I liked Finland. Even more so than Norway or Sweden, which I hadn’t anticipated.

That’s right, Norwegians and Swedes! Come and get mOW OW OW why didn’t you tell me you guys were descended from the vikings? Damn!

Helsinki reminded me more than a bit of Minneapolis, where I live, with the Finnish people possessing the same mixture of courteous introversion that I enjoy in Minnesotans. Which makes sense, given that Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians and Finns (who I had no idea weren’t Scandinavian until I moved there).

It also helped that the Finnish ladies seemed to dig me more than the average. That’s less of a brag than a bemused realization that everyone’s probably got a place where, due to whatever mysterious cultural differences, the people there are a little more interested in what you’re selling. And for me, it’s apparently Finland. Huh.

The soldiers at the Helsinki airport were so friendly they wanted to talk to me for 20 minutes about what it was like to travel during a pandemic (“Must be exciting, yeah?” the guy with the machine gun asked me, twice) while they checked my passport in great detail to make sure I wasn’t overstaying my Schengen days. This spooked me a bit, and that was before I even passed the German Shepherds that smell if you have covid or not and walked past 20 posters imploring you to get a covid test at the airport. Unt-uh. That dog’s gonna smell a passing fart and then they’re never gonna let me out of here. I made a bee-line for the bus depot, because there oddly didn’t seem to be a train that departed from the airport.

I liked the bus, and apparently it liked me too.

The thing that surprised me the most about Finland is that they have a Taco Bell. A few days into my Finland time I was walking down the street in Helsinki, thinking about how I’d kill for some Taco Bell. Just one of those weird travel cravings for something you don’t even eat at home. I laughed at this thought, since if there’s anything less Finnish than Taco Bell, I can’t think of what it is. And then I turned a corner and BAM there it was. Holy shit. Did I do that? Is this a dream?

Finnish taco bell has all kinds of vegan oat meat options on their menu and you can get beer in a bottle. Might be bad timing to be selling Corona there TB, but I admire your cojones.

Sitting on a park bench and eating my oaty tacos and whatnot, I was mesmerized by the tiny little park birds who were not afraid of me in the slightest and who were hovering in the air, a few inches in front of my face, trying to pick off pieces of my burrito on the wing.

Finland was chock full of other weird vegan foods I’d never seen before. After a trip to the grocery store I was stocked up on tasty vegan smoked salmon, ham and sharp cheddar, washed down with some indescribable pine tree lemonade. There were also pear-flavored ice cream bars, which I would not recommend at all.

While I was out wandering around I even found donuts!

I was renting an entire apartment in an old building in Helsinki, down the street from a combination mall & bus station that had a vegan hamburger joint I spent way too much money at. The first door I tried to open in my apartment building just had a wall of cinder blocks behind the door, like in a cartoon.

My favorite thing in Helsinki was the “Chapel of Silence.” The funky, curving Kamppi Chapel stands all by itself in the middle of busy Narinkka Square, like some odd space boat that sailed in on the solar winds and for some reason decided to stop in Helsinki.

Inside is bit like being in the inside of an egg, if eggs were made of curved strips of wood. Pretty lighting along the rim of the bowl creates a peaceful in utero environment. Photos were not allowed inside and I tried to respect the intention of the space by sitting on the austere wooden benches, alone in silent meditation, the sounds of Helsinki around me completely nullified by my space cocoon.

Nearby there was... what the fuck is this? A skate park?

Glass portholes looked down into a mall or something underground.

Helsinki also has a retro-futurist rock chuch, which I think any respectable town should have, really.

All around town I was charmed by Helsinki’s fun and odd little details.

You’re all right Finland, even if the name of your country sounds like an aquarium.

All right National Museum of Finland, show me what you’ve got.

Bullet holes in the door? I did not expect that!

Cool ceilings? Appreciated.

The bulk of the first floor of the museum was dedicated to a Finnish children’s book series I’d never heard of from the 1940s. The Moomins are a family of Trolls that look exactly like hippos but definitely are not hippos you uncultured swine. It’s always fascinating seeing things like this that another culture grew up with but that could have been made up yesterday for all you’d know about it.

Upstairs we got into Finland’s actual history, which I found fascinating.

