Five Good Things This Week

Another sorta lame week even though it actually wasn't. I'm still feeling a bit out of sorts, but I shall push through!


1. I went ice skating on Monday. That's not much different than most weeks since I try to go once a week. However, it's been so warm lately here in Tampere all the outdoor rinks have gone out of commission. So how did I manage to go skating? I went underground! Finland is nifty and puts lots of stuff underground, like infrastructure, to help with sprawl. I didn't think they put ice rinks underground (this one is actually two rinks), but it was really neat and convenient for those of us that are not done ice skating this year!


2. I went to Helsinki on Wednesday. It was a school trip to the studio of the biggest commercial television station in Finland. It was really interesting and then later my classmates and I went for drinks and food. It was a fun, albeit long, day.

These were our visitor badges from the tv studio. We got to keep them

Looking out onto the Gulf of Finland. More on my Instagram

3. I finally got to go into what I think is the prettiest building in Helsinki. I always thought that Kappeli was a fancy restaurant, but as my friends and I were walking around before our train, my Finnish friend said they also have a little coffee bar so we went in! It was expensive, I didn't get anything, but it is just so pretty in there. I'd really like to go back in the spring or summer.

Pictures don't do it justice. This is just one part of the building. 

So pretty inside as well!

4. I did a lot of school work today and yesterday. It always seems to be a constant drip of work that I have to do so I can get a bit discouraged, but I think I've worked it out to make a list for what I want to do during those days and it helps me organise a bit better and feel like I actually did something


5. Canada won Gold in Men's and Women's Olympic Hockey! It's a big deal.



That's it for this week. Next week is going to be quite busy with quite a bit more school work. As always, I'll be exercising as much as possible (on Saturday I want to walk the path I found for roller skating to see what it's like) and sticking in some fun stuff, I'm sure. 

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Christmas in Santaland

Just so we are clear, Santa is from Finland, look it up or watch Rare Exports if you don't believe me. 

Anyway, as you may or may not know, I didn't go back to Canada for Christmas this year. I have friends here in Finland that would have welcomed me for Christmas and Christmas back in my hometown can get a bit hectic sometimes going between two parents and my brother being in B.C., so I planned on staying here. Over the summer, my mum decided that she would come to Finland to spend Christmas with me. I for one was not holding my breath until she had a plane ticket in hand and my dad said that I was not allowed to spend Christmas alone so he would fly me home if she didn't make it out here. In September I got a message saying she had booked her flight for December 16 to December 30!

December 16, which is also the day I was extracted from the womb, comes and Im on a train from Tampere to Helsinki-Vantaa to pick up my mumma. She has never been to Finland before, even though she has been to basically every European country before I was born. I was mega excited to show her around the city I used to live in, especially since she is the one person that was subject to my full on Finnophile ways. I felt sorta bad since there is no snow in Helsinki and it rained almost the entire time she was here, but I think she had fun. She kept telling me how much she liked Helsinki and how she understood why I liked living in Finland so much. My birthday evening was spent at a wonderful restaurant on Pohjois Esplanadi called Aino, which specialises in Finnish food. I had moose neck and sausage (yum) and, since it was her first meal in Finland, Mumma had reindeer and wanted to start a long term relationship with it. The night of the 17^th was a belated birthday present for me because I got my socks blown off when I went to see one of my favourite bands, Satyricon, perform at Circus. I could ramble on about how awesome the concert was, but I won't and you can just go look at the photos I took. 

My birthday dress. A present from Mumma that she got from a Canadian shop called Blame Betty!

