During my trip to Finland I was quite surprised that some places had so few postcards, and some towns had none at all for sale. I was travelling off-season, which might explain things. In comparison, when I studied Romansch in Switzerland, every town, no matter how small it was, had its own postcards. Romansch villages, however, whether in the winter or summer might lend themselves to more a picturesque postcard experience. I did not find any postcards of Simpele or Ii. While in Ii, I mailed thirteen postcards, all of which were bedecked with six or seven stamps in small denominations. Later on in my trip I did send out five postcards from Helsinki, but I ran out of stamps and mailed them on my last Sunday, when I had to buy stamps from a tourist shop and thus did not have the luxury of poring over a stamp catalogue to pick and choose.

I decided to scan my store receipts from Ii to show not only what I bought but more interestingly what an Ii store receipt looks like. Because my mind is so trained to see two capital I’s as the Roman numeral for 2, I can’t perceive these receipts as showing the town name. I believe that is the main reason the town, even when printing signs entirely in capital letters, spells its name as Ii. As a capital I followed by a lowercase i, the town name definitely stands out and doesn’t appear to be an abbreviation or a generational number.

The receipt on the left shows two purchases I cannot divulge right now since what I bought were gifts and I haven’t given them away yet. The receipt on the right is for a birthday postcard.

The receipt on the left is for a Berliner, the jelly doughnut so often linked to a speech at the Berlin Wall by President Kennedy. The receipt on the right is for the book I bought Iin kuva — Image of Ii.