Some important things I did not know about Finland:

-Finland only became a country in 1917. I had assumed it was one of those “always been a country” countries, not one of those suspicious “way younger than the US” whippersnappers. Before that, it was basically just territory that was fought over between Sweden and Russia for hundreds of years. When the Russian Revolution happened in 1917, one of the idealistic tenets of the revolution was that people should have the right to self-determination, to which Finland quickly said “Okay! We’re a country then!” and the Bolsheviks said “Shit- We didn’t mean- All right fine” because they didn’t want to look like hypocritical assholes on their very first day of being in charge of shit. And so Finland was a country.

-Finland fought on the side of the Nazis in World War II. This was seemingly less a result of inherent evilness and more just because Russia was constantly trying to take over Finland ever since they got out-maneuvered on that technicality back in 1917. Finland had just fought Russia in the Winter War of 1939 and was still fighting them throughout WWII. So when the Nazis turned around and invaded Russia, well, the enemy of my enemy and all that. The part of this that I found most fascinating is that Finland seems to be in complete and utter denial to this day over the implications of having sided with the Nazis. Several displays tried to explain away various pieces of WWII-era swastika jewelry by saying it was an ancient symbol in Finland that had nothing to do with the Nazis. Uh-huh.

The most amusing example of this was the ornate swastika necklace in a display on one wall. This was given to the president of France, Charles de Gaulle, as a gift in 1960.

“Oh wow, thaaaaaanks.”

The plaque below explained that the Finns were shocked when de Gaulle hid the necklace under his coat, clearly uncomfortable, instead of wearing it proudly in every photo shoot from that day forward. Only then did they realize that in France, the swastika is associated with Nazi Germany.

Blink. Blink.

Uhm, it’s not just in France, you guys. Where the hell were you during World War II? Fighting on the side of the Nazis? Oh, okay. Yeah, can’t imagine why you’d want to be extra careful about giving swastikas as presents then.

Anyway, they had to make a new necklace for that high-maintenance prick de Gaulle that was a little less Nazi.

-Finland has gone through some hellacious struggles. Despite their conflicts with Russia, over the decades Finland became highly dependent on the Soviet Union as their main trading partner, making it a strange East-meets-West zone where the CIA and KGB were both active during the cold war. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Finland went through a deep recession in the 90s, and was rescued almost single-handedly by the success of Nokia, which at one point represented 80% of the value of the entire Helsinki Stock Exchange.

It was interesting to read about the intense past struggles in a country we now think of as a model in so many ways. One exhibit displayed the cardboard box that the government started giving to new mothers during the years of national poverty, in an effort to combat high infant mortality. The box contained diapers, blankets. clothes, butt cream and whatever other junk babies need, and the box itself served as a crib. This made me wonder if Finnish hobos feel nostalgic about the whole box-sleeping thing.

-Stuff comes from Finland, sort of! One wall detailed the rise of Nokia from rubber boot manufacturer to cell phone kingpin to former cell phone kingpin who apparently didn’t think smartphones were going to be a thing. Angry Birds also comes from Finland, no doubt inspired by their brash Taco Bell loving local birds. And Clash of Clans! Which I guess is a game or something. You go Finland!

The museum itself was great but it constantly made huge leaps in assuming you knew all about the Winter War, the Continuation War and the Finnish Civil war, none of which I’d ever heard of before. Display texts went deep into obscure details while you’re standing there, like, “Uhm.. who were they fighting? Why? What century was it?” I wasn’t sure if the museum was expecting only Finnish visitors, who would already know all of this by heart, or if they assume foreigners know a lot more about their history than we do. Maybe it’s all common knowledge in Nordic countries and that’s where most of their tourist visitors come from? It did make me wonder if our history museums in the US make the same kind of assumptions, I haven’t noticed it if they do, but now I want to visit some of our museums from this perspective.

The basement was dedicated to Finland’s distant past, which kind of glossed over some tree-worshiping ancient folks and got right to allowing you to virtually try on some of their swank jewelry.

Probably the most memorable thing in the museum was this wall of photos of the past presidents of Finland.

