Finnish summer cottage

The meals that my hosts and I enjoyed throughout the weekend were a blend of American and Finnish culinary culture. I tried Finnish viili for the first time.  Wikipedia describes viili as “a type of yoghurt (a mesophilic fermented milk) that originated in the Nordic countries. It has a ropy, gelatinous consistency and a sour taste resulting from lactic acid.” It doesn’t sound so tempting from that description. Upon opening the package, the viili didn’t look so tasty either due to its Elmer’s glue-like consistency. But, with a little bit of sugar and lots of fresh Finnish strawberries and blueberries, viili was a nice breakfast meal. 

I brought fresh ears of corn from Helsinki’s market square to cook on the grill as my hosts had never tried grilled corn on the cob. With a little bit of butter and salt, the corn was a big hit! We also grilled hamburgers and they provided all of the typical American toppings – ketchup, mustard, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, onions and individually-packaged slices of cheddar cheese. I even persuaded my hosts to forego the boiled new potatoes that Finns can’t seem to get enough of during the summer months. It just didn’t feel right to grill hamburgers and corn on the cob to eat alongside boiled potatoes. So, after a bit of convincing, boiled potatoes were replaced by potato salad – a much more appropriate side dish, in my humble opinion. However, we did have lots of boiled potatoes the next day with lamb steaks. 

Desserts included home-made blueberry pie (with Finnish blueberries, of course), famous Brunberg kisses from Porvoo, pancakes made on the grill, and lots of ice cream as the Finns’ annual consumption of ice cream is the highest in Europe. I made America’s favorite classic yellow cake from a box with chocolate frosting and rice krispies treats, which were initially met with apprehension as I mixed butter, marshmallows and cereal, but then were consumed with exclaims of delight.

Pancakes

In addition to all of the eating, I took advantage of the summer mentality of relaxation. I spent a lot of time swimming in the Gulf of Finland and experienced my first Finnish sauna, which was much, much hotter than I anticipated. I even enjoyed “roughing it” the Finnish-summer-cottage-way with no indoor plumbing aside from a kitchen sink, using an outhouse, and showering with a hose and bucket.

Despite the abundance of mosquitoes, bees, and flies, it was a tasty and memorable weekend. I can’t thank my generous hosts enough for the opportunity to experience the Finnish countryside.   

Loviisa sunset

Some of the highlights of my experiences include visits to schools throughout the country and the chance to talk with students and teachers, hearing the Kantele played so beautifully in Ilomantsi, walking in nature during all the seasons and whatever the weather, coming to a deeper understanding of what the Kalevala means, and eating delicious Finnish specialities. I can say that visiting Inari in February took my breath away in the most positive sense – I loved it! Most of all, I think of the many friends I have made during the past three years and our wonderful times together. I will miss you more than you can imagine.

As I have told some people, my husband and son loved being here as much as I did. They, too, think of the wonderful friends they have made and very fond/fun memories. You can count on us to be very strong Finland boosters – promoting your beautiful country and very fine people to all we meet. Plus, I will look for every opportunity to return!

I headed over to the YleX radio studios earlier today for a live interview with Heikki Soini and Bikka Puoskari.  I thought we were going to try to figure out why Hip Hop music is popular in Finland or maybe discuss Lady Gaga’s latest releases.  But no, they wanted to talk about the environment and at one point about bodybuilding. (Note to readers, despite Heikki’s assertion that we could both bench press about the same weight, I am not so sure.)  If you want to hear the interview -  yes, it was RADIO not TV – you can click on the following link: http://areena.yle.fi/audio/575685

By the way, Heikki is really ticklish, as you can see from the photo below. 

The interview was a lot of fun, but I turned the tables on them a bit as I brought a mini video recorder with me.  Look for the video in about a week when we have the Youtube channel up and running for my journal.

I spent the morning at the Cleantech Finland Conference in Lahti. Several very thoughtful presentations were given and I plan to return to get into greater details and specifics on their waste reduction and utilization practices. (Yes I know, it perhaps does not sound exciting, but it really is.)

The conference included lunch followed by a concert at Sibelius Hall – neither of which I could attend due to an already over-scheduled afternoon. So instead, I headed back to Helsinki for the first snow of the season. By the end of the day only about 4 or 5 centimeters had fallen, but wonderful nonetheless. 

What is it about snow? Watch any child and you cannot help see their sense of wonder and delight playing in it, catching snowflakes and of course throwing snowballs. Kids don’t complain that it is cold or that the days are darker. For them, winter isn’t a cause for unhappiness. Rather they revel in the miracle of snow, in the entertainment of seeing their own breath in the frost air and the discovery of the mysteries of the trees now revealed in the absence of leaves. Winter means popcorn by the fire, the beauty of candlelight and piling in under quilts and blankets. Sometimes as adults we focus more on the drudgery of winter than on its pleasures. 

