House-hunting: the kid in the candy store

You know you’re getting serious about putting down roots when you start house-hunting. And I mean house-hunting. Not apartment-hunting, not townhouse-hunting. After scrolling in earnest these past few weeks through pages and pages of possibilities, I realized that at the back of my mind, I was looking at apartments dutifully but not happily. I even went to an ‘esittely’, open house, and saw one very nice apartment. Key word: nice. After a conversation with a colleague from Australia, I realized that we shared an unexamined prejudice: where we come from, you don’t live in apartments when you’re a grown-up if you’ve had any success in life. You don’t go looking for an apartment in your 50s unless your health is failing or you’re in bankruptcy. There’s a faint smell (metaphorical, of course) around considering apartments, something like that whiff of sadness and defeat you get when you walk into a second-hand store in the US (Goodwill in particular). And since this is my one and only life, I get to decide where I want to live, and it’s not going to be in an apartment – no matter how sensible that seems to Finns who point to such issues as maintenance, snow removal, traveling, summer cottages, proximity to downtown, and a score of other advantages. Oh, and the cost.

So this preference is irrational here in Finland (and in the US for that matter – how many people own single-family dwellings in Manhattan, for example?), but I have a right to have it, and once I accepted my irrational preference, I started to really enjoy looking for a new home. And I got very lucky, because my Australian colleague doesn’t mind looking at homes, and in fact seems to savor it (he was an electrician before he became an English professor, and he spent years renovating his own beautiful home), and he has come with me on most of these visits. We play good cop/bad cop as I explore and feel like a kid in a candy store, salivating at built-in corner cupboards, swooning over pönttöuunit (tell me if you have a better translation than “brick oven covered with sheet metal”) and admiring honey-colored wood floors, and he asks the hard questions: Why is it being sold? Why hasn’t it sold yet? Don’t you think it’s overpriced? How recently was the plumbing updated? How much insulation in the walls? etc. In fact, he’s been looking at homes for a long time, and some of the realtors recognize him (and tremble, I think).

You learn so much about a culture when you explore the nitty-gritty of how its members live. All of the houses have saunas, because that is a necessity, but many of them have only one toilet (“You Americans really love your bathrooms, don’t you?”). I’ve seen some houses with beautiful wood paneling and floors, but one realtor said “Finns don’t like all that wood”; some wood floors are covered up with linoleum. Many homes, maybe even most, have a potato/cold storage cellar under a trap door in the kitchen, with treacherous stairs leading straight down. How do you maneuver that when you’re in your 70s? (Oh. That’s why some of these houses are being sold. And thank goodness I have male friends who were willing to climb down into them for me, because you probably shouldn’t do it in a skirt.) Some are set on land that is part of the sale; others are on land that the city leases to you for decades, and you pay around one thousand Euros in rent per year, depending on the size of the lot. You have to shell out a rather high sales tax (4%, I think), but low property tax (laughably low – 100 Euros annually for one home I looked at). 

And clearly, Finns take up less living space than Americans. My house in Oregon is a whopping 232 square meters. It’s a pretty good sized house in the US but nothing extravagant. I just searched for homes that size for sale in this area, and there were only 5 that size or larger, the only one in my price range located way out in the country. Have you ever been to IKEA and seen the ‘small-space’ home display? It feels a bit like that looking at homes in Finland.

And then there are the snow/cold issues. Triple panes are a must. If the home has wood siding, it needs to start a certain distance off the ground or the snow will rot it during the slow spring melt. All homes have a snow ladder so you can knock heavy drifts off the roof. Heating is a real deal-maker or deal-breaker – oil heating is the most expensive, a heat pump highly coveted, and all kinds of alternatives in between exist as well (district heating, electric with radiators, etc.). Most of the homes have a wood closet for stacking your firewood conveniently so you don’t need to lose any digits or your nose running out for more wood when it’s 30 below.

I haven’t even mentioned the ‘kuntotarkastuslausunto’. This is the inspection report, and you can imagine the kind of vocabulary words you might find there. I am so lucky to have Finnish friends willing to go through this document for me; I was steered clear of a house I fell in love with but whose past was too checkered to risk a long-term relationship.

So many choices. Maybe this is the thing I find most difficult about looking for a house: it forces me to examine what I want vs what I need, and it brings up difficult-to-answer questions, some of them very uncomfortable: How much longer will I live in Joensuu? What will I do when I retire? How long will I be able to ride a bike around? Will I always live alone? Will I go to the US every summer? How often will my children come to visit? Will I need to take grandchildren into account?

Maybe I should get an apartment after all.

But to get serious again: figuring out what I want – never mind what I need – has never been easy for me. But I take solace from a wise Finnish friend who said I should simply wait until my mind and my heart come to an agreement about which house to pick. At this point it feels like I’m wrestling with a blanket that’s too short. I just have to figure out which corner to tug at and which part of my body to leave cold. Then I can settle back and savor my candy.

