Act 2 - Finnish summer strikes back or how you “get what you have”

And the Finnish saga continues...Our invincible RECOMS fellows, Viola and Ruben carry on with their storytelling between two saunas and even after the grandiose RECOMS online Training Event 5 ended. Stay tuned as we are far from the end!

By Viola and Ruben

Training event 5 is what happens between two saunas, if you ask us. Check the act one of the epic saga “RECOMS goes online” if you missed our arrival to the Finnish cottage where we spent the 10 days of the fifth online training event. Our trust in life was already tested, but little we knew about what the following days had in store for us. And indeed, there was more than met the eye.

For those who are not familiar with Finnish summer, here is a fact that gives an idea of how it looks like: midsummer, the biggest event after Christmas, is celebrated around the 21st of June and, according to popular wisdom, one can say it has been a good midsummer if it was not snowing. Finnish summer is life at its best but it can mean anything from +30 degrees to, well, as said, snow. You can imagine it as a lottery-like paper box in which Gods, or someone on their behalf, place leaflets describing all sorts of combinations of climate events. Then, if you want to know the weather forecast, you are invited to pull a leaflet out of the box; and so we did and it was rain written on our leaflet. Oh, so much rain.

In Luvia downtown they have a saying – “you get what you have” – which means that there is only one way out when Finnish summer strikes back: to adapt and make the best out of the situation (Editor’s note: At least if they did not have this saying before, they have after our visit.). For example, we start from the assumption that Finnish summer may mean bad weather, and bad weather means rain, but rain means mushrooms, and mushrooms mean risotto, and risotto means... we guess you got the point. Ah, it also means a muddy dog but that is a whole different story.

A good recipe for sanity - as the corona spring taught us -  is to dive into routines, which we immediately practiced without any loss of time. Forage, cook, bake, eat, repeat. And do not dare to forget the sauna!

For our happiness, the internet connection did not fail us. While keeping our culinary daily routines, we still managed to attend the online event and get to see our bright colleagues. Unfortunately, sharing delicacies is not possible through zoom and therefore we ended up eating 26 korvapuusti (Finnish cinnamon rolls), trays of focaccia, kilos of gnocchi, gigantic bowls of tiramisú, meters of blueberry pie - portions that would have fed the 15 fellows just between the two of us. Oh, tough life! It also might have been that all this eating was just a coping mechanism to cover for the hole in our hearts caused by the absence of the rest of the fellows during the days of the training event.

But then anyways evenings come, sauna is over, bellies are full. The typical atmosphere of the Finnish cottage is thought to make you a bit nostalgic and melancholic (one could claim that whole Finland is thought to make you feel like that, but for the reader’s sake, we won’t dive deep into the beauty of Finnish melancholy here). We got used to accommodate these feelings, putting some blues playlists on Spotify and moaning about our lost and errant lives. Opportunities come and go… Ok, let’s stop here. To finish the Act 2 (thanks for bearing with us this far), we would just like to remind the reader that you have what you get or you get what you have (we always forget what the right order is) for what it’s worth... So, all this to say: don’t ever forget to buy chocolate. 

You might think this saga is over now. Dream on! See you in Act 3: Light at the end of the tunnel.