TORNIO - A HOME FOR FOUR WEEKS (1999)

In March or April there was this report of John Hopkins at my school in Kiel.
This time I thought really hard about online life. Thoughts like do I get shizophren run through my head. Is my life parted into real life and online life?
It was one of theses circles of thinking in your head where no exit was in sight.
But now there was this strange american guy talking about energy floods.
There should be an exchange of energys not related to the communication channel you choose.
(Right now I hear him exchanging energys with his son passing by under my window on their way to the watertower where energy levels will probably rise to heaven with the other neoscene members)
Anyway, his lesson smashed the blockade in my head and I could easily stop thinking about parted life. I just lived: on- and offline. No more thoughts about shizophrenia. This was a nice gift to me. So I sat down writing an email to thank him for sharing his thoughts.

He wrote something about neoscenes occupation 2 in an e-mail. A listserv and an upcoming workshop which should be around midsummernight near the polar circuit in Tornio. I never thought about a trip to scandinavia before 'cause normally I used to go south to catch some sun. My knowledge about Finnland was very small.....I only knew Aki Kaurismäki films. Anyways it was a quick desission. I didn't think about it, just this feeling that I have to go there. Probably some reason was, that I could meet some people who have even more strange thoughts than I have.
And here I am. Now that the time in Tornio is nearly over I feel kind of melancholic to leave here. Life was so easy and so much fun up here. Working did not really feel like work.
Even if that fucking machines sucked all energy out of you somedays. :-/
The short distances (like two minutes from the dorm to school) and everything reachable by bike in a few minutes were also very relaxing, when you are used to go half an hour by bus to school.
I'm lying tired on my bed thinking that I actually hate long farewells and this time saying goodbye started on thursday and will go on till saturday when I'll finally catch my plane. That's a long one. But perhaps it's a good one to live through melancholic feeling than everytime rushing from one thing to another and feeling not catch up with thoughts and actions. (this sentence is dedicated to "little" Riikka ;-))

Listserve - Black curtain

At the same time I signed on for neoscenes listserve.
There was this unnessecary war going on at the Balkans. One day there was the suggestion to make a black curtain in the net dedicated to the war victims in Kosova. As much people as possible were supposed to keep their webspace shut down for one day - all the pages had to be black with a title of your choice. And then they were linked in a circle.
I liked the idea of silence protest against all this media flood which is sometimes really tasteless and I took part in this event. It was a good experience to work with people from all over the world in a network. Should be more of such events.
Germany as some other countries is stoneedge in onlinestuff. People behave strange in the way they use the net. And like someone said to me in Tornio: "It's hard to tell people what you are doing there, when they don't understand it." And they won't learn it, 'cause they think it's not necessary. But I think it's more wasted time watching TV than communicating online.
I started joining a newsgroup of european journalists. There were some of the Balkans also and it was interesting comparing those news with the media news.
Finally this black curtain made me think about home, what means home to me and to other people (how it feels to be thrown out of houses and towns). Also I had a very strange personal situation going on and didn't know if I could stay in my flat. I love it 'cause it's seaside and it really felt like my home for the first time after I moved from my grandmas place.
But when I started these online-interviews: "How other people think about home", I managed to change my view a lot. Home was not only a physical place now, but something that I could give myself whereever I would be. Somehow I managed to have a home for a month in Tornio and it was a nice one....I really enjoyed staying there.

Arriving in Tornio

My first contact to Finnish langauge was at plane, when the stewardess made an announcement. A short look at my neighbour - also virgin Finnland traveller - and (excuse me) we had to start laughing. Especially this Äxi, kûxi, ûxi was strange for my ears.
In Helsinki I was suprised by high temperatures, wishing my warm jacket away (someone wrote that I should bring clothes keeping me warm down to zero degree :-) ).
After some (more) hours of waiting for my connecting flight I took course to the international arrivals with a sign in my hands. Sixten Therkildsen was written on it and there I stood for over half an hour waiting and nothing happend.
A nice finnish lady on the counter told me that there was no other way getting to the domestic flights, but the danish guy I should meet here was more clever. Somehow he managed to find a way to the other building without passing the nice smelling underground parking place. And when I was just on my way back there someone passed by and asked "Are you Nadja?". So we finally met and together we found our way on board the machine to Kemi.
This was my first flight without reserved seats. It was like going on a bus.
We had another stop in Oulu which reminds me of the first and only sentence I learned in Finnish. To amuse the Finns I'll try to write it: "ºxy oulut, kiitos.".
The norther we went with this plane the lonlier it looked on the ground. Woods, lakes, the sea, a lonely farm somewhere and few roads with nearly no cars on it. We started making up stories about anti culture shock in Lappland. It's a pity we never shot the movie we had in mind while this trip to Tornio. It would have been about the reactions of a person originally from a big town now going to northern Finnland getting crazy on this "island of nothing". Like starting talking to trees or whatever.
Actually while staying in Tornio I got an e-mail from one of those Emmaba students who went back to Helsinki for some time and he wrote: "I'm sitting home - actually here are some people as well; I mean in Helsinki, yeah yeah real people. Imagine that; I mean the streets are alive.". So staying in Tornio really felt for some people like being in the middle of nothing.

