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In Which I Meet A Super Jumping Monster Bike

October 22, 2006 by Mike

Kauniainen

I'm loving it here. So what's been so good about my time in Helsi-- I mean Kauniainen?

I've had time and space to get on with things but been included in family stuff too. Given the run of a beautiful apartment but looked after, fed, watered and entertained. Seen life in the 'burbs, life in the big city, life at a seaside cottage. All this and I haven't seen Stephen in ten years (I could have sworn he was called Steve back then.) I called him out of the blue when I reached Finland a couple of weeks ago, offering to buy him a beer after I'd found a place to stay in the capital.

"I'll have the beer," he conceded, "but you're staying here."

I wasn't going to argue with an old friend. But imagine: Anna didn't know I existed before that call; today, as I sit and type, I've been living in her home for the past four days. And the kids have been as welcoming.

Stella let me take her to playgroup the day after I arrived. She's two. I felt so proud!

Pinja wrote her name for the very first time while I was in the room. She's four. Imagine how proud her dad was!

Emil's Super Jumping Monster Bike was much faster in the living room than my Bonnie could ever be. Imagine how proud he was!

Tanya let me sleep in her bedroom - though she didn't realise she was being so kind until she got back from her Dad's place.

OK, this time I mean it. No more gushing.

Coney Island is twenty minutes by train from the centre of Helsinki. I've seen the capital at night -- a brilliant meal at Finland's most Finnish restaurant and passable jazz at Storyville one night, passable peanuts and brilliant jazz at the Sture jazz club another. That was something: a scruffy neighbourhood bar given over to live jazz once a week, and this time celebrating its 50th anniversary with a tribute to the club's driving force (and drummer) Olle Ekman.

It was a good crowd - most of them artists who were there to say Hyvaa syntymapaivaa to Olle. To me, that looks like a transcribed Coltrane solo, and if I tried to say it, theyed think I was trying to scat. Badly.

Finland's leading Frank Sinatra tribute act stopped in on the way to a paying gig (very smart in his white tux and whiter hairpiece.)

Gimer, a Russian pianist and friend of Stephen's held the music together with a huge smile. Someone turned up with a mouth organ and turned out to be a virtuoso. The man with a sax round his neck used it mainly to prop up his pint, but nobody minded. One pianist was introduced as 'Sibelius'... but not *that* Sibelius.

There was a drunken Englishman swaying from one table to the next trying to blag free drinks - and by the way he was swaying, it seemed to be working. (This wasn't Stephen. And no, it wasn't me.)

Then there was Margareta von Bock - a Polish-born vocalist whose transformation from Billie Holiday to Shirley Bassey was all the more remarkable because she's 76-years-old, drinks like a darts player and flirts with all the boys (well, with yr correspondent.)

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Finland has been fun. Helsinki, the white domes of the cathedral, errrr, contrasting nicely with the pale white clouded sky, a city of elegant avenues, monstrous shopping centres, and an unfeasible paucity of mobile phone shops, is big enough to be exciting and small enough to feel manageable. It also has, somewhat to my surprise, the best little shopping street in Scandinavia. Frederikenkatu.

Item: The mustiest secondhand bookshop in the world, smelling deliciously of 'Air du Livre Ancien', with no less than *five* Sanskrit-to-English and Sanskrit-to-German dictionaries cheek-by-jowl with an entire section devoted to original 19th century cowboys'n'injuns potboilers. Doubtless, if anybody has travelled the coast of Europe before, at any time in the last thousand years, their account could be found in the bowels of such a bookshop.

Item: Garageland stocks my favourite panel shirts (and makes and sells their own), not to mention assorted jackets, trousers and kitschiana.. I could have spent a fortune in there but space dictates that all I could spend was a great deal of time telling Mr Garageland what a great shop he has. They do mail-order round the world. PLEASE buy yr shirts from here in future.

Item: .. and bang next door, a genuine Laaaahndahn barber shop, complete with twizzlestick on the outside and the smell of pomade on the inside. There was a nice twist though: instead of asking "what are you doing for your holidays, then?", Rody the barber told me what he was doing, opening a London barbershop in the middle of Helsinki.

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(In short: Rody and wife want more from life than commuting and mortgage and mortgage and commuting; visits to Helsinki hint at possibilities of a better life; scrimping and saving and bloody hard work allow them to up sticks and live the life *they* want to live in a brand new country. Hats off to them. In this case, hats off to reveal a particularly good haircut. Cheers Rody - and all power to you and the family.)

--

But what's taken up most of my time in Helsinki has been Russia. Or more specifically, getting a visa to allow me to go to Russia. Again. The plan was to get paperwork sorted for the trip to St Petersburg and also, after the the Baltic states, for the jaunt through Kaliningrad -- which will be my third taste of Russia on the trip.

The agency i used to get my visa for Murmansk emailed me the requisite documents for a double-entry visa, or so they said. I'm sure they believed it, but unfortunately the woman at the consulate didn't. Something, she assured me, was missing. Of course, she couldn't tell me what. I called London, who told me that she was wrong.

But of course, she was right. If she told me that the sky in Russia was yellow and that the sun was a cucumber and that women can play football, she would have been right. She was on the 'right' side of the desk. The only other people I've come across who have the same smug certainty about them, the same unrestricted power of veto over your immediate future are the drudges at passport control in US airports. You know, the ones sitting beneath a great big neon sign saying "We reserve the right to send your sorry ass packing straight back to the same dreary little country you just came from for any reason whatsoever and quite possibly for no reason at all. And you'll thank us for it. God bless Amerika."

I digress. But then again, I had time to digress, time to review most of the dull encounters with officialdom of my life. Three-and-a-half hours to get the right to queue for hours to get into a country full of people queuing. And because of the visa kerfuffle, I know I'm going to have the same frustrations in a couple of weeks queuing once more for a Russian visa for Kaliningrad. I can hardly wait.. except that waiting is exactly what i'll have to do.

On the plus side, however, my entry into the consulate didn't set alarm bells ringing; armed guards didn't tap me on the shoulder and ask me to step into a sideroom; presentaion of my passport didn't cause the clerks to snort in derision at my temerity to try and enter their glorious country after my little run-in with the checkpoint charlies outside Murmansk way back at the start of the trip. (When, if you've lost the willpower to go and check, I may have strayed into a restricted area and was detained for four hours and told that "Moscow will decide if you are ever to be allowed back in the country again.")

So thanks, Moscow, for letting me spend another great wodge of money on visas.. the only country, remember, that needs visas in Europe.

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