Summer....and sauna!

After-storm sunset across one of the many lakes in the park

So, my past couple of weeks living in a National Park (Patvinsuon kansallispuisto) have been pretty much...mahtava! Awesome!  Anyways, I have millions and millions of friends that keep me company wherever I go, all I have to do is share a little of my blood occasionally...

These little butterflies are always very brave and tend to surround me and land on anything while I am doing my plots

My average day starts at 6am, but it feels like midday by this point as the sun has already been up for almost 4 hours at this point.  After breakfast I go to the forest and count trees...lots and lots and lots of trees.  This is interspersed with small breaks of mosquito mass murder...and of course taking pictures of cool things that I have found.  A friend of mine said "I take photos of things I find interesting..." and I think is also true for me.  After counting trees for several hours, I try to get back to the house/cottage by 6pm.  Then make dinner, light the sauna, do a little reading...have a sauna, wash the dishes, go for a walk, go to bed.  Repeat. I live in an old farmhouse with no electricity or running water.  Instead, we have an outhouse, several wooden ovens (direct translation), and a gas stove.  Oh right...and 2 saunas!  because there are no showers or anything of that nature, we have traditional sauna to wash everyday.  There are 2 wood-stove type devices.  One is below a large water tank and is used for making hot water.  The other is the kiuas and is the actual sauna stove/oven.  So, in order to take a proper sauna....

Ahhh...a summer evening in Finland...about 11:30pm. It doesn't really get any darker than this.

1.  Light fire in kiuas and under water

2.  Stoke fire

3.  Use hot water (mixed with cold) to make warm washing water in buckets

4.  Use hot water to make löylyvesi (water for throwing onto kiuas...to make the steam)

5.  Take off all of your clothes (naked is the only way to sauna)

6.  Climb on benches and heitä löylyä (throw water onto the stove to make the steam)

7. Sweat

8. Use vasta if desired.  This is a small bundle of birch branches that you dip in water, steam the leaves briefly on the stove, then beat yourself with.  Seriously.  Beat yourself with hot branches while sweating in a small steamy room.  I highly recommend you try it some day.

9. Take a little break and go outside

10.  Return to sauna and sweat some more. use vasta some more if you would like to.

11.  When you are done sweating, it is time to wash. Use the warm water and pour some onto yourself. Wash as you would in a shower, use the rest of the water to rinse.

12.  You are now done. Dry, dress, and drink water (and/or beer!).  

So now....go have a sauna...for your health!!!

So on that note...here are a selection of photos of what I have found interesting so far this summer!

Sunny morning after a big rainstorm that left the grass saturated. 

Another perfect summer evening.  The only problem is that there are so many things waiting to eat you that it is hard to stop long enough to take a photo

Lakka or cloudberry.  They are now blooming and in August the fruit will be ready.  There is a special kind of insanity that takes over every Finn when it comes to cloudberries. 

The aptly named suokukka, or swamp flower

Kielo, or lily-of-the-valley, has been blooming over the past couple of weeks.  It makes carpets across the floor of some forests and leaves the evening air smelling simply amazing.  It is the national flower of Finland...an excellent choice in my opinion!

Cottongrass (of some sort) fills the edges of some bogs and wet forests here.  Masses of it look really neat carpeting the forest floor in waves of white tufts

One of the friendly butterflies was enjoying blueberry nectar when it was ambushed by a ghost spider.  Too bad for the butterfly, but definitely a lucky day for the spider; that would make a juicy meal!

Green lacewings.  The veins on its wings are actually covered in thousands of stiff black hairs...you can see them making a dark halo around the edge of the wings.  I never would've known this before I took these pictures!  Lacewings are voracious predators with an appetite for aphids. 

Orchids!!  Yes, the first ones are finally out and I found this yellow coralroot in one of my plots.  Corallorhiza trifida, or harajuuri in finnish.  It is an orchid with no leaves or chlorophyll and it gets all of its energy from decaying organic material.

Regeneration survey (tree counting) purgatory.  Plots like this definitely receive a few colourful words of frustration...

This is my awesome work truck.  Aka Fiat Bravo.  So far, so good!  5.3L/100km (44.1 mpg) is alright even with European gas prices.  