It didn't feel very Christmasy, probably because of the lack of snow, but we had a little Christmas tree complete with Canadian themed ornaments, and even though my dad wasn't there, he sent me some gifts that were also Canadian themed. We didn't have an oven at the little apartment we were renting so we couldn't make a proper Christmas dinner or bake cookies, but we had as close as we could manage for Christmas Dinner, which actually ended up being eaten on December 26^th. In Canada we celebrate Christmas on the 25^th, but I know most of Europe opens their presents on December 24^th. Our typical Christmas Eve is to have a ridiculous amount of finger foods and Mumma makes a huge pot of mussels in white wine. We couldn't find any fresh mussels, we didn't look that hard), so we just had loads of smoked salmon and the usual amount of finger foods, and of course a lot of wine. Since my parents have been split up since I was fifteen, I've always opened presents from my mum on the 24^th so that part wasn't strange to me. What was strange is that hardly anything was open on the 24^th, nothing on the 25^th, and nothing on the 26^th. I don't know about other countries, but in Canada, the 24^th is one of the biggest shopping days because of last minute shoppers. There are a number of business open on Christmas Day, especially in the bigger cities in Canada, mainly because there is a much larger number of people that don't celebrate Christmas in Canada compared to Finland. Boxing Day in Canada is a massive shopping day; a wonderful day to go to the Eaton Centre if you have a death wish or are feeling dangerous (the Eaton Centre is a large mall right in the centre of downtown Toronto).

The Leafs aren't my favourite but there is a player on their team with the same last name as me so my dad had to get it for me. I know what I'll be wearing when I go skating this winter!

Christmas Eve dress! You can't see our decorations very well but that IS an RCMP Beaver as our tree topper

Without going into too much detail about the rest of the trip, since I can't really remember everything we did the whole two weeks, Helsinki with my mum was awesome. I was a bit on edge for a few days for some reason; I think I'm still dealing with school stress, lord knows I keep thinking of all the stuff I have coming at me in January. Mumma wanted to go to Tampere, Turku, Tallinn, and even St. Petersburg and was kinda bummed we didn't manage to get to those places. I like to stay away from the touristy places anywhere I go, so I tried to take her to the places I liked to go to when I lived in Helsinki in 2011/2012. I'm not sure which her favourite was, but she really liked the Christmas Market, Kaivopuisto, and Suomenlinna; I know, I know two of those three places are very touristy but you can't go to Helsinki without seeing Suomenlinna and we don't have Christmas Markets in Canada on the same scale as Europe does. The rain sorta slowed us down most days, but we walked a ton, something Mumma isn't used to since it's pretty hard to get around without a car in my hometown, but I think I showed her a lot of Helsinki and I think she enjoyed herself a lot. I definitely enjoyed myself and I'm overjoyed that both my parents have now seen the country I love so much and understand a bit more why I love it so much. I did miss being back in my hometown for Christmas, which apparently has a ridiculous amount of snow right now and thankfully didn't get blasted by the major ice story (one of my best friends that lives east of Toronto was without power for over a week), and I did miss seeing some friends and family (and kitty cat!) during the holidays, but I'm quite happy I decided to stay in Finland for Christmas; what is Skype for if not connecting with people at times like this?! Mumma is going to Scotland in May and said she wants to come visit me in Tampere and that there had better be nicer weather then!

I've got photos from my holiday in Helsinki on my Flickr as well as myInstagram! You can also follow me on Tumblr and Twitter!

"Metal all the time, in every bar"

           Finland is known as being a sort of Mecca for metalheads. Sure, Germany has Wacken, the UK has the ones that started it all, and Norway is kvlt, where else can you go and easily find a bar that plays exclusively rock and metal music? And I don't mean just once a week or the possibility of one song a night. Or, where else can you find a country where most of the population can play at least one musical instrument and and a good few of them have been in a band at some point in their life? Where can you go and hear Nightwish or Sonata Arctica coming from the speakers in the lingerie department of a major department store (a Finnish version of The Bay or Macy's)? While I am not the most traveled person, hailing from Toronto, Canada, having only traveled to a handful of European countries in my short years, I think I'm pretty safe to say that Finland really is a haven for metalheads. That gif of Vreth (Finntroll) saying “in Finland its metal all the time, in every bar” is pretty damn close to the truth.