This might not seem remarkable until- wait, did that one blink? Oh shit, I don’t think those mushrooms were edible. I hope I can get out of here before- was that portrait smiling when I came in? I swear it looked more serious THAT ONE JUST LOOKED AT ME. That’s when I realized the framed portraits were actually cleverly-disguised video screens, and each portrait would subtly change every minute or two, the eyes shifting slightly in direction, the facial expression changing, the eyes blinking, just subtle enough that you couldn’t be sure you weren’t imagining the change unless you were staring straight at the portrait when it moved.

Huh. So this is how they test for insanity in Finland. Good to know.

Outside, newly confident in my sanity (wait, what if they were just regular portraits?), I wandered through the city, taking in the lovely public parks, flower gardens and fountains.

The Helsinki Cathedral was surprisingly plain inside, though it did feature a rockin’ organ.

The central train station did make me chuckle with its giant, covid-masked statues.

So! What is there to do around Helsinki? All the tourist guides insisted that Suomenlinna Island was the place for me. I was skeptical in looking at the photos but everything insisted it was a must-visit and Finland’s top tourist destination.

Once I was there, I realized something has to be #1. What the hell else would it be? The statue of the naked blacksmiths? It’s not like Finland has got a bunch of Eiffel towers laying around.

Waiting on the docks for the ferry to the island, I squinted at the giant wooden baseball cap on the other side of the bay. Huh. Okay.

The second I took a snack bar out of my pocket, the birds were all over me.

I loved this seagull that was practically sitting in my lap until I took my phone out to get a photo, then he got all bashful.

Eventually I realized the ferry had rudely left without me before I even got there, and made my way over to Uspenski Cathedral to kill time until the next ferry and see how the Eastern Orthodox Finns got their Wang Chung on.

Cool. Oh! My ferry! I jogged back and hopped on the boat that would ferry me to the most overrated tourist destination of my entire trip. Sorry Finland! We’re still friends, right?

The Suomenlinna Church was cute, with a fence outside made from old cannons and the very understated interior that seems to be a Finnish thing.

There didn’t seem to be much of anything actually open on the island, which may have been a covid thing. All in all it struck me as a good retired person tourist site, as many older people mostly want a nice place to sit and drink coffee at a cafe. It seemed like it was probably a nice place for family picnics.

Making my way out of the little town center, there was a nice walk along the coast, where the edge of the island was lined with cannons and I found a nice spot to sit and contemplate the sea.

The grand finale of Suomenlinna Island and the endpoint for the long walk I was on was the glorious KING’S GATE!

*crickets*

OK, thanks for trying Finland. I think I’m going to go back to the mainland now.

Helsinki also plays host to Finland’s best and possibly only amusement park, Linnanmaki.

I walked all the way across the city from my apartment to the park, which is a bit odd for being inside the city itself. It was only open on the weekends and didn’t open until 4:30 in the afternoon, which made it seem like it might get pretty busy at night, so I was trying to make good time and beat the crowds as I followed Google Maps’ directions on my phone, curving along the lakeside walking paths that again reminded me of Minneapolis. Forty-five little minutes later and I was there!

Inside, the park was an odd conflagration of disparate elements.

Vuoristorata, a wooden rollercoaster that’s a thousand fucking years old, where a brakeman literally rides in the last car and applies a hand brake to keep you from flying off the track? Check. This ride was so rough my thighs were sore from the lap bar smashing into them all ride long, which was a first for me.

Kirmu, a clown-themed Zipper ride where you’re strapped into a seat attached to a giant circular saw blade, your legs dangling free and your feet so dangerously close to the ground that I had to be moved to a special seat for tall people, and then was unceremoniously swung back and forth and thrown backwards through disorienting loops? Check. This ride was intensely fun but also ten seconds long. This was so fun I decided to try a second time without holding onto the hand grips mounted on the chest restraints, and the ride repaid my faith by slamming the living shit out of me as we lurched up and down into the sky.

Ukko, a weird psychedelic Sky Loop that I’m sure is also used to torture detainees who know state secrets? Check. A haunted house full of witches that popped up and blew air in your face? Check. A funhouse full of creepy clowns, purportedly for the enjoyment of children? Check.

But Sean, you protest. Why aren’t you showing us photos of these incomparable wonders? We’ll get to that.

This is all, this entire post, merely garnish for the meal that is Taiga. Taiga is the greatest rollercoaster in the world.