Petersburg and Pests

St Petersburg, St Isaac's Cathedral

So, in the past 6 weeks, spring has basically come and gone in Finland.  Despite the fact it is 10 degrees and raining outside, it is definitely summer, so I've just been pretending that I live in Vancouver... :)

St. Petersburg, St. Nikolas Cathedral

Over the past couple of weeks I have been busy...actually very busy, though not all work-related.  Finish courses, and projects, and exams took up the first half of May (not terribly exciting).  I managed to get through the most intensive GIS course I've ever embarked upon, so now I feel like I know nothing about GIS! I just have one little thing left to do...my thesis! For my thesis, I will be counting natural regeneration seedlings after different logging and burning treatments.  Somebody was bound to ask, so I thought I should mention it.  So I will be spending the rest of my summer living in Patvinsuo National Park (sweet...a giant swamp on the edge of Finland) and counting baby trees.

The Russian throne is up for grabs...any takers? The last time the whole family was executed, so I can't recommend the position!

I have a sneaking suspicion that this summer will set a new record in my world of blood-sucking bugs.  Finland has a wide selection to choose from. There's the old faithful mosquitos that make the most annoying hum when they seemingly hover in your ears as you try to fall asleep. There are the no-see-ums or midges that can go through any bug netting.  From there the size of biting flies increases through 6 or seven different species up to horseflies, which are well over 1.5cm in size and tend to fly off with great chunks of your flesh leaving you with a bloody hole in your skin.  Nice.  There are two forest friends here in Finland that I am not used to from Canada:  mooseflies and an overabundance of ticks. Yes, we have ticks in Canada, but our stocks (where I have worked) are not nearly as plentiful as what Finland's forests have to offer.  Just last weekend, I experienced the second most disgusting feeling in my life as a full tick (it had dropped off the cat) popped between my toes.  It was the sharp snap like popping bubble wrap that first got my attention, followed by masses of dark sticky goo that were (probably partially digested cat's blood) squirted across the floor and smeared between my toes.  So...watch where you step if you have indoor/outdoor pets in tick country!

Sweet Russian Ride (Lada), St. Petersburg

This brings me to an essential piece of Finnish foresty equipment: Nokian kumisaappaat.  For those of us who understand English better than Finnish (most of the world), that is rubber boots...specifically those manufactured by Nokia that are knee-length, preferably black.  They keep your feet dry through the swamps (which dominate the Finnish forest landscape) and they keep the ticks out. It's fairly common knowledge that Nokia was originally a Finnish company and still is a point of pride for many Finns.  But, did you know that Nokia has made everything from rubber boots and tires (the "rubber division") to electricity cables and power generation equipment (the "cable division") to personal computers and even military equipment.  The rubber boots are still a mainstay in Finland and I can almost guarantee you that every Finn has owned a pair of Nokian kumisaapaat.  The core company today makes phones and smartphones and other things like that.  Fun fact, the current CEO of Nokia is Canadian.

Cathedral of Christ's Resurrection, St. Petersburg

Back to what I have been up to...

We took a budget cruise from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, and as a result we went to the budget docks.  This meant we had to go by all of the industrial docks for this major Russian port...that was interesting in itself!  We passed within 20m of large ocean tanker-type ships and got to see amazing quantities of stell, aluminum, fertilizer and all sorts of other outward-bound products

My parents have visited me during the second half of May and we certainly did our best to cover significant ground in this part of the world...Helsinki, St Petersburg, Lapland, and Eastern Finland...it was a busy tour, but well worth it!  My Dad got to listen to some Russian accordionists, while my mom got to summit the "Finnish Alps" hehehe....they're not exactly mountains by any Canadian's definition, but they certainly rise above the flat lands of the rest of Finland.  You could see from Russia to Norway on the top of some of the hills.  Oh yes, and we drove to Norway too...by accident.  so we turned around and headed back South into Lapland! all the pictures this week are of travels with my parents...

from the mayhem of a large Russian city to the tranquility of the Finnish wilderness...ahh, breathe a sigh of relief!

Well...I have to make it brief, but hopefully the pictures manage to fill in some of the gaps!

That's a funny looking reindeer!

Yep..they grow nice timber here in Finland...just kidding! These are on the tundra "mountains" (tunturi) at almost 70 degrees of latitude...that's like where Inuvik is in Canada!

Swamps and Swamps and more swamps...but they are picturesque.  And, if you're one of those people in the world who likes sphagnum (there must be a few out there..), it is a very interesting place...

The wilderness church near Inari.  This was the second time I went there...notice my mother can't sit still long enough for the long exposure time...she looks like a ghost!

Yes...this is what the rest of Finland looks like all the time...sunshine, flowers, and huge Medieval castles...Actually this is Savonlinna, one of very few castles here on a rare sunny spring day...