Pulla Is Not An Only Sometimes Snack

So remember at some point Sesame Street wanted to cut down on Cookie Monster eating cookies? So he had this song, “Cookies Are Only a Sometimes Snack,” so Meghann’s title of this blog is in reference to that. I had no idea. This is way later than my time. Perhaps Meghann is younger than I suspected. I can only hope. Strike that. Anyway. In Finland, pulla is not an only sometimes snack. Yum.

“What is pulla?” some of you may be asking yourselves. Pulla is a religion, a treat, and a state of mind. You remember The Dude? Picture him with a loaf of cardamom-flavored sweet-bread – but not too sweet. This is no damn Cinnabun. Well, unless it’s the McPulla – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Google pulla in English Wikipedia, and you’ll get some of the story. Google pulla in the Finnish Wikipedia, and you’ll get the full story. Including the carefully braided loaves, like my grandmother makes, which I now know are called pitko, like Meghann’s ridiculous last name that she won’t change. Not that I care. I’ve never asked her to. (Kitten aside: If only my last name translated into delicious bread.) (Lamb aside: It doesn’t. Pytka is Polish slang. See if you can find it!)

We went to Finland recently. We left the house in Poznan (Lamb aside: My keyboard is malfunctioning so I can’t make the proper diacritical marks – I’m sorry!) at 4:30am and took a train to Gdansk. It just about killed me. Meghann thought it was fine. I don’t rise before 11am. Anyway, I slept sprawled out on the train seat as if it were a bed. The conductor didn’t think much of this, but I didn’t care. (Kitten aside: I felt a little embarrassed.) (Lamb aside: I was asleep.) (Kitten aside: The snores clearly indicated that.) Once in Gdansk, we went to the mall, because that’s what we do, and got Meghann coffee. Did I mention she hadn’t had coffee all morning? She was pleasant. She almost killed a Polish Trixie who was in line in front of us at Coffee Heaven. Then we found this hotel, from which a WizzAir shuttle left to the airport. We waited in the lobby, the Lamb barely able to sit in his terror that the bus would fill up and we’d miss our flight. That didn’t happen. Instead, we got on the shuttle and a creepy older German businessman hit on a young Coloradoan and made it clear that he’d come to Poland to destroy any virtue a young woman would offer. (Kitten aside: It seemed as if he remembered Gdansk from sometime circa 1940s… What would a German be doing in Poland in the 1940s…?) (Lamb aside: He wasn’t that old. He just acted like a Nazi. German businessman, Nazi, you know.)

We made it to the airport, got our boarding passes, and were very amused by the Finns who couldn’t understand the Polish “system” which is essentially a lack of system in which clumping counts as queuing, and a sign saying a flight has finished boarding doesn’t mean that that the plane has even landed. Instead, you must sit or stand in a central location as you never know what gate the plane may or may not land at, and you must be near at least the center of the clump to not get pushed to the end. I don’t know why the Finnish family didn’t realize all of this. (Kitten aside: A) Survival of the fittest, B) Understanding Polish helps.) (Lamb aside: I thought I was properly sarcastic and that it was clear no one could possibly be expected to understand this without visiting Poland repeatedly, and, yes, perhaps understanding the language. Or at least the language of the clump.)

But everyone got on the plane, everyone had a seat, we had our own row. The flight was fine, it was short, we landed in Turku, which is a Finnish city, not Swedish, on the southwest tip of Finland. It is on the sea and off the coast is the Finnish Archipelago, which consists of over 200,000 islands. Now, you can do cool things in Turku; you can rent bicycles and ride around the islands in idyllic, seaside country towns; you can, if you’re me, meet unexpected family at the airport and probably get to know them better. But we chose to do none of this. Instead, we had booked a car ahead of time—prepaying online—and after staying one night in Turku, we planned to drive approximately 10 hours north-east to the tiny village Juntusranta, basically on the Russian border, nearly at the Arctic Circle, and land of my ancestors – well, ¼ of them.

Before we could carry out this madcap plan, though, we had to get the car. The tiny Turku airport did not have a desk for the Scandinavian car company from which we rented. Asking the guy at the Avis desk (who’s English was impeccable) he said they normally showed up wearing red with a car, but he didn’t see them. I didn’t see them. Meghan didn’t see them. Where was our pre-paid, very expensive car? (Kitten aside: Taxes man, makes for quality of living and expensive prices.) I called the company’s number, and it was disconnected, adding confidence. Oh, I wailed inside my head, the money’s gone, there is no car, there will be no Juntusranta, what sadness, but then we were saved! Meghann saw a woman holding a sign which said, “Jacob and Meghann Juntunen.” I assumed she was the car person, but no! She was my cousin! I didn’t even know I had a cousin! What a thrill! So now we need to back up.

By coincidence, this trip, June 16, 2011, was exactly 100 years after my great-grandparents made it to America. To the day. I found this out because my dad’s cousin, Maryellen, who’ll come into the story later, was also, by coincidence, planning a trip to Finland, and Dad put me in touch with her. She was researching the family far more systematically than I. Rather than simply renting a car and driving, she was doing research and contacting people. One of those people was Annikki, a woman who does genealogical research and had been in touch with my grandfather before he died, and is also somehow related to me, though I think somewhat distantly? In any case, Annikki was cc’d on some of the e-mails I had sent Maryellen, and Annikki told the mother of the woman who met us in the airport that we were coming. The mother texted the daughter, Hanne, in the middle of the night saying she had to meet us the next day. And she did. Without knowing our flight number, our airline, or even the time we were to arrive. Clearly she is amazing. Her boyfriend is pretty cool, too, because he figured out that the car company’s phone number contained one digit too many, called the correct number, talked to them in Finnish, and got us a car. Thank God. Epic succeed. Then after they helped us, we abandoned them. They were going to Hanne’s mother’s for dinner, and I couldn’t quite tell if we were invited. It was so culturally difficult. In the U.S. I would have felt like I was inviting myself to their house without an invitation; but in Finland, perhaps they felt like it would be an imposition to ask us when we might have had other plans. Or perhaps they were simply meeting us at the airport and we weren’t invited. It was confusing and vexing. In the end, though, they left, and we went our separate ways. However, we are now friends on Facebook and next time – and I hope there’s a next time – I definitely want to plan to spend time with our saviors.