I got to thinking about this because of our dog, Deckard, who simply revels in the cold and snow.  Here he is yesterday afternoon catching snowflakes with his tongue and generally romping without a worry in the world.

Thermometer (Photo Credit: Wikimedia)

Imagine a newly-built apartment heated only with the excess energy produced by your television, your computer, even your own body. Now imagine that same apartment in Helsinki, Finland – one of Europe’s northern-most cities where winter climes can dip to -20C (5F). Sound impossible? Not at all. Finnish building contractors, Reponen Oy, are making it an everyday reality with their new low-energy building concept called MERA. 

Reponen’s Jukka Kinnunen and Mika Airakselaa recently took Embassy Helsinki’s Economic staff on a tour of their latest MERA project – a new apartment complex that blends passive housing designs with Finnish craftsmanship to create ultra-low energy housing.  

Here’s how MERA works – in simple terms. First, the apartment building is super insulated.   The roof and walls have extra thick insulation to keep warmth in and the cold out. Next the windows are quadrupled paned – four layers of specially-designed glass that lets in light but effectively keeps out drafts. Then there are the pièces de résistance: a thermostat box located near the door and a small, understated air vent near the ceiling. Via the thermostat, you set the desired temperature for your apartment – say 20 degrees Celsius. Your appliances, your own body, even your dog produce heat that raises the apartment’s internal temperature. The air vent sucks up the internal air, runs it through a filter located in an adjacent hallway and then shoots it back out into the apartment in quantities sufficient to keep the internal temperature at your desired level. 

Since Finland’s winter weather can be rather severe – and the amount of heat-generating appliances/people/dogs may vary from one apartment to the next – each apartment complex is equipped with back-up central heating for the coldest winter months. But according to Reponen, central heating is used only two months at the most throughout the entire year –an impressive feat considering Finland’s cold weather can stretch for eight months from September to April.  

Equally impressive is that the MERA design is more energy efficient than Finnish passive housing standards. For the non-initiated, passive housing standards require that a house (or an apartment building in this case) have exceptionally low energy consumption – particularly for heating/cooling systems. How low to go varies vary widely from country to country. 

In Finland, passive standards require that the amount of energy required to heat a home not exceed 30 KwH/m2 per year. By comparison a conventional apartment building uses an average of 70kWh/ m2  per year for heating.   Reponen’s first MERA apartment complex, located in Heinola (2 hours from Helsinki) and occupied since May 2009, measures in at 15.6 KwH/m2 per year. That translates into a nearly 25% reduction in heating energy compared to conventional apartments.

But how comfortable are the apartments, really? After all, living in a cave with blankets might be energy-efficient but not entirely practical. Luckily, the apartments are aesthetically pleasing with all the modern conveniences one would expect from high-quality apartment living in Helsinki – lots of windows, enclosed balconies, electric ranges and even individual saunas. As for its winter warmth, we unfortunately could not judge the toasty-factor just yet.  But similar designs in central (albeit warmer) Europe have proven quite effective. 
 
MERA homes are also surprisingly affordable. Construction costs for Reponen’s MERA designs are only 1.7% higher than conventional buildings, keeping the price of a MERA low-energy apartment competitive with traditional housing.  Clearly the Finns are hooked:  the new MERA apartments are still under construction yet every unit is already sold. 

In the US, passive housing is gaining traction. In 2003, architects Katrin Klingenberg  and Nicolas Smith built America’s first passive home in Urbana, Illinois. The two-bedroom home’s annual heating demand averages only 11kWh.  Klingenberg now co-directs the Passive Housing Institute US, a consulting and research firm working to further the implementation of Passive House standards and techniques nationwide. Many US top architectural schools, such as MIT and Yale, are also introducing green and passive building courses into their curriculums. Solar panels, green roofs and state-of-the-art energy efficiency are all steadily becoming the norm of the built environment – a small, but important step on the road to a greener, cleaner tomorrow.  

Even our new US Ambassador to Finland Bruce Oreck has personal experience with US-based green housing. Ambassador Oreck and his wife Cody Oreck launched the Zero Carbon Initiative as a clearinghouse of information on green housing standards. They even used their own Colorado home as at a test lab, successfully turning it into a model of low-carbon living that sacrifices neither quality nor luxury.  

Imagine fifteen years from now living in a low-carbon world where homes are fully energy efficient and actually make more energy than use. Sound impossible? Not any more.