Opening ceremonies

Every year, the University of Eastern Finland launches the academic year officially with a day of opening ceremonies. These are both religious and secular, and as far as I can tell, they are poorly attended. I saw none of my colleagues at the church event (as one of them told me, “I don’t believe in God, so I’m not going”), and only one of my colleagues in English attended the secular one. I’ve been considering my motivation for spending that precious time at the beginning of the year on something so ‘non-productive’. I suppose I’m finding ways to tie myself to this still pretty alien institution.

To be clear: there are other ‘ceremonies’, or perhaps ‘rituals’ would be a better word, focused on students. Groups of ‘fuksit’ [FOOK-seet], or ‘freshmen’, are wandering the campus behind older students dressed in large pants. These pants are covered with patches commemorating various milestones or memberships. (I have one with a beer mug on it which apparently was a souvenir from a pub crawl in Savonlinna. No, I didn’t attend; I bought the patch.) These mentors arrange activities and parties for the new students. I went to one last night, the only teacher there. At first I thought I had misunderstood the invitation. As it turns out, no, it’s just that the other teachers were busy elsewhere. Maybe my priorities are in the wrong place; I think it’s more that my mindset is still in the US university system, where making your program attractive to students (for example, by getting to know them in informal settings) is part of your job. In any case, it seemed to be a fun event, though the ‘fuksit’ were given a rather daunting task: introduce yourself to older students/teachers and then ask them if they are hiding one of the special objects on their scavenger hunt list. I had the screwdriver, and had made up a story about being the only one strong enough to pull it out of a frozen turkey, but only one student benefited from my genius. I guess I am just that intimidating.

To go back to the official ‘avajaiset’. A Lutheran coming from Oregon, where I am used to people not really knowing what a Lutheran is, or people who have an active antipathy towards organized Christianity, I felt – what, excitement? a- or be-musement? -- at the prospect of entering my church for a university event. It felt like a clash of worlds. And yet, there were university officials offering prayers for the new students, for colleagues, for stamina and purpose and joy and all those other things you need to get through an academic year. The sermon had to do with gratitude (though, admittedly, I didn’t catch all of it); the hymns were hauntingly beautiful, and the choral offerings were by Sibelius. I admired the paintings when I was distracted from the words – amazing renderings of sprigs from local trees and bushes.

After a break for lunch, the opening ceremonies continued with a formal processional by the PhDs into the auditorium, where we were seated in the second and third rows. Here I have to digress for a moment. I got my PhD from Yale, but when I did, I was already working in Oregon at my first 'real' job and was too poor to go back to the East Coast for my graduation ceremony. How I would have loved to have my dissertation advisor, George Schoolfield, hood me and shake my hand in the presence of loving family members. (As it was, my mother said, “You mean Robert Redford was your commencement speaker and you didn’t go?? I missed my chance to meet him!” I think she was more upset about that than about not seeing me get my doctoral hood.) In addition, Yale did not subscribe to the practice of a dissertation defense. Here in the Nordic countries, the doctoral defense is a huge deal. It’s almost as elaborate as a wedding. After the academic portion, you can have a sit-down meal or a ball or who knows what. I had no defense, and, when I got the letter saying I had passed and was now Doctor Saranpa, I was stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce. I still remember wiping my hands off to open the envelope.

All that digression as a way to explain why I now, at every opportunity, participate willingly in academic rituals. It’s a way to take back a little piece of the acknowledgement of this accomplishment in my life that I didn’t allow myself back then.

So then, all of the faculty PhDs (or rather, all who show up) walk in solemnly, dressed in black, with their doctoral hats held in their left hand. I find the doctoral hat tradition rather amusing. You have a tailor come to measure you for your hat and you spend a lot of money on it. But you NEVER WEAR IT. Seriously! I think maybe there are one or two rare occasions when you might be called upon to put this expensive garment on your head. But not at this one. Apparently there is also a doctoral sword, and a ceremony in which you sharpen this doctoral sword. But it’s a blunt sword and it never cuts anything, at least not intentionally. I love ritual – don’t you?

The rector gives a speech which is partially delivered in English as well, then there is a student speech, and finally the awarding of the Teacher of the Year award. This year, it was a very well-deserving teacher of Finnish language, and she gave a smart and amusing acceptance speech. That’s pretty much it. There are also musical numbers, and of course I have to say something about them. The first group was a vocal/string/percussion ensemble (including electric guitar and bass) that performed three songs in English which seemed to have little to do with the theme of ‘avajaiset’. (One of them had to do with not being able to sleep at night, so maybe I’m wrong there.) The second group was the university’s choir. Their songs were lovely if the delivery was a little rough. (My son would shudder if he could have heard how many separate ‘t’s you could hear at the ends of words.) The whole ceremony was topped off with a rousing rendition of the Karelian fight song, or at least that’s what it sounded like. I will have to learn this song. My colleague in English says you could tell which of the chorus members were not from Karelia, because they were pretending to sing it – they don’t know the words yet.

Speaking of things I’ll have to learn, I’ll say a few words about the Finnish language and my struggle with it. I’m feeling a bit encouraged lately. I’m understanding more, I’m daring more, and I’ve signed up for a Finnish class. I’m going to meet this beast head-on. Or at least that's how it feels now at the opening of the school year. Maybe I'll visualize myself with that doctoral sword, slicing at menacingly long words and frightening dipthongs.