Granted, I have not ridden every rollercoaster in the world and there’s probably one somewhere that makes all your dreams come true and dumps you into a huge pile of money at the end and cures acne but until the day I ride that one, Taiga is it.

Taiga kind of ruined my life and I didn’t even mind.

The ride has you board a big-ass bird inside its big-ass nest and proceed to swoop around Finland performing the kind of aerial acrobatics that birds probably do when they’re on acid.

As you’re waiting inside the nest for the bird to return, the train swoops by so closely outside that the entire loading station shakes ominously. Talk about anticipation!

As you board the bird, you’re warned profusely that you can’t take your cell phone or anything else on the ride, because you will lose anything that is not fused to your soul. And then VWWWWWWONK the train rockets out of the station with a gut-crushing magnetic launch and straight into an upside-down twist. From there you slalom through a series of side-to-side transitions that are thrilling for the way the track starts to fake a turn to one side before suddenly and violently dive-bombing in the opposite direction.

Once the track mercifully straightens out for a second, instead of a break you’re treated to a surprise second launch, where the already hauling-ass coaster boosts again to 66 miles an hour before rocketing straight up into a top hat 171 feet high, where you marvel in the panorama of all of Finland spread out all around you for a beautiful second before the coaster turns sharply and dives back down to Earth, hurtling you through a series of upside down loops and quick airtime hills before whipping you through more slaloms, a loop and a barrel roll before depositing you back in the nest your pants thoroughly shit. Wheeeeew!

All of it is smooth as silk, with no rattling or head banging, and the only physical discomfort comes on one of the most intense drops where you have to flex your abs to keep from passing out when all of the blood in your body rockets down into your feet. Most roller coasters have highlight moments and then dull parts where the pace slackens and you start thinking about your next ride, but Taiga never lets up for a second, it’s pure woosh. Nothing will likely ever top the front row on Katun in Italy for me, which I’d classify as almost more of a religious experience than a ride, but in the realm of mere roller coasters Taiga was without peer.

It’s also somewhat unique for being located in a park that’s mostly just weird bullshit, so that’s the long way of saying I rode Taiga 24 times in a row.

The rules forbade just staying on the coaster, so I also ran through the empty queue racing little kids 24 times, which is its own kind of fun. On around my 10th ride I realized I was looping the ride with an overweight local 10 year old boy who was wearing a shirt advertising the ride we were on, which is the exact same experience I’d had riding Wildfire in Sweden a few days before, so clearly this overweight preteen is my spirit animal.

This would all make for a pretty short chapter if it wasn’t for what happened on my 21st ride of Taiga. The ride came to a stop and I climbed off, as I had so many times before, and made may way for the exit, cutting through a side-door to avoid the exit gift shop which wasted precious seconds I needed to get ahead of little kids to get the front row seat on the ride. I squeezed through the door, tapped my coat pocket and… wait.

Where’s my phone?

Must be in my pants pocket. That’s weird, I make it a habit to put it in my zip-up coat pocket when I’m on rides… nope, not in my pants pocket. Other pants pocket. Nope. Other coat pocket. Nope. Other other coat pocket. Nope nope nope. That’s odd. I must have left it… OHHHH shit it came out on the ride.

That’s impossible! I always zip it up in the… I slid my hand down the front of my coat and felt the dismaying jagged teeth of an open zipper. Oh god... the zipper was somehow a third of the way down. I had scoffed at the repeated warnings not to bring your phone on the ride, because who wants to just toss their phone in a box and hope nobody walks off with it while you’re on the ride? I’m an adult, I have zippered pockets. This is not my first rodeo. I’ve also been to theme parks before, which present similar logistical challenges to rodeos. So how had... Oh my God. This ride was so insane it had worked the zipper part-way down on my jacket and my phone had fought its way to the light and finally, freedom.

It took a full minute for me to accept that this had really happened, and that my phone wasn’t just… in the bottom of my shoe or something, I don’t know. OK, so what now?

I made my way through the ride queue again and flagged down the ride operator I had made very small talk with during my previous 21 loops of the ride. I sheepishly explained that I had lost my phone on the ride.

“But you can’t take your phone on this ride!” she exclaimed at the possibility of this ever happening.

“I know! Weird right? And yet it still happened!” I explained about my rogue zipper and she nodded along. Goddamned zippers.