First impressions

One of my first impressions I had from the "town" were the really ugly buildings.
Excuse me another time, but some houses looked like those in german suburb ghettos. And then these nice wodden houses in between. Really strange for german eyes.
Once when we were in sauna Elina told me that it is fault of the germans that most wodden houses are gone. They burned them when they left in direction to the swedish border in the end of second world war. Quite shocking historical news for me - humans seem to be all the same when they start fighting.
I decided to take realistic colour pictures of all the buildings looking strange to german eyes. I did this in the middle of my month in Tornio - it was quite near to the point when you get used to your surroundings and a good exercise going one step back in point of view. Accidently I took a picture of my feet and then I went on documantating my way through Tornio on this "photo-safari" with pictures of my shadow at different places I passed.
Now you know what the attached Photograph are about.........

Sauna

Before I came to Tornio one thing I heared about finnish people was that they do sauna all the time. My sauna expieriences were very simple - I went to sauna once in my whole life and it was about 10 years ago. I didn't made it to check out sauna at my gym before travelling.
I hadn't been in Tornio for 24 hours when the girls grabbed me for sauna. Actually promising me that I will become totally relaxed and have a good sleep afterwards. As we all suffered from lack of sleep 'cause of the lightened nights here in Lappland I was easily to persuade.
It turned out exactly opposite - I was totally refreshed and not able to catch much sleep in the following night.
Two times we went to the local swimming pool and the sauna there was quite helpful to make the cold water of the pool bearable for at least 10 minutes swimming without deepfreezing. Then I had to flee to the Yacuzzi to warm up again and another time to sauna for daring to get into the swimming pool once more.
You can call me a chick that I never went to swim in the river. But first there was no sauna near and second I was the one located most southish in europe from our group and used to hot summers in Kiel *g*.
Anyway, I became quite a sauna freak up there - I went there three times a week and definetly one of the first things I did back in Kiel was checking out sauna of my gym.

Birthday

Than there was my upsoming birthday. I started planning an online-birthday-party shortly before I came to Tornio. Sended a lot of announcements out to all my reallife friends with account, my online friends and the neoscene members. My plan was to gather them all together and get some nice chaos and perhaps conversation as well.
But it didn't really worked out the way I planned it (was it a performance then? ;-))
My reallife friends were either too involved in the "Kieler Woche" or affraid of technics 'cause they never used IRC before. There were only Frank and Christian showing up. The Onliners were quite active in showing up but not so happy with speaking english.
But there were nice things happening when the neoscene people (some of them for the first time) were online. And the Annies were also very active. In between I checked out all the functions of i-visit and decided for myself that I prefer textbased-online-communication.
Normally I hate birthdays but this was really a nice one. We had coffee in the afternoon before the onlineevent started and one of my presents was a nice nokia toy mobile - every student has a mobile in finnland, so I shouldn't miss that part.
Later the party started also in RL at Tipula basement. Mindaugus was so nice to fix a streaming real audio and video (7h xxmin - be patient while checking the whole party and please miss the last hours where I probably should be really drunk judging from the hangover I had the next day. And Mindaugus was probably capable for that also, 'cause he brought this strange liqueur from Lithuania which would kill a bear.:-)
Another nice souvenier were Moskitobits all over my legs and feet (looked like measles).
My tip: don't wear short skirts in Lappland when you plan to get drunk and stay outside for a longer time. Luckily I changed clothes after we had breakfast and went to the beach with a bunch of people. I wouldn't have enough hands for all the scratching in the next days and nights ;-). It was very strange but really nice sitting at the riverbeach at nighttime everything totally light, sun shining and listening to music and lucky me managed to get home safe by bike and could enjoy the next day in bed in a state of coma. ;-)

