Soft as snow but warm inside. For the first twenty minutes of the day or so, the brain remains in a strange place, a bit of a semi-slumberland, where reality is a dream and those other dreams are still just a thin, thin membrane away. And that's just after a few hours of sleep. Or dreaming. What happens if we throw a brain into a very fascinating place, where almost everything appears new and familiar at the same time and then crank it out of that state after about seven days and throw it into a very quickly spinning wheel for a sporty hamster and just pull it and push it and drag it over the floor of a midtown office space and then splatter the remains all over the tracks of the f line ... well, not really, of course, just the imaginary brain, the neurons, you know what i mean? It is going to be almost a week soon since the return from Helsinki and I am just now getting back to some of my senses. I was able to work very hard through the week, but I was not really able to digest what truly happened in Finland. Helsinki was pretty much exactly like nothing I had expected. I am ashamed of what I had expected. Some bizarre little portion of perhaps my brain-stem had expected the stewardesses on finnair to be dressed as snork maidens, the pilot to look like moomin papa, the groke to work at the hotel counter... you get the picture. Once in the city, I was expecting scenes a bit comparable to ghostbusters, with a giant moomin walking the streets of the Finnish capital. I thought that everyone would have cute and soft furry paws and that it would be a happy place where the snow on the trees is sweet and not cold. You know, like frost-ing. Helsinki was nothing like that. Instead there was a gigantic Alvar Aalto, standing over the city like the Colossus of Rhodos (only bigger) and he was not only standing there, he was waving at us all with his "young Eskimo girl's leather breeches". (Google it if you think I am crazy for using that description.) Everywhere. It somehow became too much too soon. And then there was Marimekko. The stripes and dots and the poppy flowers were even more in our faces than Alvar Aalto. Was everybody secretly wearing striped underwear? Is a printed giga flower on a cotton fabric the equivalent of a venti soy latte for the Finns? Parts of the city felt as if they were being preserved inside of a giant dry-ice block. Some of the restaurants we entered have not been altered since the 30's. Some since the 50's. They were beautiful places. I guess it was just common sense to leave them exactly the way they were. Down to the glasses, down to the waiters, down to... the young eskimo girl's underpants (everywhere, everywhere.) And yet the other side of this stunning freeze-frame experience was a superbly contemporary way of things. 97% of the hotel room was recyclable. no chemicals were used unless really necessary. there were so many layers of glass in some windows of the hotel that it might have been as well our body heat that made the giant sheets of glass amazingly cosy, while there was a raging snow storm outside. Nokia phones come from Finland and it is not surprising at all if one just spent a day there. And it was also not surprising to see what looked like a whole collection of 2006 model cellphones at the Historical Museum, made out of stone, thousands and thousands years ago. (Tools of a different kind of communication. Or maybe not.) It is somehow not a contradiction that contemporary thinking can be thousands of years old. One can be incredibly efficient and create amazingly simple and beautiful things if making them somehow helps the survival in an incredibly wicked winter. It sometimes felt as if elements of contemporary design were not developed but unearthed here. Common sense and simple beauty are truly good things if one wants to stay alive and see the next spring. And it was f*cking cold. It was dark and f*cking cold. And I do not usually curse, yet here I found myself stepping into the street, wrapped in layers upon layers of fabric and just cursing through these layers, and more and just angrily punching words at the wind which kept hitting even the tiniest parts of any exposed skin. My eyeballs seemed to freeze. And I cried and cursed and sled and punched until we reached another warm oasis of commerce and clarity and common sense beauty. And i have never in my life seen more women who hated their blond hair so much they would turn any visible representation of it into something else. (and something completely different at times, some of it not even resembling hair.) And it also felt as if changing the color of a Finnish woman's hair gave her the ultimate protection from even the most severe cold weather. no hats were used by so many here. how did they do this? and why did so many men shave their heads. did they not hear the news? winter was definitely here. again. Who knows. Maybe they kept warm from the inside. It happened more than once that we by accident scratched the thin friendly surface of a person at a store, for example, and flames came shooting out, hot flames. Some heat (and anger) seemed to be bubbling wildly under the skins of more than one person here. the snow at first felt and looked like friendly dust. it moved around and freely, shaping snow bunnies in some corners here and there. it later became the ultimate surface of things. snow streets, snow sidewalks, snow trees, snow everything. and it seemed completely okay and not new and just the way things were suposed to happen. were helsinki in the united states, the streets would be drenched with dirty, salty, poisonous water and the giant all wheel drivers would pretend to be in sport and utility and vehicles. because helsinki is in finland and because of all of the factors mentioned above, there was just a trace of gravel on the sidewalk in some areas. the streets were often perfectly white and shiny ribbons which i was able to cross by running up to them and then pretending i was on a snowboard. One glide across eight lanes. No problem. (I was looked at as if I were the village idiot. Nobody looks at the village idiot.) and cars were not driving slowly, ever. the speed of vehicles did not seem in any way adjusted for the obviously lethal snowy conditions. it was some sort of miracle that nobody got hurt. or maybe not. Maybe somebody got hurt. Or maybe it was not a miracle. And Kiasma was even much better than expected. Even much better than that. (And I will need to write more about it.) And reindeer steak was delicious. And so was smoked reindeer. And I am angry with myself that I did not buy more Dumle. And I had completely forgotten that shops in some counties do not open on Sundays, no matter what. and so I failed to buy any of the Arabia Moomin cups I wanted to get. Here we go again. Yes, Moomins. Soft as snow but warm inside. Or maybe more than just warm, really.