View from summer cottage (Photo Credit: Wikimedia)

To say that the Finns have a certain reverence for their summer season is no understatement. From May to August, nearly every Finn heads outdoors to take advantage of the twelve-plus hours of sunlight before the long, dark winter creeps back in. Government and other activity slows down, prompting many to travel to forest cottages where on Midsummer’s Eve they build bonfires and revel in the longest day of the year. So enticing is the Finnish summer that many Finns stay at their cottages for the entire month of July.  

In Finland, the summer season is a fleeting miracle – a mere four months of life-giving growth after months of sub-arctic temperatures. And the Finns do not take it for granted. With such an appreciation for their world around them, it is not surprising then that Finns have such an active interest in reducing their carbon footprint.

Since 2001, the Finnish government has produced a series of action plans, known as the National Climate Strategy, detailing concrete steps the nation must take to reduce their share of emissions. In its latest Strategy published in November 2008, the Finnish government set ambitious goals to ensure that 38% of energy and 10% of transport fuel is produced from renewable sources. By 2020, Finland hopes to produce 14.2 terawatt hours (TWh) of hydroelectric energy, 1.0 TWh of wind power and 34.9 TWh of nuclear energy – a big leap from their 2006 levels of 11.3 TWh, .1 TWh and 22 TWh respectively.

Finland’s efforts are starting to pay off. According to the latest United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s report, Finland’s total emissions declined slightly in 2007 from 79.9 teragrams of carbon dioxide equivalent (Tg CO2) to 78.3 Tg CO2. Just this month the OECD’s Environment Directorate Director Lorents Lorensten called Finland a pioneer of environmental policy.

Such environmental awareness coupled with a “can-do” attitude make the Finns excellent partners in the fight against global warming. In June 2008, Embassy Science Fellow – US Forest Service Senior Researcher Dr. Alan Rudie – spent several weeks with top Finnish scientists to advance work on the production of biofuel from forest trimmings. Building on this successful collaboration, the US Embassy Helsinki hopes to sponsor another US Forest Service Science Fellow in 2010.

In 2008, Finland joined the Methane-to-Markets program – a public/private partnership in conjunction with the US Environmental Protection Agency that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by promoting the cost-effective, near-term recovery and use of methane, while providing clean energy to markets around the world.

In June 2009, the first of three American National Science Foundation (NSF) research fellows will arrive in Finland via the newly established Nordic Research Opportunity Grant. Funded by NSF and the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES), the new program will foster closer research ties between US and Finnish scientists.

When I arrived in Finland two years ago I had already accumulated 34 chess sets after 20 years as a diplomat, from countries such as Germany, Denmark, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Peru, Tanzania, Kenya, Armenia, Croatia, Poland, France, etc.  The materials of the pieces and boards are plastic, wood, stone, metal, plaster, porcelain, glass and leather.  Some I bought myself, but, since people know that I collect chess sets, others were given to me for birthdays or Christmas.  I received three more Russian chess sets and one from Ecuador as presents while here, and bought a chess set made in Sweden that I found in a book store in Espoo.

In a number of countries where I have lived or visited, I have found a selection of chess sets to choose from in the tourist market or in tourist shops.  But search as I might, I couldn’t find a chess set made in Finland.  Not in the Kauppatori, not in Stockmann, not in any of the tourist shops I looked in.  I can think of several possibilities for a Finnish chess set – carved from different colors of Finnish granite or other stones, carved from birch wood, carved from reindeer antler, or based on Finnish themes such as characters from the Kalevala or wild animal figures representing Finnish nature.  I did find one company on-line that sold stone chess boards, and another site (that I could never find again) with a wooden set, varying a little on the standard Staunton design, created by a Finnish chess master.  But still, I couldn’t find a set to look at in Helsinki or the other cities that I visited in Finland.

Moomin chess set

But now I have two Finnish chess sets!  A small Finnish design company put out a fancy (and expensive) set a month or so ago, and I was able to find one in Helsinki.  I also took matters into my own hands.  I went to the Moomin Shop, bought 32 figures, and glued their feet to a set of white and dark-brown checkers (which I already had) to make up the two sides.  You can see the results in the pictures, with the pieces arranged on the original chess board that my mom gave me all those years ago.  My Finnish colleagues tell me that the set is so cute, it’s a great idea, and that I should patent it – which I obviously can’t, since I used Moomin figures.   Maybe some Finnish company or craftsman can take this as an inspiration – although I suppose not many visitors to Finland will have the same hobby of collecting chess sets that I have.

Moomin chess set - A closer look