Midsummer

I talked about the light before. Two days after my birthday there were midsummerpartys all over. Neoscenes planned to go to a "mountain" up north to see the sun not going down.
Actually I hadn't totally recovered from my birthday, had a bad mood and was fed up with all this moakitos - so, I decided to stay home alone.
My expiriences on Johannus were also very interesting ones. Besides the uncountable drunks on the streets I saw a whole group of people partying on a houseroof. I had a phonecall with my mum and in between beerbottles were flying out of the next building down on the street - that was the moment when I started thinking that perhaps I better go home soon and lock in my room. ;-)
But I dared to have a long ride with the bike to sweden. When I finally came back to the dorm, I had a shower and wanted to go back to my room afterwards - but wow it was locked - I forgot the keys inside. If I would have been as drunken as all the others I would have understood, but I didn't even look at a beer this evening. Then I experienced the advantage of a mobilephone. Luckily one girl stayed in the dorm, too, and managed to get someone with a masterkey to open my door. And he had the chance to look at a girl in her bathingrope happily smiling. While I was happy to be able to grab some clothes soon.
Strange things happen near the polar circuit around midsummer and those were not the only ones........

Jazzfestival

I'm very flexible when listening to music. There are only two kinds of music I really hate: one is folkmusic and the other one jazz. But as the Tornio Jazz Festival is one of the biggest events there and Marie pushed me to go there, I tried once again listening to Jazz.
It should take place on a very small subisland of Tornio. First we thought it won't be possible to sqeeze the complete audience on this island. But then we recognized astonished that there was even enough room for a tent. When the first band started to play I was quite shocked that there were chairs all over the tent and I should sit at a concert. Tina and I sat in the back of the tent. The first band was really nice a mix between Tekkno and Jazz - bearable ;-). Meanwhile I observed one of the mixers running around with his sunglasses and basecap nearly the whole time - even in the tent. So Sherlock Franz suggested to Tina that he was too vain to wear his real glasses. We started a bet. When we would find out that his glasses were ordinary sunglasses she should have a beer, otherwise opposite.
Noone really dared to ask him, but when I sat outside with Elina escaping from the second band - really awful jazzy for my ears - he passed by several times smiling over and I dared to tell about our stupid bet. Poor guy - it was really embarassing for him - he explained very long that he forgot his real glasses at home when they started working very early in the morning. Anyway the beer was mine and Tina a bit desparet that she lost and didn't want to believe first. But the american old daddys playing Dixieland cheered her up soon.

The End

Finally there are some more strange things to mention:
First of all I was astonished that finnish students are payed for studying.
Then there was this luxurious equipment at the school and really ergonomic computerlabs - not used to this.
Astonishing was also that smoking was nearly handeled as in the US. In few places you are allowed to smoke inside - this reminds me of the pizzaparty with the Emmaba students which was splashed by a fire alarm coming from the boys bathroom...tsts.
At the schoolground there are several smoking places which look like gaarden houses with an ashtray in the middle.
Also the behaviour of the youth reminds me of the States - once some cars passed me several times when walking on the main street. They seem to have fun riding the cars up and down the main street on saturday nights or whenever the weather is nice.
Finnland is paradise for lactose allergics. Everywhere you get lactofree food or worst Hyla (milkproducts with very few lactose in it).
I never saw so many drunk people, who sometimes had to be carried out of a bar - I wonder how they manage to get in this state when a beer costs 20 FIM!?
It was also strange to have this "bikerbar" PressClub in such a small town and someone told there were even seen german biker.
Cashmachienes at banks are called OTTO - perhaps only funny for german natives.
And last but not least there were these strange things on every parkinglot. As I found out there is energy coming out to heat up your car in winter time when it's going down to minus 40.

I think that was most of the things that were really strange for me. Could be that I forgot something and I definetly have more Tornio stories in my head (but I won't tell those ;-)). I hope you enjoyed reading about my memories about Tornio.
I like Finnland and can imagine going there another time.
When I get flooded with work Tornio could definetly be a good place to do it over there,'cause there is really not much else to do (at the first view ;-)).
Anyway I learned a lot over there and met a lot of nice people.