Verification: Burp!



+3 TPE - S65 milestones - Lemo Pihl







I’m gonna turn this one on it’s head a bit and tell you about the time my and my wife went on a two-week road trip to Finland a few years ago. We’re from Estonia actually and we hadn’t had chance to really see Finland ourselves. It was a fun trip - we toured the southwestern part of Finland and visited Helsinki, Turku, Rauma, went to Pori Jazz to see Snarky Puppy especially, and finished off with a couple days in Tampere before returning home. So the trip was great, in all but one aspect - we were very often disappointed by the food we were served. There were still a few bright spots, but they were mostly of the more exotic variety - like a great little Vietnamese place in Helsinki or a small kiosk outside Naantali where an african guy served his homemade african chicken soup and bakeries. In fact, although we tried, we actually couldn’t really even find any places that served ‘authentic’ finnish food. I still have no idea what constitutes such besides maybe Karjala pies. Instead there were just pizza-kebab-burger-chinese places all over. But when we tried to eat at more regular sort of run of the mill local places, even though they had good ratings on the internet, often the food was bland and uninteresting, no matter the supposed origin. It might just be a cultural difference of ours, since we’re used to more vibrant tastes in Estonia, or maybe we were just unlucky with many of our choices. But the trip itself was still lots of fun and made all the more memorable by the covid crisis coming on just a year later and then also our kid being born that have both pretty much anchored us down for the whole time since.
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I think the best thing I like about Finland is the licorice culture. There’s at least ten different licorice candies and five different licorice ice creams available in almost every shop! Here in Estonia, we’re lucky to have even one kind of licorice candy or ice cream in any shop, so when I visited Finland a few years back, it was great!

I also like finnish humor - not all of it, perhaps, but the more subtle type, like what you might see in Aki Kaurismäki movies. Their humor often reflects their sort of melancholy and inner conflict of wanting everything to be neat and orderly and dreaming of being a free-wheeling rock’n’roll soul at the same time. But this conflict within them is a well balanced and fruitful one, often resulting in Finland leading the yearly world’s most happiest countries list, as I’ve heard. You probably couldn’t tell by the looks of them most of the time in everyday life, where they can look as sullen and disgruntled as the rest of us, but that happiness ratio probably has a lot to do with the overflowing joy that they all experience when they win hockey gold again at some level or other
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I’ve been pretty all right lately, thank you for asking. For a while during this spring I felt like I was pretty on edge again with work and family life putting such a strain on me and leaving me no time or place to really unwind, but now things have slowed down a bit so I’ve been able to catch my breath and even have a few nights out with my buddies again, playing some board games or doing a quiz or something. Just things that I’ve been missing at times. Also now that my kid turned two and my wife is adjusting back to work life, that’s been kind of difficult to handle at moments, but it seems like it’s starting to come together now and we’re figuring it out. So all in all, not too bad right now, really
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