Santalahti

 

Santalahti

A funny thing happens when you are on a trip for this long.  You kind of run out of things to do.  At least the things that you had on your list when you started.  Over a month in we had our things we’d checked off of our list.  We had our regular activities that we liked doing.  And we had a fair bit of downtime.  And that was welcome.  But we were also keen to keep trying new things and not waste the time that we had. 

So one day we woke up and had breakfast, and didn’t have an agenda.  So after going to some parks and doing our grocery shopping, we had a whole afternoon unaccounted for.  So we decided to ride the tram as far west as it went, to a place called “Santalahti.”  Lahti means bay or cove, and there are a lot of lahtis around Tampere. 

We weren’t exactly sure what we would find.  We hoped there might be a café for some coffee and korvapuusti.  Or maybe a cool park.  In our wildest dreams, maybe a library.  But we didn’t find any of that.  We found something a lot cooler.

A vast expanse of open fields, and water, and forest.  Beaches and dog parks.  Cliffs.  Trees.  Nature.  It felt like the Pyynikki, but instead of feeling like we were in a coastal mountain range, it felt like we were on Whidbey island.  We saw people in small sailboats on the lake, and people practicing parasailing, and flying kites.  I can’t really adequately describe it.  So I’ll just show you:

Another funny thing happens to you on a trip this long.  You start to feel really connected to where you are.  At first you have to of necessity – you do it so you won’t get lost.  But after a while it becomes a more ingrained part of you.  You know where you are because you are a part of where you are.

While we had originally planned to take the tram home, at some point we realized that we had walked far enough that we were reasonably close to home and just walked the rest of the way back.  In all it took us about two hours, but we stopped at lot to play and to marvel.  And then eventually we were home.  It was an adventure that felt like we had begun it as tourists and finished it as locals.  It felt like we lived here.  It felt like we belonged.

Part of it is that we have jobs that have a lot of freedom and flexibility that we can take an afternoon to go for a long walk.  Fair.  But I think its more than that – I mean we saw lots of other people there too who presumably also had jobs.  And as we walked through this wonderful place I kept thinking that in America it was something that we would have driven by on the way to somewhere important we had to be.  And we would have craned our necks and thought “huh, that looks like a neat place.”  And we would have told ourselves that we’d check it out someday when we had the time.  And we never would have found the time.  Because every day we’d be off to some new important place.  And on the way speeding to all of those different places we’d be driving by something special.  And in Finland it’s nice to have time to just be somewhere special.

It’s nice to just be.

Hei Hei