Though their Messianic abilities only extended so far. They could get the Lamb a car, but they couldn’t teach the Lamb to drive a car. The car was a stick, which is okay, I know how to drive a stick. It had 6 gears, which was odd, but the principles were the same. The real issue was that 1^st and Reverse, were both in the upper left-hand corner of the gear shift, right next to one another, making me very concerned I would put the car in reverse by accident. I also kept stalling the car. (Kitten aside: Clearly he started driving without understanding. Fools rush in.) (Lamb aside: Do you even have a driver’s license?) (kitten aside: yes.) I also ran a couple people off the road (Kitten aside: In the finest tradition of our family vacations). Finally, I parked the car, and couldn’t get it into reverse. We were trapped. Until Kitten pulled out the owner’s manual, which was in Finnish. The Lamb found an illustrated digest of the manual, found the relevant picture for “reverse,” but the Kitten discovered the clever disk on the gear shift that you needed to pull up before you could go into reverse, thereby keeping one from accidentally putting the car in reverse. Seriously complicated. It also meant I had been trying to start the car in 3^rd gear the whole time, which accounted for the stalling. Now, in a positive light, I think it’s somewhat amazing that I drove around town as well as I did starting the car in third. But it was much easier in first. Sukces.

We found our lovely B&B with some difficulty, and an incredibly hospitable man showed us our rooms, the bathrooms, where we’d have breakfast, the whole works, welcomed us in Finnish, and explained to me, as Meghann took a shower, some of the important things to know visiting Finland, such as not tipping. He said especially if someone does something extra nice, do not tip as it would be seen as an insult. Doing something nice would be commodified if you tipped rather than an act of kindness. I find this awesome. (Kitten aside: And thus the Finnish nationalism begins.) I love that waiters or hotel owners or whomever are nice not for the $20 you hand them because they upgraded your room, but because they’re being nice. Now, admittedly this is probably due to living wages and government health insurance making the $20 less necessary, but that’s lovely. It’s structurally and culturally lovely. If that’s Finnish nationalism, so be it. I liked niceness for niceness’s sake. I like to think I have that quality. But I probably don’t. Because I’m American.

We went out into Turku and of course it wasn’t dark because we wouldn’t see darkness again until we got back to Poland. As in the sun never set. It kind of got to twilight, but never dark. At midnight you could easily walk in the streets as if it were, say, 7pm during the summer in Chicago. (Kitten aside: That might have led to some midnight craze.) (Lamb aside: And not from the bi-polar one in this relationship.) (Kitten aside: Not from the diagnosed one, anyway.)

We walked around the city, saw a cathedral, saw art everywhere, and ate fish on a boat in the river. It was so cool. And, I thought even better than the fish, was the reindeer soup. It was essentially melted cheese with reindeer chunks. My friends, my relatives, my fans, my students, my peers, whoever reads this – and I have no idea who you are – you must, if given the opportunity, eat reindeer. We named it “FinnCow,” though, alas, we never saw one. Well, not alive. Heh, heh. Let me try to describe the wonder of FinnCow. It has the texture and color of very lean, very high-quality beef. It is not anything like venison. It is not gamey, it is not chewy. It is silky and melts in your mouth, not like the fat or marbling in aged steak, but instead like the carefully cut filet mignon. Do you have the texture in your mouth? Beefy, melty, and lean? Now, if you can, add a smoky, almost bacon-like taste to that texture, and you have FinnCow. Chunks floating in a rich, creamy, cheesey soup was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. Ever. (Kitten aside: What a Lamb.)

So that was dinner; we walked some more, and Meghann alternated between saying, “I’m so tired, let me lean on you, we have to go back to the hotel so we can sleep,” to saying, “let’s run up this hill! Where does this go! What’s behind this museum! Why are those hoodlums drinking in the park in the middle of the day?!” (Kitten aside: I still don’t understand the bust of Lenin.) (Lamb aside: It’s because Lenin spent time in Turku.) (Kitten aside: Did you get this verified by anything other than Kitten?) (Lamb aside: Yes, I knew it at the time, it’s in the Lonely Planet. It talks about Lenin being in hiding or some such, various people wanting him dead, etc., and staying in Turku. Hence a bust of Lenin and, yes, a museum Meghann wanted to run around, literally, at about midnight, in this deserted park. And, sure, Finland is safe, I’m sure we were fine, but there was this group of guys drinking in the park at midnight, and the this whole midnight sun business seemed to confuse Meghann A) about whether she was tired or not, and B) about how safe it was to wander around a city we knew nothing about.) (Kitten aside: I promptly backed away from the hoodlums.)

It was strange sleeping during the light because the curtain was not heavy enough to block it out, but we slept. Breakfast was good, but no pulla yet. We hit the road. Finnish roads are good, and we’ll tell you were we headed tomorrow…