Finnish-ing Touches - I

I want to make a trip to Finland again; maybe someday I will.

I spent the first six years of my life shuttling between India and Finland. It was a pretty little town called Tampere in Finland, right on the periphery of the Tundra region with coniferous trees standing tall around charming lakes. Finland is called 'The Land Of A Thousand Lakes' with the last count numbering them to be 187,888. Contrary to most belief, Finland is a Nordic country, but automatically gets grouped with its neighbors Sweden and Norway as a Scandinavian one.

The above picture is of the view from my living room/Kitchen/Bedroom (They all had windows facing the same way) on the 7th floor of a building that had 12 floors. The 13th floor was divided into an attic and the terrace. I did hunt through my treasured photographs for a picture of the building but couldn't find one. But I do remember it to be a rust colored one with intermittent patches of concrete and pebble finishes. It had two wings with sand-pits, bike trails and dainty, small parks on either side of the building. In fact most of my memories are still quite fresh in my mind as if it were just a couple of years ago that I was there, scampering on the streets as a carefree toddler. If I took to penning down every detail that I recall and cherish, I wouldn't have to look for any more topics to adorn my blog space. But since this is one of the constructive and happy outcomes of a memory refresh, I shall go on till the point it starts getting boring even to as generous and patient an audience, as my family and friends.

A couple of minutes walk from our house got us to one of the 187,888 lakes that I had nicknamed 'Small Lake'. I called it so because it was the smaller of the two lakes that I would frequently haunt, so naturally the other one was christened 'Big Lake'.

Small Lake

Big Lake

It was about an hour and a half long walk (for a 2-3 year old and with pine cones strewn all the way, who could resist!) to the 'Big Lake'. And make that 3 hours when spring came along, for it was time for berry picking (I still did not ditch my pine cones; they just went into a separate basket). The walk was an extremely picturesque one complete with little wooden bridges under which ran lyrical brooks in tiny cascades and cave like tunnels with murals bedecking it's otherwise staid walls . The walk was a shimmering pebble trail and dandelions filled the air. All in all it made one pretty postcard.

The place on the whole lacked human touch. The streets were usually devoid of people. Winters brought in the desolation that accompanies an ambient temperature of -30C or lesser. Come summer and we would witness a nod here and a smile there. In general the Finnish were an aloofish lot. But the handful of friends that we made there were a really warm and hospitable bunch. More on the friends and my quirks in my following posts. I should probably focus on the stories that go with the photographs that I have managed to salvage from a fading lot. That might help me cut short what right now appears to be a topic that has a sequel numbered X!