Summer of Sisu: Week at the Summer Cottage

A week ago, my host family and I headed off to Vierumäki to the summer cottage. Vierumäki is a small town in between Lahti and Heinola. It was a week filled of relaxation and doing absolutely nothing… ahhhhh… except that doing absolutely nothing in my case meant having something to do constantly! It was an actually busy week of doing different sports, touring, and shopping.

I’m not remembering the exact order of things we did. One of the first things though was going to Mikkeli. It was about an hour away from where we were staying. There held the headquarters of the armed forces of Finland during the Second World War. Our first stop was the actual headquarters building which is now a school and a museum. The museum had different exhibits on Finland during the second world war. Although the placards explaining each display were in only Finnish and Swedish, it still was interesting for me. There were different photos, artifacts, scale models and videos on everything about wartime Finland.

Mikkeli Päämajamuseo - Former headquarters of the Finnish Armed Forces during WWII and now a museum and school

Finland was right in between two of the world’s largest powers at the time: the USSR and Germany. Finland was originally allied with Germany early on in the war because Germany gave Finland help to keep the Soviet Union out. Finland fought the USSR twice. The first time was during the Winter War when Finland struck back at invading Soviet troops using guerilla warfare in the middle of the Finnish Winter. (the USSR was driven out by the way, but Finland lost its southeastern region.) The next time was during the Continuation War. Karelia (a former southeastern region of Finland) had been taken by the USSR during the Winter War. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union and captured Leningrad, Finland tried to re-capture Karelia so the USSR started attacking Finnish cities including the capital, Helsinki. Finland eventually lost the regions it gained again, and Finland had to repay the USSR in damages for years to come. Then Finland turned on Germany during the Lapland war when it drove out all German troops from their camps in the northern part of Finland, Lapland. [I hope this is pretty accurate even though this is a very generalized history on Finland during the war.]

Anyway, the museum was a neat place to visit and I even got to go in the office of the president and Finnish hero of the time, Carl Mannerheim! And just saying, I was only an hour and a half from Russia. It was the farthest East I have ever been!

For some time after, we walked around the main market square (kauppatori in Finnish) and then had lunch at a restaurant just off to the side of the square. From there we stopped at a store that sold handmade items made by prisoners from the jail in Mikkeli. Casual, you know.

The jail store!

So I can’t really detail every single thing I did in a week in just one blog post so here’s basically what I did when we were just at the cottage: frisbee golf, tennis, swimming, walking, eating, wild berry picking (a popular Finnish pastime!), fishing, reading, drawing, Finnish grammar… For not doing much I was actually pretty busy.

The cottage we stayed in was not the typical Finnish cottage (small building in the forest or on the shore of a lake near nothing else), but this cottage was very nice. All the walls were paneled with Finnish wood, there was a big fireplace in the middle of the main room (kitchen/living room), two bedrooms, a loft, a bathroom, and a sauna, of course, I mean we are in Finland. (Fun fact! For a country of just over 5 million, there are 2 million saunas!) In the back there was a deck with a table and chairs (where we ate most of the time.)

The cottage was a duplex. We were in the half on the left side of the picture.

Back of the cottage

My room!

Backside of the fireplace

Throughout our stay, we went in to Lahti, which was the largest city nearby. The main attraction of Lahti is its ski museum, with its Olympic sized ski jumps. Fortunately, we were able to ride the ski lift up to base of the jump (which was another 72 meters on top of the hill!) We rode the elevator up to the top and as soon as you walked out onto the platform, it was quite the view of Lahti and the surrounding areas. And just to think that world famous skiers had gone down these jumps from where I was standing was a crazy thought! No way anybody could get me to ski down one! (There were three different ones, all with a different height.) Well, if I did in fact ski…

Lahti Ski Museum

The highest ski jump (the one we went up)

Downtown Lahti

Don't fall!

After that, we drove a few minutes and then were visiting friends of my host family up until very late at night (which means sunlight still…) Although most of the conversations were in Finnish (I could get the gist of what they were saying, but not totally) it was nice to sit there and be a sponge soaking in the Finnish social life.

On one of our last few days, we headed into Lahti again and went to the TV and Radio Museum. It was up on a hill and it used to be the broadcasting station for the area. The main radio mast is still there and when it was built, it was the tallest man-made structure in Finland. (I’m not sure if it’s still in use.) It was interesting to see how telecommunications have evolved in this part of the world. There were different displays of photos and vintage radios, phone systems, and TVs along with extensive history on the Lahti’s broadcasting station. Near the entrance of the museum, there were interactive exhibits for kids where they could put on their own news broadcast and radio shows. There were cardboard cut-outs of famous people there that the kids could pretend to be on camera…and my host brother just happened to pull out Barack Obama’s face! He didn’t know who it was so when I said that he was my president, they thought it was funny.