An international flavour

Nice to see someone on the right side of the fence this week

And so it begins, the month or so of travelling, well travelling further than Estonia, which I visit regularly. Last week was a trip to Finland, a country I have never visited before. I went to the airport and got chatting with a guy I met. Over lunch we talked about our week, of village life and alpacas and then we went our separate ways. Oh wait a minute! That was my husband. You may remember that last week was our 35th Wedding Anniversary and he was in the UK visiting grandkids and doing an alpaca course. We met for an hour and a half before he had to go to put the alpacas away and I had to go through security to catch a plane to Helsinki. I was a little late arriving at the airport because I was trying to do some last minute jobs but at least we did get to spend some time together.

I gather it has been wet while I've been away

Veronica looking sprightly

I arrived in Helsinki with the instructions to get the train to the main train station and then my friend and her daughter would meet me there. I had made some attempt to find out what to do but in the busyness didn't really sort it out properly in my head. Normally that would be a recipe for disaster but I figured that by now I would be able to work the system out, I've travelled about enough in European countries. There was a lady by one of those "Welcome to Helsinki" signs and I stopped to ask her how to get a ticket for the train. She directed me to where I needed to go and told me the machines would be on the platform with guards in bright vests to help. She finished with a very cheery, "Welcome to Finland." Sure enough, the guard was down there and helped me to purchase the correct ticket and directed me onto the train, that just happened to be pulling into the station. Sorted! I was on the train on the way to Helsinki centre and for the first time in a week, I felt relatively relaxed.

I posted this picture last week of the pond filling up. It has
been so low over summer and finally the water was up to
the cattail rushes

Now let's play spot the rushes. The pond is now oeverflowing.
In fact all three ponds are overflowing, including the middle
one that doesn't hold water that much at all

Who are you looking at?

My friend, who is Indian, sent me some vague details about waiting inside the train station for her, which puzzled me until I got there and I found that it wasn't a huge place, even for a capital city. It was interesting doing some people watching while I waited. Helsinki has an integrated transport system that reminded me of our time in Copenhagen and so it was fairly easy to understand. Even easier was the fact that the signs were also in Swedish, which I can just about read, as well as Finnish obviously, which I can't read more than a few words of and only if they resembled the very few Estonian words I know. So after a short trip on the Metro we arrived at her apartment and my place to stay for the night. It was only a short stay but I was well looked after and my friend made sure I caught the right bus in the morning to the institute where I would be doing a presentation.

I wonder if it is going to be hard to tell these two apart?

A golden leaf shower

I was a bit worried about the presentation because of the lack of time I had. I had hoped to have my talk more worked out, but it went okay. It also worked well with the Dutch team who were from a project working on a similar theme to ours and so we had decided to collaborate with them on the workshop. I was very pleased with the response that our project leader had to to my presentation though. She told me that she was happy because she knew what a steep learning curve it had been for me, especially after joining the project late and she felt I had really "got it." I can't do much better than that, so I was happy enough.

A golden view

It has been windy today and so many of the leaves are now
on the floor

After lunch in the canteen, it was time to catch the bus up north. Again it was easy to book... twice! I somehow managed to click on the wrong time but fortunately the costs weren't astronomical even for a nearly three hour bus journey booked on the day. That's the way it should be! So my next stop was Mikkeli, the regional capital for Eastern Finland. Most of what I saw of Finland was from the bus and my impression was of a lot of forest, which was glorious golden colours interspersed with the deep green of spruce and pine. The towns were mainly modernist steel and glass buildings but wooden buildings in the countryside.

Did I say it had been wet?

Our well has filled up very rapidly and is a bit murky. The
moles have been digging tunnels nearby and so instead of
filtering through the soil, the water has been running
through the mole drainage system

I was meant to be meeting up with the Senior Education Officer on the Thursday morning but he had go to a seminar in the very north of the country and so changed the time of the meeting to the evening. We met in the city centre, which was only a five minute walk away from the bus station and we chatted over a cup of tea... and chatted.... and chatted. We both worry about the closure of rural schools. I from the community impact and he from the impact on children who have to spend such a long time on the bus to get to school. We decided there is definitely a need for more research on the topic. I think there is a problem when there is an EU policy that is working towards encouraging more young farmers and then a national policy of closing down schools before the young farmers get established. They need resources for their families too for them to thrive.

