Mark and I spent our Sunday and Monday after the Ultra Bra concerts visiting my friends. I am grateful to have the opportunity to spend time with all of them. Our schedules were compressed because of the concert dates and the fact that Mark arrived in Finland two days after me, so we could really only do our visiting on those two days. We spent our second week in Finland visiting Seinäjoki, Oulu and Rovaniemi, all firsts for Mark.
We spent the afternoon of Sunday, August 24 with Risto, his wife Tiia and their children Sakke, Brandon, Elsa and Jasper. Jasper wasn’t born when we were last together in 2022. We had an afternoon visit over tea and chocolates and pastries. I brought over a box of Purdy’s chocolates. The kids certainly have grown; Sakke is seventeen and towers over all of us. I have known Risto for 25 years. While we were talking Risto brought up one of the tasks he had to undertake when dealing with his mother’s estate. This news shook me, as I did not know that Mrs. Rossi had died in the intervening three years. I had met his mother on several occasions, once in Michigan and all the other times at the Rossi household, where she had been caring for the children. I felt sad for the rest of the visit. I did not want to ask Risto to elaborate on her loss and told Mark afterward that I will express my condolences and memories of her at a later time. I loved meeting Jasper who as you can see below looks just like his big sister Elsa.
From left to right: Elsa, Jasper, Tiia, Risto, Brandon, Mark and Sakke
After our visit with Risto, Tiia and family we headed to Prisma to get some flowers for our next visit. Sagan (formerly Tiffiny) and Risto are now divorced but it is good that the children are still close together, as Sagan, her partner Erik and her daughter Lumi live only a short walk away. The next day was Lumi’s twentieth birthday, and I brought over some “happy birthday” Purdy’s chocolates and card for her. I can remember her as a little girl when Sagan would read Hop On Pop to her. Now she’s twenty and starting at Aalto-yliopisto the next day. Two major milestones on Monday for Lumi!
Sagan looked so good and stylish with a blue shock of hair. In the photo below you can see photos of her children as they grew up. I can remember when they were all toddlers. She and Erik have a gorgeous dining patio that faces their backyard. Earlier that day I told Mark about a must-eat meal we have to order when we’re in Rovaniemi. That meal, comprised of shaved reindeer meat, mashed potatoes and lingonberries, is a Lappi tradition. I have eaten it on several occasions, most notably when my mother and I were in Kemijärvi during the summer of 2000. I also had that meal in Utsjoki. Sagan must have telepathy because she made the most sumptuous dinner of exactly that. Her homemade rye bread topped it off to be the *perfect* Finnish meal. This was no five-minute slap-up and must have taken her all afternoon to prepare. I was so happy that Mark got to experience it. As I have been to Finland so many times and seen places and eaten things I know what I want to expose Mark to. And on this occasion, Sagan showed him the traditional Lappi dinner. Our mouths were watering, wanting more. I had a second helping of mashed potatoes with reindeer gravy.
Sagan and Erik had recently been to Bhutan so we spent the rest of the evening looking at their vacation photos on their TV. They were fortunate to have planned a long trip that included the east of Bhutan so they saw much more than just the capital city Thimphu and its immediate vicinity.
Erik, Lumi, Sagan and Mark
The following day, Monday, August 25, we had dinner at the apartment of Antti and Ilona Lehtinen. I greeted their youngest son Aulis who was at the door. He was in the midst of studying for his Swedish exam the next day. Antti was mixing our delicious yellow carrot soup in the blender when we arrived. I recall we had carrot soup the last time we visited, yet this time it had a shot of ginger. We brought over six cans of cider, Purdy’s chocolates plus a Toronto Blue Jays water bottle. Antti said he would place that bottle next to his drum kit. Maybe I will see that bottle “in action” at a future Scandinavian Music Group or Ultra Bra show.
I wanted to thank Antti in person for including us on the Friends and Family list which entitled us to purchase concert tickets at a reduced price. Antti really went out of his way to ensure that we could attend the concerts without having E-tickets. Although Mark has since purchased a cellphone, one year ago when tickets first went on sale he did not have one. I am still living without one. Antti spoke with the ticketing agency to make sure that we could attend the concerts with paper tickets. We had no problem presenting our printed tickets as we entered the stadium. Kiiiti jengi. We had some questions to ask about the production and Antti was just as eager to hear our impression of the show. He told us about the earpiece trouble that Vuokko had on the first night. I could detect that she was briefly out of synch with the band but she blended back in seamlessly as the professional she is. I asked about the black oily substance that was poured over the band members’ heads during “Ken Saro-Wiwa on kuollut”. It was definitely a real thing and not a creation out of AI. I told him how much I enjoyed seeing them from the front row and then from among the crowd on the field. It was a thrill to be part of the yellow-raincoat brigade.
Antti and Ilona have an enormous book collection, and on my two prior visits I didn’t feel I had enough time to look through it all. As Mark and Antti chatted about other things, Ilona and I talked about books and the Finnish literary classics. She gave me two books from her vast library.
We had checked the tram timetable before we left for their place, as we didn’t want to miss the last one as we did last time. However, when we went to the tram stop, we discovered that we did in fact miss the last tram, by about half an hour. Turns out that trams run later on weekends–even on Sunday–than they do Monday to Friday. Were we looking at a weekend schedule? Antti had said before we left that he could show us where to catch the bus if in fact we did miss the last tram, but neither Mark nor I wanted to go back to his place to ask. We had already said our goodbyes and I would have felt embarrassed to come crawling back, needing to be shown the way. Surely we could find the bus stop for ourselves. It wasn’t a big deal at all, as we had seen two buses pass by and just followed where they had come from. We found the bus stop, which would take us to the Kalasatama subway station. Neither of us had a ticket or bus pass, and the driver told us we could pay by credit card. I was worried my card wouldn’t work because I hadn’t authorized it to tap for transactions, but it did.
Son Aulis, the photographer for the first picture, joins us in the second
Risto the cat