            I first found out about/fell in love with Finland through listening to music. Yes, I was one of those14 year olds who wanted to marry Ville Valo of HIM; probably one of Finland's best known musical artists. But before you close your browser window in a fit of “she's not metal” rage, let me finish. I was a diehard HIM fan, and still really appreciate their music even though I've stopped listening to only them, and through that band I was able to discover popular Finnish rock bands, some that have reach international fame and some that have only really been popular within Finland. The rock bands here have got a pretty strong fan-base around the world regardless of how small that fan-base is. But because I listened to so much music from Finland, it spurred me on to find out more about this little-known country which seemed similar to my own snowy homeland. As for metal, well I wasn't quite the metalhead back then as I am now; I only listened to a sprinkling of metal amongst my hardcore HIM listening. To be frank, half the vocals drove me nuts because they weren't Valo's baritone; ah, to be a pigheaded teenager. I was determined to go to Finland and I got the chance through my university as an exchange student at the University of Helsinki. In late August of 2011, I became a resident of Helsinki and the real fun began.

            Remember how I said I wasn't that into metal when I was younger compared to now? Well, since I was in Helsinki, basically the centre of the Finnish universe, there was usually at least one concert happening every week somewhere in Helsinki. To put it into perspective, between late 2004 and August 2011, I had been to eight concerts. Between September 2011 and May 2012, the time I lived in Helsinki, minus almost a month that I was back in Canada for Christmas, I went to 38 concerts. Some of these bands weren't metal bands, but, I did grow to love metal so much more because of concerts I went to just for shits and giggles because it was so cheap to see these bands compared to going to shows in Toronto. I was seeing bands I wouldn't normally see in Canada because it would just be too expensive for me; I live 2 hours from Toronto/a decent venue and normal concert prices for these bands would be around 35 Canadian dollars. I really was able to expand my listening repertoire while living in Helsinki. My friend would want to see a band that I had heard of but never listened to before and I’d agree to go, then I would come out with a new band that I was into. This is when my love of Folk/Viking/Pagan metal really ignited; I had always liked the idea of it but had only ever really listened to less than a handful of decent bands from those subgenres. It was from seeing these bands live that I was able to fully appreciate their music - for example Lauri “Varulven” Õunapuu of Metsatöll who made me dizzy from the amount of times he switched from guitar to a traditional instrument that I’ve never even seen before. If you can play bagpipes and make them sound badass, I’m pretty sold on your music.

           

I think that could be where Finland has such a strong connection to music. You may or may not know, Finns are NOT Vikings (Finland is a Nordic country not a Scandinavian one. Educate yourselves) so that means they don’t have the same Viking lore as the Scandinavian countries. Which means their mythology is not centered on warriors. Without going into it too much, Finnish Paganism has lots of nature (birds, lots of birds) and lots of music; the stories were passed down orally through runo songs for centuries before Elias Lönnröt wrote them down in The Kalevala. The main character in The Kalevala, the shaman Väinämöinen, who has been identified as one of Tolkien's sources for the character of Gandalf, is portrayed as having an amazing voice and carrying a kantle made of a pike's jawbone with him everywhere he goes. A kantele made of a pike’s jawbone? Sounds pretty metal to me. I took a class at the University of Helsinki that was called The Kalevala in Music. In that class we focused a lot on the classical composers that wrote music based around the Kalevala, but we also talked a lot about modern day Finnish musicians that use the Kalevala for inspiration, like Amorphis and Korpiklaani. How cool is the idea that Amorphis can play the main stage at Tuska Open Air Metal Festival, the biggest Metal music festival in the Nordic countries, and all they do is sing about centuries-old myths of their home country and a large number of people in attendance won’t have any idea that Mermaid is actually about Väinämöinen being a creep about marrying Joukahainen’s beautiful sister, Aino, who had been promised to him if he saved her brother, so she turns herself into a salmon. The mythological Finns fought with songs and spells rather than relying on swords and other weapons all the time. It’s not surprising that music is such a part of Finnish life that it’s basically second nature to Finns.