Looking through the shed

So embarassing! No peace when you are trying to use
the toilet

I have a friend who lives about 40km away from Mikkeli but he knew people in the town, so he organised for me to stay at the home of a young couple. I did get chance to see my Belgium/Italian friend briefly and he and his Finnish wife took me to buy socks in the centre as all mine were getting holes in them - not good in cultures where you take your shoes off at the door. Anyway my hosts didn't have a car and it was getting late after the meeting, so the guy who I was chatting with ordered me a taxi. That 8 minute drive cost me more than the three hour bus ride. Oh well! Such is life! At least it got me there and that was the main point. I was immediately made very welcome by my Russian host and found much to chat about. You may find a theme here! It seems that much of my week was spent chatting.

Mr. P. delicately nibbling on his leg

A restful place to be

With my meeting already over, it meant a relatively free day. Both of my hosts were working although the Finnish wife worked more in the evening and so she cooked me lunch. It was a bit of a damp day and so it didn't seem to be too bad to just be able to get on and work. In fact it was nice to be able to just concentrate on the work itself and not wonder what other chores I should be doing. It was nice not to have to cook for myself either and I was well fed the whole week by all my hosts. It was a delight to be able to stay in the home of a young couple who are working out their faith and thinking hard about what that means. We finished our conversation with the conclusion that the most important part was love and wisdom, and most important of course is love. Not a bad way to finish really.

You can see where the boys have been eating. It would be
good to get them onto the green grass, but they are already
fat, or at least some of them are.

The leafy lanes of Mikkeli suburbs

The next morning I booked to go back to Helsinki on the bus. I decided I wouldn't take the taxi but walk. My hosts had gone to work and I sauntered around the leafy lanes and by the lake. As I was taking pictures of the lake I got a message from my Belgium/Italian friend that my host was trying to get in touch with me, but Messenger wasn't working so well on my phone. He said he would come and pick me up from the house, but I told him I had already left, so he and his friend came and picked me up from the side of the lake instead. It turned out well, firstly because it was beginning to drizzle a bit and secondly the leafy walk was at an end and the rest of the walk would have been more boring. My host apologised and said he didn't know if his friend was able to help or not and that's why he hadn't mentioned it. As he left he told me the Finnish name for restaurant/coffee shop and indicated where they were and wished me well.

Leaves in the lake

Another view of the lake

I was met off the bus by a Finnish friend who had time for a cup of coffee and we talked about theology and environmentalism. It wasn't long as he didn't have much time, but then again, neither did I. I was heading towards the workplace of a Latvian friend of mine, who has stayed in our apartment a couple of times and now lives just outside of Helsinki. I got near the workplace a little early but found a rather nice bakery and so stopped for a cup of tea and a piece of cake. My friend turned up and we went to find her family and set off to the leafy outskirts of Helsinki.

Well something is of interest

A forest garden

My friend has been in Helsinki for a couple of years now but she and her husband have only just bought the house. It is a cosy little place that has a forest for a back garden. Such an amazing place for children to play. My friend and her husband still have their Latvian accents but her children, especially her little daughter, are fluent in English with an international accent and a just a twang of American.  The little girl read her school book to me, it was funny hearing stories of Kipper and the magic key again, as this was something my own children read at school.

That is an amazing ants' nest

The lake near my friend's house

We had a lazy Saturday, waking up late - well late for me anyway - a leisurely breakfast and of course lots of chatting, a walk around the lake - because there are lots of lakes in Finland, and a film night. I felt so relaxed it was a wonderful way to finish off my time in Finland. The next morning was an early start and I woke at 4:30 and decided it wasn't worth going back to sleep for 20 minutes. My Latvian friend drove me to the ferry terminal and hugged me goodbye. It was so much easier catching the ferry than going to the airport. In Riga I had to queue for 3/4 hour to get through security, at the ferry terminal it was just a matter of pulling up the email with the QR code, scanning it and up we went. No security and all my bags with me. Easy!

Not sure if this boat will be going far

Lots of boats by the lake

I arrived in Tallinn about 9:30 and met up for coffee with an American friend. We talked about faith and life in general before she helped me to get on the right tram to take me to the bus station for my bus to Riga. So on a damp and dreary day I headed home. Getting plenty of work done and dozing along the way. The bus was about 20 minutes late and I was panicking just a little. I had just enough time to buy my ticket, go to the loo and get some water and an apple (the most humungous apple you ever saw) before catching my bus back to my village. It was dark when I got back and Ian was waiting for me near the bus station.