She then explained, patiently as if to a child, that my phone was probably fucked. Occasionally they find phones that made the leap to freedom on this ride and they are invariably super-fucked. I explained that I understood, but I had a flight in the morning and my tickets and everything else were on that phone, and my only way to connect to my work was on this phone, so if it was at all possible for them to check for it on the off chance that it was not super-fucked, I would really appreciate it. I could stay after the park closes if necessary, which would be easy because I also had no idea how to get back to my apartment without my phone.

She conferred with the other ride operators, who were very nice, and they told me to hang around and they’d let me know if they found my phone. I decided that the best way to kill time while waiting was to ride the roller coaster three more times. What’s the worst that could happen now? I’d already lost my phone.

While in line for the last ride, I saw a dude in a jumpsuit who was obviously park maintenance walk across the platform holding something in his hand. My phone! I fantasized about the possibility that it had fallen out at the very beginning of the ride. It was in a good case that had saved it from many mishaps. I once dropped it while running through Heathrow Airport, had it bounce off the tile floor in front of me, and then I inadvertently kicked it 150 feet across the floor like a hockey puck and DONK off a metal railing. Not a scratch. So maybe it wouldn’t be that ba-

The jumpsuit guy looked at me with extreme pity and said “I’m sorry” as he handed me my phone.

I immediately burst out laughing.

My phone was, as they say in technical circles, super-fucked. It was the most fucked phone I had ever seen in my life, by a wide margin. It looked like it had been shot out of a cannon straight into a brick wall that was three feet away. It was only still a phone in the most abstract conception held together by my memories of it once being a phone. In physical reality it was now just a phone-shaped hunk of pulverized glass.

I couldn’t even be mad, I was so impressed by how fucked this phone was. The glass wasn’t just shattered in a spider-web of cracks like you’ll see when a phone meets its maker in a really horrible way. The glass was shattered like that, sure, corner to corner all across the phone. But when you looked at it closely you could see it was also shattered within the layers of glass themselves, from the surface down into the deeper planes of the glass, in different directions from the surface cracks.

Welp, okay. Gonna have to figure out this flight stuff without my phone. Just then my black, blank, utterly and catastrophically deceased phone suddenly buzzed with a text notification. I burst out laughing again. Oh my God, something’s still alive in there! How adorable. Too bad there’s absolutely no screen to speak of to tell me what the notification was actually for. The phone buzzed a few more lonely-sounding buzzes over the next few hours before the battery went dead for the last time.

Aside from being hilarious, this was all something like a relief, since now I at least knew what the situation was and was no longer holding out hope for a cracked but functioning phone to bail me out. Park closing time had come, so I made my way out of the park into the Helsinki night and proceeded to try and find my way back to my apartment, across the entirety of Helsinki, purely on memory. This made me really wish I’d been paying more attention on the walk over, instead of rushing to get there before the non-existent crowds showed up.

I made it a good part of the way back based on my vague memories of the visual landmarks, and was following the curving path around the lake, knowing at some point I had to turn right and navigate the sort-of grid of city streets to find my apartment. But the turn I was looking for never came, and before long I was somewhere I didn’t recognize, amongst a tangle of abandoned trainyard rails. Yep. I didn’t come this way. Shit.

I cut right into the city and wandered through neighborhoods, looking for something that looked familiar. I was glad to be doing this in a super-safe Nordic country and not, say, Detroit. After much wandering and searching my memories from my days in Helsinki I spotted a spire up ahead in the dark sky. Oh hey! The National History Museum! I know where I am. From there I worked my way through the zigzag of dark streets and before I knew it I was at my apartment. Whew!

OK. How do I get to the airport in the morning for my flight? I got on my laptop and looked up the bus times, the train schedule, the flights. I didn’t have any paper to write anything down, so I made a long list of notes and drew tiny maps on the backs of receipts I had in my pockets. Okay. Now I just need to get up at 5 and… how do I set an alarm? I don’t own a watch. I laughed about the myriad of mundane ways smartphones have taken over our lives and downloaded an alarm clock app for my laptop. Only I couldn’t let my laptop go to sleep, or else the alarm wouldn’t go off in the morning. So I set it to stay awake and draped a towel over the screen so it wouldn’t keep me up all night in my studio apartment.

