Sunday, December 16, 2007

Rolling in the snow

WELCOME TO HELSINKI!
SETTING OUT
This is Riita's trusty old Lada-she sold her Nokia shares at a low point and so doesn't run to a Saab or Volvo.With it's Russian pedigree it sure knew how to handle snow

Anyone got a scraper?

On the road less travelled

An original and ancient smoke sauna-you go in pink and come out kippered.You can do the bacon at the same time

Cosy cottage in a clearing


Mein Hostess-the lovely, effervescent and always colourful Riitta Suominen-we met whilst I was pretending to learn Russian at St Petersburg university- she is fluent in it and four other languages.She loves to wear a Finnish stylists patterns and colours( the sort of ken Donne of Finland) and Japanese tourists think it is native-Sami -dress. Also she bakes a mean blueberry pie and cooks a karelian deer meat stew.

Ayone for a barbecue-where's the weber?


Hundred year old Finnish Country cottage and wood fire heated sauna and dunny complex.It took a few hours to crank up the sauna but it was much more moist than the electric commercial ones and I got to roll in the snow after a session.Wow! Also spurning a chamber pot and the walk across snow to the freezing dunny at 4am in -4c I resorted to chidhood techniques of peeing off the verandah,starkers, into the snow.Her brothers could thus write their names in the snow-male vanity and utility of tackle.

Going to put feed out for the birds at an absent neighbour's cottage

Near miss-as the camera clicked an avalanche of snow slid from the cotttage roof-I think Riitta planned this

1 comment:

Blamey said...

Hi Barry - and I thought it was getting cold here in Tokyo http://intokyonow.blogspot.com/