The lake bottom is solid rock

So here I am, back in my caravan, after a fairly laid back day. A bit of work, catching up on emails, podding some beans and starting to think of the next trip, which is only a few days away.

Relaxing

Yes in the greenhouse again, but we
forgot to take pictures this week and so
these are the cast offs from last week.
So cute though, I'm sure you don't mind

I took the opportunity to relax a little this week and do something completely different with our little granddaughter around. She has been such a joy to have around with her little giggles and inquisitive nature. I'm sure her Mum winced occasionally when she was scrabbling around with her food, but we are all well aware that kids need dirt in their lives to build up immunity and reduce problems with allergies. She ate lots of fresh food though to compensate, although tomatoes aren't too her liking - except once. If she was whinging a little due to tiredness or hungry, she was offered plums, apples, pears or cucumbers all freshly picked and not a chemical residue in sight. Sometimes our daughter cooked too and it was nice to have someone else do the cooking. One night they took us to the restaurant - a treat as we have only been once in the last year or so and that was recently when our friends took us out.

Showing Mummy how to collect tomatoes. Shame the wee
one doesn't like them 

We sat around and talked a lot too, yet still got wood stacked in our basement for the winter and radiators attached to walls thanks to our son-in-law. We continued our walks around to see the alpacas and chickens and of course, the wee one preferred to see the chickens - much more interesting to youngsters. According to the little one, chickens go "arrrrggghhh!" not cluck cluck and she is sort of right really when you really listen to them.

There has been plenty of sun this week.
Rather nice! Only problem is that we
have had just a touch of frost and so
that prompted some hurried harvesting

Our sheep are finally sheared, but were greatly threatened with having a rendezvous with our freezer in the process. They escaped twice after shearing, but we think it was because they were unsettled with having strange people around who helped with the job. Our sheep are very easy to keep and move around, but as soon as we need to do anything like shearing or injections, they are an absolute pain to get hold of. You wouldn't think that one of them actually likes a nose rub, would you? At least they settled down for Ian when he took them some food in the evening.

The amaranth is in the two strips in the centre. Not exactly
well advanced. Not done so well this year with this

My daughter and family returned on Friday and I went with them to the airport, as I had a dental appointment in Riga. They ordered a taxi for me from the airport as I had to take their child seat with me and then we have it for any little visitors in the future. I was a little late as the taxi got stuck in traffic, but that was okay. I don't miss city traffic, that's for sure. The dentist whipped out the broken tooth and then took two x-rays, one of the tooth and one of a tooth that is sensitive to pressure from time to time. Since the broken tooth is not hurting, she arranged another appointment to deal with it for three weeks time. This time it only cost me €12.30 - not too bad then.

Sunflowers again and showing the autumnal look to the
trees

As I had two hours to kill after the dentist I decided to walk back into the city centre to catch my bus. The child seat was very light and quite easy to carry ....... for the first hour. I did something that is not like me at all, I took a wrong turning and ended up walking for two hours - not quite what I had in mind when I thought about killing time. To cap it all I got there too late to buy a ticket at the kiosk and the bus was really full, so I had to stand for over an hour. I was so pleased to reach a stop where people were actually getting off the bus and not on it and I got to sit down then. I then spent an interesting hour chatting to a young man, who I've met before. He was enthusiastically re-telling me many a tale of changed lives when people listen to God. He is a young man with special needs and yet he has a deep wisdom to know that listening to God and acting on it will help him and others immensely. I love it when God uses the people considered weak or foolish in society's eyes for his purposes.

The bees are still busy

Our son-in-law loves a good challenge when talking and he certainly posed some interesting ones this week. After we had spent rather a long time picking a poor harvest of potatoes, he commented that he could buy lots of bags of potatoes if he had been working for that length of time. He's right of course and we could argue, they won't have been picked by us, the ones from the supermarket would have chemicals added and all sorts of good reasons to continue growing our own. However, the one thought that struck me, long after he had gone, was that it demonstrates the price we put on our food. Not everyone can become a software engineer of course and just about anyone can grow potatoes if they wanted to, but the price we pay in the shops doesn't just represent that the farmer has better machinery to pick potatoes, it also represents the low wages we pay those folks who sort through the potatoes that the farmer lifts. Somewhere in our system we have decided that those who produce food are not worth as much in the economy as those who design clever systems to make our life easier or help industry to run smoothly - all well and good, but with no disrespect intended, we can live without those things, we can't live without food though.

