Vappu (May Day)

To celebrate May Day, our Finnish moms (minus Ritva) invited us over to Marja-Leena's house for lunch. As usual, this involved a “short walk,” though in retrospect we're realizing that our understanding of a “short walk” has become increasingly more Finnish – that is, it didn't strike us as particularly odd to walk a mile to a dinner party. Without directions.

We were told to arrive at 1 pm, and when we got there Marja-Leena invited us into her living room, a bright and sunny room packed with pictures of flowers, knick-knacks, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases which entirely covered two of the walls. To our delight, it also contained a piano and an impressively new flat-screen HDTV. Needless to say, while Marja-Leena fluttered back to the kitchen to finish her preparations, we had no problems entertaining ourselves – we ended up watching a symphony led by an extremely amusing Spanish conductor.

An hour later, however, we were starting to get a bit antsy. That was when Pirjo and Eira, one of our Finnish moms' friends and colleagues, showed up. We didn't know Eira very well, having only met her once before, but she hardly got into the house before snapping a very candid photo of the two of us. She seemed very nice, but the lack of any exchange of pleasantries made the continuing candid photography rather awkward, to say the least. She also seemed to have a penchant for snapping photos during particularly unflattering moments, including mid-story, mid-mouthful, and really any time we were distracted. Unfortunately, her camera had the flash off but the shutter noise on, so we only realized we'd been the victims of another candid once the damage was already done.

Another hour rolled by before it was finally time for lunch. Starving, our bellies embarrassingly audible, we headed into the kitchen where another round of unsuspected photos were taken as we got our food and began to eat. Our food was pretty good, including traditional boiled potatoes, peas and carrots, pork in a fruit sauce, chicken with onions and mushrooms in a yellow (?) cream sauce, a large “Italian” salad (lettuce, sliced bell peppers, cucumbers, olives, grape tomatoes, and feta cubes, sans dressing), rye malt rolls, homemade rye beer, lemon-rosemary water, and some kind of red cranberryish berry.

After finishing our meals and firmly refusing seconds numerous times, we were ushered into the dining room, where 5 huge glass goblets awaited us at the table. Dessert was then presented: a large bowl of apple and raisin goo – the consistency of a pudding but translucent like a gelatin, and not creamy (it's made with potato starch) – and a mint vienetta, a sort of log of ice cream with crispy layers of thin dark chocolate in between wavy layers of mint ice cream. We watched with increasing disbelief as our Finnish moms not only piled the the goo and vienetta on top of one another, but proceeded to mix it all together. Not wanting to be rude, however, we followed suit. It wasn't bad, but it was one of the strangest combinations we've ever had.

We were quite full, having accepted seconds of the mint ice cream despite much resistance, but we soon discovered that there was yet more eating to be done. We came full circle, returning to the living room, where we were poured glasses of cloudberry wine. After that, cups of hot coffee and tea were waiting. Also waiting was a huge platter of chocolate mocha-cake slices and sugared mini-donuts. Once more, much as we tried to avoid another helping of food, no did not seem to be an acceptable answer, and we had a cake slice and donut piled on each of our plates. Taking advantage of one distraction, Elizabeth did manage to slip her untouched cake slice back onto the serving tray beside her, but Jaime, located across the room, had no such luck.

We shared some pleasant conversation during lunch (or maybe dinner at this point), of course, and enjoyed exchanging stories and recounting our adventures in St. Petersburg. We were the subjects of several odd guessing games, though, including guessing what certain phrases meant in Finnish, and guessing the age of special education students based on their drawings. Between these games and the candid photos, as much as we love our Finnish moms, we began to feel like we were being put in awkward situations for the purpose of observing – and documenting - our reactions. However, we did have a tasty meal and enjoyable conversation, and after saying goodbye, we caught a bus downtown to briefly check out the May Day street festivities (mostly tents with food, candy and trinkets for sale) before heading home for the night.