stand selling beverages. Johanna waited in line and got pear ciders for both of us. As soon as we got our drinks, clouds covered the sun for one of the first times all day, making it chilly outside.
We took the subway back to the apartment after the drink. We spent the rest of the evening drinking the beer I had bought in the morning, talking and watching TV. I got a good laugh out of something I saw on the news. There were wife carrying competitions this weekend and the sports news covered the highlights of them. I have long been entertained by the concept of wife carrying, so I am always interesting in hearing the news about them. A familiar looking wife carrying contestant with American-sounding English was being interviewed on the news. I just thought it was hilarious when this person was identified as Dennis Rodman. So this is the kind of stuff he has been doing the past few years.

July 1, 2005
Friday:

I packed for the planned weekend trip to Helsinki after breakfast this morning. I walked downtown at 1 o’clock. My bus to Helsinki did not leave until 3:30, but I first wanted to spend some time at a medieval market downtown, which I had seen being set up earlier in the week. I at first had trouble finding it, but called Johanna and got directions. The market consisted of a few hundred vendors selling all kinds of homemade products, most of which looked medieval, of course. Most of the vendors were dressed in period clothing. There were also some wooden props that the city had built to make the downtown area look more medieval. I stopped for a few minutes to watch some street performers and take pictures of a pig roast. The pig was being roasted by one of the vendors and the meat was being sold on “plates” made of thin slabs of wood. Dozens of people had gathered around the pig to gawk, and many also were eating pieces of it as they watched it spin on the rotisserie.
I walked towards the bus station at 3 o’clock and decided to eat something before my trip started. There is both a Hesburger and a Mcdonalds near the bus station. I first walked into the Hesburger, but decided I wanted Mcdonalds instead. I had a sandwich that resembled the Big N’ Tasty, then got on my bus. The plan was that Johanna would get on the bus when it went through the town she works in, called Salo. It only takes her 20 minutes to get to work, but for some reason, it took the bus an hour to get there. She was at the station when the bus arrived, and we then traveled the rest of the way to Helsinki together. During the ride, she told me about Name Day, which is like a second birthday for all people with normal first names. She told me that tomorrow is her sister Mari’s and her friend Maria’s name day. It is customary to give a card or a small gift to people who are celebrating their name day. Weird. Now I have yet another day to remember…..June 21, which is Johanna’s name day. It shouldn’t be that hard, though, because it is just 3 days before her birthday.
We arrived in the Helsinki city center at 5:45, which was about ten minutes late. The bus station was brand new and had only been open for about two weeks. They claim that it is one of the nicest bus stations in all of Europe. It is underground and kind of resembles a small airport. The whole place smelled like marijuana for some reason, but I think it was just a chemical smell left over from the construction. We were planning on staying for the weekend at the apartment of Johanna’s sister’s boyfriend, Reko, because he was going out of town for a 4 week vacation. We called him when we arrived, and he agreed to meet us at the train station after he left work. We had a few minutes to kill, so we walked through an outdoor art display called Earth from Above. The display travels and I had seen it before in downtown Chicago about 3 years ago. It consists of about 100 high quality poster-sized aerial photographs that depict everything from farm fields to earthquake damage. It began raining quite hard as we were looking at the pictures, so we had to hide under a roof for a while.
We met Reko at the train station sometime around 6:15, then he took us to some machines inside where Johanna and I bought weekend subway passes for 10 Euros each. Next, we got on the subway and went three stops to the area that he lives. The subway is quite unique here because it is deeper underground than normal and it looks like a cave. The longest continuous escalator I have ever seen takes the passengers underground, where the tunnels have been carved into solid stone. The rock has been covered with a cement-like substance and painted, but it still looks like a cave. There are also a lot of cave men around the subway areas. They are very rough looking homeless men who seem to be allowed to freely roam the city with vodka and whiskey bottles in-hand. I was really surprised to see so many homeless people, because I had not yet seen more than one or two homeless or poor people in the country.
Reko’s apartment was just a couple minutes walk from a subway stop. It is on the fifth floor in a complex of several tall buildings, which surround a central common area with grass and a small park for children. The apartment was not large, but was larger than Johanna’s. It has a sauna in the bathroom and a decent sized balcony outside. Reko started packing immediately after we arrived. He asked me to double-check the English of some writing he had done on the computer as he got ready to leave, but I found that the grammar was almost perfect. His spoken English is a bit unusual for a Finnish person, as it has a distinct Australian accent, which Johanna told me was probably from the year he had spent in Australia when he was in high school.
After Reko had everything packed, Johanna and I helped him carry his things to his car, then he left. Johanna couldn’t at first figure out how to get back into the apartment building. Like some cars, the key has a electronic chip in it, and you have to wait for the door to make a beeping sound before the key can be turned.
We next gathered a few things from the apartment before heading back to the subway and going downtown again. There, we walked around and I took a few pictures of some buildings in the city. A white cathedral built on a hill may be the most impressive building in the city. Its shape and design make it look more like a building at the Vatican than it does a regular church. After about 45 minutes of walking and taking pictures, we decided to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The place was totally elegant except for the carpet, which had turned from red to a nasty stained black color. Everything else in the building was made of glass and hard wood, with many very nice Chinese decorations everywhere. Everything was in perfect shape except for the terrible rug. We were almost the only customers in the large restaurant, probably because it was already 9 o’clock. There was one other Chinese family eating dinner. The young daughter of one of the employees was playing with toys behind the counter. Johanna and I both ordered a set meal that included an appetizer, 5 dishes and desert. I had egg drop soup for the appetizer and the desert was deep fried banana. The meal was very good, but cost 32 Euros, which is quite expensive for Chinese here. I said a few words in Chinese to the waitress as we were preparing to leave, and she responded as expected, which is good.
We took the subway back to the apartment after the meal, where we had a beer and got into the sauna.