I was amused thinking about how I’d grown up with intense admonitions to not ever lose one’s wallet. Oh man, if you lose your wallet, you’re screwed! But I realized this was a bit of an outdated concept today. Sure, it would be a problem to lose my wallet, but you’d be much better off tossing it into a volcano than your phone. I can pay for things with my phone. I can’t find my way across Europe with my Sam’s Club card.

In the morning I was successfully awoken and made my way out into the still-dark streets. Now I had to find my way to the train station based on memory and some really bad receipt-back maps. Along the way I kept seeing things I wanted to take photos of, but of course could not. One diner I walked by had an eerily backlit Sekhmet statue on its roof, glowing silently in the night. Jeez. How did I not notice that before?

I made it to the train station but was confused by the mutually exclusive train and tram systems, eventually finding the train to the airport, which had not been turned on for the morning yet. I climbed aboard as it jittered to life and lights came on. I’d had to scrape together the little bit of local money I had in my bag for the ticket, since I’d been using my phone to make contactless payments all trip.

I made it to the airport without incident and was able to pick up my ticket at the counter using my passport. I found myself becoming hyper-aware of where there were clocks, hidden in the corner of display screens on the train or in odd places in the airport, because otherwise I had absolutely no idea what time it was, which is not ideal for catching a train or a plane.

I obviously needed to get a new phone, as I was still only about half-way through my five month journey. The problem though was that I couldn’t just walk into a store and buy any old phone, since I was working remotely this entire trip and had a special phone set up with encryption to connect my laptop to my work’s systems, and all of my work meetings were tied to my US phone number. So if I suddenly had a Finnish phone, none of this would work. I also had special phone service tied to that phone which works in any country, if I bought a phone anywhere in Europe I’d have to start dealing with roaming and figuring out data going from country to country, it was going to be a mess. So what I really needed was to replace my exact phone. Which wasn’t sold in Europe.

Except. There was one store in Germany that carried them, supposedly. So I’d changed my flight to go to Dusseldorf to try and find this phone. Landing in Germany, I looked at my scrawled receipts detailing bus times for getting across Dusseldorf as I climbed aboard a bus outside the airport.

I somehow made the bus and tram transfer, having to run up a street and duck into a store to see what time it is, and was dropped off as close as I could get to the store. I made my way the rest of the way on foot through some bizarre office park, following my memory of what I’d seen on Google Maps on my laptop the night before in Helsinki, and eventually found the store, a huge Best Buy type electronics depot, which wasn’t open yet. I waited with the electronics junkies outside in the cold morning light until the doors were unlocked.

They didn’t have my phone on display. Dammit. I asked an employee and he looked at me like I was crazy. Didn’t I want a nice new Samsung Galaxy XRP Platinum with the new DNA reader? No, funny as it might sound, that’s not what I want at all. I came from another country to buy this phone I’m asking you for.

Oh. What size do you want? The XL? We don’t have that, he frowned into the computer.

Look whatever one you have is the one I’m going to buy so just tell me what you have. You only have one? Yes, whatever that one happens to be is the one I want. Thanks.

He disappeared into the back for a long time before returning with my new phone. Woohoo! It was even on steep discount because it did not have a DNA reader.

I was back on the bus to the train station and off on a train to The Netherlands, which was my actual intended destination. I was going to be back in Germany afterwards, and due to covid spreading out of control Germany was starting to refuse entry to anyone who’d been in any but about two of the provinces of The Netherlands, so I’d carved out a bizarre train route threading the needle between the covid-infected areas so that I could return to Germany after I was done theme parking it up in The Netherlands.

Sitting on the train I had one last hurdle to surmount: These phones are only supposed to be sold in the US, and you can’t activate them from overseas. I got on the train’s wifi and set up a VPN so it looked like I was in the US, and the phone activation promptly sprang to life. Within a few minutes I had my old phone number back and all of my photos and settings were downloading, as if I’d never lost my phone. Well, except for the photos of that day at Linnanmaki, which hadn’t had a chance to upload to the cloud before my phone lept to freedom, going 66 miles an hour, upside down, 171 feet in the air.

Rest in Peace, original phone. You did a great job and your death was hilarious, which is what I hope people say about me one day.