I haven't yet been fortunate enough to stay in Finland past May, so I've missed the Finnish summers which means I haven't had the chance to attend the copious amounts of festivals that happen here in the summertime. But if Wacken, in Germany, is the biggest metal music festival, Finland has to take the cake for the most metal music festivals. Tuska Open Air, Sauna Open Air, Provinssirock and Nummirock being some of the big names, along with a host of smaller festivals; you could probably do a festival a weekend if you had the time and funds. I’ve only ever been to one metal festival, and I guess only one summer music festival, and it was this past summer when I went to Mayhemfest at Ontario Place. If you want to know how tiny the metal scene is in Toronto, the bands at Mayhemfest were complaining that it wasn’t worth it to do a Toronto date because it was the smallest turnout on that tour, a measly 7000 people. A band like Children of Bodom can easily sell out, or at least pack a house, in Finland, and probably most other places, like Germany, but as one of the bands at Mayhem, they were on a side stage. I went to see Finntroll in Toronto before I moved back to Finland this summer and there were probably just over 100 people there. It was lovely because it was an awesome small show but that would never happen in Finland. I think it’s threat to future decent metal shows in Canada because the bands and their management and whatever other powers that be don’t see the point if no one is going to show up if they can just focus on places where they are assured a big turnout.

            Let's get back to the metal culture that thrives in Finland. Remember how I mentioned Vreth saying that it was metal all the time in every bar? That's because there is a scene for it, meaning that more than one bar can survive on catering exclusively to a specific subculture, even though people outside the subculture go to these places as well. You don't get that in Canada, or at least I haven't found it. We might have Hot Topic (cue mass eye-roll) and the odd struggling shop that sells band merch and albums, poor HMV, but in Finland, at least in the bigger cities, you can easily find a record store that is stuffed full of the albums you are looking for; Music Hunter in Helsinki and Swamp Music Second Hand in Tampere, my favourite second-hand music shops: CDs and vinyl galore. I can sit in the main building of my university, Tampereen Yliopisto, and probably see 10 metalheads walk past me within an hour, no problem. Every Christmas season there is a musical event called Raskasta Joulua, which roughly translates to Heavy Christmas, which is a bunch of well-known Finnish metal musicians, including Marco Hietala of Nightwish, Tarot, and Northern Kings, Tony Kakko of Sonata Arctica and Northern Kings, Ilja Jalkenen, ex-Kiuas, Ari Koivunen of Amoral, JP Leppäluoto of Northern Kings, Harmaja, Charon, and ex-Poisonblack, as well as a host of other Finnish musicians, singing Christmas tunes with a metal twist. They do quite a few shows in Finland and they get a huge turnout. I went to one of the Helsinki shows back in December 2011 (it's so popular that they have to do two shows in Helsinki) and it was fantastic. It really showed how metal is pretty mainstream in Finland because among the metalheads there were business people in suits and ties and other "ordinary" people who you'd never see at a metal show in any other country. In fact, I think this is the perfect example of just how metal Finland is. Maybe it’s because Finland is quite a small country compared to Canada, in both geography and population, so everything is a bit more concentrated here. Unlike in other countries where the top 40 radio playlist are lacking in metal-ness, in Finland, it’s perfectly normal to hear one of the many Finnish metal acts on mainstream radio and to know loads of people who are into metal bands across all age groups. If metal is a subculture of outsiders, I think they can find a home in Finland. 

Don't forget to comment! You can also send me questions to my Tumblr and you can check out my Flickr, which consists of many pictures of Finland!

Of Vikings and Care Bears

Well, hey there! You've stumbled across my blog and this is the first post! I thank you now for coming here to share in my life in Finland. I promise to share some knowledge, interesting stories, and, of course, many laughs.

