Goosed by a ghost

I had to give a presentation in Seinäjoki yesterday. It's about a 4-hour drive from Mikkeli if you go direct, but we decided to take a longer route so we could pass through Tampere, where the Moomin Museum is. If you're unfamiliar with the Moomin family, google it. I never read these books as a child, but our friends introduced them to our kids. They're cute books, and the story of their creator, Tove Jansson, is really interesting too (there's a movie about her called Tove that is worth a watch). The museum was magical. It was almost entirely dark in the exhibit rooms, and the exhibits themselves--many of them dioramas made by Tove and her partner, Tuulikki--were illuminated. Everybody in the museum was moving through it quietly, or sitting in chairs (such as the bean bag chairs made to look like boulders). There was a workshop where kids of all ages were encouraged to make a Moomin house out of paper. The girls spent about an hour working on those, before ransacking the gift shop.

The woman working the gift shop, upon learning we had just an hour to spend in Tampere, told us we should go eat donuts at an observation tower. This is another curious Finland thing: many towns--maybe all of them--have at least one observation tower. We assume there is some defence function because they seem to be paired with or near bunkers, but additionally weird is that they often seem to have cafes in them. In Mikkeli, the observation tower is known for its waffles. In Tampere, the tower--which is up on a hill and surrounded by woods and lakes, is known for its donuts. It was not hard to convince us to go eat a special donut.

Then it was back in the car for a long, boring 2.5 hour drive to Seinäjoki. Our accommodation in Seinäjoki was a hostel whose website mentions, as an afterthought, that the building was once a psychiatric hospital. "We are located in the main building of the former Piiri Mental Hospital, which has undergone an extensive renovation, including the ventilation systems," it says, before describing the room capacity and layout. (In the FAQ, no one has asked if there are anguished ghosts haunting the halls.) Approaching it from the road, it looks... like an institution that wouldn't have been nice to its inhabitants, and when you go in the door, it's obviously divided into wings. No amount of decor could completely conceal the building's true identity from anyone who watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. We hoped the kids wouldn't notice anything off about it, and they didn't. I had a shower by myself down the hall and tried not to let my imagination run wild about pervert ghosts and when I returned to the room Brian was teaching the kids how to play Blackjack with a deck of cards they found in the common area. Good, wholesome fun in a definitely-not-haunted hostel.

We all slept fine and nobody was visited by a poltergeist. I gave my talk the next morning and then got taken to lunch at 11:00am, the time the Finns always eat lunch, they tell me. This is my preferred lunch time too. The Finns also love a lunch buffet. Around my office in Mikkeli, there are numerous restaurants with awesome lunch buffets and it's consistently 13 Euros to eat at them. They always have a table of cold salads, a table of hot dishes (e.g. meatballs, paprika chicken, pork neck!), possibly a soup (when it's cold smoked salmon soup, you're in luck), bread, coffee, tea and dessert. There are also terrible buffets--more on that later.

After lunch we got back on the road, taking the shorter route this time (still 4 hours), with a plan to hit Tuuri, a town synonymous with the Keskinen department store. Pictures of the exterior do not capture how gigantic this store is. Moreover, it's clad in gold and tacky as hell. The current owner--Vesa Keskinen--is the grandson of the founder. It started as a more modest "village store" but Vesa has taken it in a gaudier, gimmicky direction. There is a lot of lore about him and the store, but not much in English. Among the stories I've heard and corroborated by scouring Reddit: once he stocked the moat between his gold mansion and the mall (yup) with fish, and tagged one of them with 1 million markka (about $100k back then), and held a fishing competition. 

The store is just massive inside--like 6 Costcos, maybe more. I can't find any square footage online but there is one update on the store's website that says it was "enlarged by 5000m2" at some point. In addition to the main store, there is a grocery store and several restaurants, and a room at the end of a hallway that just has a bunch of Lamborghinis and Ferraris in it. Throughout the hallways connecting each part, there are replicas of famous statues, like David and The Thinker, murals of unicorns, and photos of such rock music icons as Axel Rose (aged version) and Dee Snider (near the "Rock Music" themed restaurant, which was totally empty apart from the bartender). The ceilings are painted to look like a sky. There are balconies with mannequins on them. I peeked into one room, fenced off and unlit, to see a regular-sized bathtub full of real coins with a statue of Scrooge McDuck bathing in it. I was later told Vesa really likes Scrooge McDuck. After roaming around the stores and hallways, agog, Brian and the kids had lunch at a buffet. It was pretty terrible, unfortunately. 

While they ate lunch, one of only three parties in a huge and otherwise empty restaurant aiming for a late-1800s-Finland atmosphere (walls plastered in fake rock, dark and dusty wooden beams overhead), we could hear muffled live music coming from somewhere. It sounded like a lounge singer, but an accordion was involved. Eventually I walked up some unmarked stairs and opened a door at the top to find a room FULL of couples dancing to this crooner and his band. It was one of the stranger experiences of my life. For a palate cleanse, we stopped at a chocolate factory and bought an unseemly amount of chocolate and booted it home. 

Today was quieter. I visited an organic farm and learned about how the Finnish government selects some farmers to be "reserve" farmers who will commit to growing food if war breaks out rather than fighting on the front lines. The kids were a bit dumpy all day, possibly because we spent 10 of the last 48 hours in a car, witnessed the Saddest Mall in the World, and ate several pounds of chocolate covered licorice.