The Finns Visit The Finns

By Stephen and Louis Finn

Standing naked on our terrace at our timeshare just south of Lapland, we didn’t feel awkward as we looked out at a lake and forest. The two of us, Louis and Stephen, were having a sauna in our chalet and then went outside, where it was -4 to enjoy the “Finnish experience” even though there was no snow to roll in.

“What happens if anyone walks past?” Louis asked. “Don’t worry,” I said, “the Finns do this all the time – and are used to it.”

“By “the Finns”,” Louis asked, “Do you mean us as the Finns or the Finns who actually live here?” “Both,” I responded, as a man walked by with his dog and greeted us. Both of them had jackets on.

I’d wanted to go to Finland for decades, not only because of my surname but because of its reputation as a liberal country with its tranquil forests, freezing lakes and incredible music tradition. One of our favourite composers is the fantastic Jean Sibelius. Actually, when I was in primary school and my Dad bought an LP with loads of tracks, I used to stand in front of the radiogram (as it was in those days) and conduct Sibelius’s “Finlandia”, a wonderful tone poem that underlines a desire for independence from oppression.

We’d been warned that the Finns of Finland were unfriendly, unhelpful and taciturn; they evidently don’t engage in small talk. We found just the opposite: incredibly friendly, helpful at all times and some of them more chatty than even I, Stephen, am.

So, you might well ask, what were the highlights (apart from cavorting naked near a lake). The music performances were spectacular: an opera, Animal Farm, written by a Russian in English, performed at the opera house across the road from our hotel; at the same venue the next night, magnificent ballet; the following night saw us in Lahti for a programme of Sibelius – brilliant; and the next one at the concert hall down the road of, among other works, Brahms’s Symphony No 3 – another of our favourites.

What was exciting was to see the age mix of people at all of these performances: as many youngsters were there as the more “mature”, with dozens coming along on their bicycles.

The concert hall in Helsinki is the most beautiful we have ever been to anywhere in the world, dominated by a magnificent steel sculpture that we worked out was actually the organ. It’s one of only two of its kind.

And then there was the phenomenally beautiful Sibelius monument, echoing in steel the flow of his music.

We also did a joyous parkrun along a lake, with loads of cherry trees festooned with blossoms.

As we’re vegan, we had wondered beforehand how well we’d be able to eat. Our hotel had a complete plant-based menu for breakfast and all the restaurants we went to for our suppers catered happily for vegans: Nepalese, Chinese, Italian – and Finnish, with the Helsinki train station having a fantastic restaurant.

We found something even better when we went by ferry across the Baltic Sea for a day in Tallinn, Estonia. It was very interesting, and we found a vegan restaurant just off the main square with incredible food.

Would we go to Finland again with its wonderful architecture (you should see the new library in Helsinki), where there’s no littering, everything runs to time and with its residents evidently being the happiest in the world? Of course, we’d love to but as there are so many other countries we haven’t been to yet, it’s unlikely. Is it one of our favourite of the fifty or so countries we’ve been to? It certainly is. And that’s the naked truth.