SO, where shall we start?! I think introductions are in order. My name is Biz. Strange, I know, especially for a white Canadian girl with basically only British, Scottish, and Irish heritage. The name that is on my birth certificate and other government documents is of no significance because I simply do not identify with that name. I've been known as Biz since I was about 9 days old and my big brother, who was 4 at the time, thought I was a very busy baby and my family started calling me Bizzy which was then shortened to Biz. I started getting called Biz in school around grade 1 when I came home at the beginning of the school year complaining to my Mum that Elizabeth was too long to write and could I please use my "home name". So, call me Biz.

Hey look, it's me! 

So a little bit about this "walking cartoon character" as my Finnadian friend has described me. I'm at the older end of 22 and was born and raised in the land of hockey and maple syrup, Canada. I graduated with an Honours Bachelour of Arts Degree in Cultural Studies specializing in Film, Video, and Media from Trent University in 2013. I'm starting my Master of Arts program at the beginning of September where I'll be studying Media Management at the University of Tampere. I don't have my exact career objective planned out BUT, I really want to be involved in the music industry or the film industry working behind the scenes to get amazing works of art to the public.

So why Finland? weeeeell, like a lot of people, I discovered Finland through Finnish music. I was at the older end of 13 when I went to Toronto for the day with my Mum and we stopped at Indigo (a chain bookstore in Canada. They might have them in the States as well) and I picked up an issue of RockSound magazine because it had a cd with it and some band I liked was on it (to this day I cannot remember the band I originally wanted the cd for). The band that was on that album was HIM and an acoustic version of Funeral of Hearts from their Love Metal album. The whole magazine did a big feature on HIM because their greatest hits album And Love Said No had just come out, or was just coming out. I was so impressed by the one song and the feature story on the band that I went straight to HMV, when I was near one since my hometown is tiny, and bought And Love Said No and it was ALL I listened to for MONTHS. I gradually found other big bands from Finland like The 69 Eyes, Negative, Apocalyptica, The Rasmus, etc. and then wanted to know more about the country and sort of fell in love with the country as a whole. It's just got something about it that really appeals to me but it's really hard to explain (maybe through this blog you'll find out why I love it so much). So in 2011 I got the opportunity to go on exchange to the University of Helsinki for a school year. As soon as I landed in Helsinki, I just looked around and said "I'm home". I really came into my own while I lived in Helsinki, which I think a lot of exchange students say, but in Helsinki I felt less like a tourist/exchange student and more like a local. I made so many wonderful friends while I was there, many of them I met through Tumblr and still keep in touch with and can't WAIT to see again soon! Hi to you lovely people if you're reading this! It was one of the hardest things for me to have to leave at the end of my exchange but I was determined to get back to Finland and worked my ass off in my 4th year at Trent to get into an international Masters program that only lets in 12 students every 2 years. And I did it. So here we are, 25 days until I get back on Finnish soil and I'm so ready to be back.

My new city, Tampere. Photo by me in October 2011. 

Im a different person than I was almost 10 years ago, THANKFULLY, but I still love Finland.

Hopefully you find my adventures in Finland to be somewhat interesting. While I lived in Helsinki I had a Tumblr, of the same name as this one, but it had it's limitations and this way I can write walls of text without getting annoying. For this blog I have plans to do theme type stuff (which I'll need help thinking of, hint hint nudge nudge), music stuff (I went to A LOT of concerts last time I was in Finland and plan on going to more this time round), travel diaries (both in Finland and in greater Europe), etc. I also have plans to start my Youtube channel up again, providing I can get a video camera, and if I do that I'll be doing a lot of vlogs and random videos in conjunction with this blog. Don't forget to follow me on Tumblr (lilacviking.tumblr.com) and Instagram (@lilacviking)! If you have any questions about me or Finland, don't be shy and ask via comment on this blog or send me an ask on my Tumblr!