An acorn year for sure! Hmmmm! Lots for the wild boar to
eat over winter then.

A big announcement this week we have a new grandchild on the way. My oldest son and his wife are expecting again and so our grandson is going to become a big brother. Time does fly and it is funny to see how little he looks and yet when his father was born, his big sister was only 15 months older, younger than our grandson is now. My grandson will be over two when his little sibling is born, in fact more like the gap between his father and baby number 3 in our household. Gosh we were all young then. 

Lost and found

The roadway is getting a little chewed
up now. At least this week the forecast
is for a freeze and so that will help

I think we lost our sense of humour this week, somewhere in the mud with the dreach weather we've been having and the nasty emails going between neighbours. I can just do without it at the moment. I have had extra things to do with my course, that I should have anticipated, but didn't. For instance I have an evaluation to do, as it is a year since I started the course, but what I hadn't realised is that this is not a cosy chat with my supervisors, but a meeting with a board and a presentation - all to be done by the end of the month. Okay if I had actually sat down and read through all the steps of doing a PhD on the university site, I would have realised that, but just like most people, I haven't. So there is that to do, on top of the reading I still need to wade through and some prep work for a course in the beginning of February, where I shall be learning how to make pretty maps using computer software.

Dreach! A Scottish word for dark, damp gloomy days

Water has been pouring into APH1 (Alpaca house one) and
so Ian has put plastic under the roof, so he can stop it from
raining in on the boys. It is angled to drain out of the house
through the funnel you can see on the right hand side of the
picture

Learning to do maps, reminds me of some of the decisions I made when I was younger. I had to choose between Geography and History at school and I chose History. I did prefer history and I was good at the subject, but there was one more element in the decision - I didn't want to do a subject that my Mum taught. My Mum was a supply teacher at one point and I didn't really want the risk of being in a geography class with my Mum, it was bad enough the one class that I did have where my Mum filled in for another teacher, but that was Chemistry and she just supervised that class, as the teacher had set us some work. Some children don't mind. That particular chemistry class was taught by the father of one of my classmates and he didn't seem to mind. Not sure why I didn't want my Mum to teach me, but it is ironic that I am now learning some of those things that are more akin to geography than history, although there is some of that too in the subject I am researching.

To drain the water away from the inside of the alpaca house

This is one of the hats I knitted. I knitted the one below
first and thought it was a bit too small and so that will
be a present for a young one later. I knitted this one
bigger and went to wash it and was horrified to see it
expand a lot and was now too big. Fortunately it is alpaca
wool, not ours though, and so it felted relatively easily
and so I felted it down to the right size. Worked nicely
as you can see. 

As you can tell I am feeling a bit inundated really, but rather than spend more and more time working, I realise I need to take time off and relax, otherwise I will get less and less done in the long run. I need time to think and mull things over. I enjoyed just pottering about at our other apartment yesterday. I could have got some sewing done, something I find relaxing, but hadn't taken my sewing machine lead up and it was a while before I found a decent pair of scissors amongst all the boxes of stuff I have. I packed most of my stuff into boxes when we had a family staying at the apartment. I realise that I really need to do something about our organisation, I have sewing stuff in two places and rarely do I have the right things in the right place - not helpful! I wasn't always so disorganised, I could be and can be quite organised. I must get more organised again though and then I will be more productive. I find that what happens is discipline slips and then the organisation slips and then I end up running rings around myself and that has to stop.

Thought this looked cute with a little pompom on
for a little one

All three ponds are full to overflowing

I'm writing this blog early because a series of things have fallen into place, which is wonderful when I feel under pressure. I sent off a chance email this last week, wondering if someone had some contacts that might be useful for me for starting my field study and he did. Not only did he have some contacts, he had a meeting with them today (Monday) and I was welcome to join him and his colleague. He even offered to come and collect me, as I was kind of en-route, which was really appreciated. I decided not to take up the offer when another series of things started to fall into place too. A friend of mine offered me their car and suggested a young man we both know would make a good translator and he was able to rearrange his work shifts to go. This all means I can now combine the meeting with some interviews in a nearby village, which is good as it is a couple of hours drive away. This should all get me off to a good start with my research, as I can test the type of questions I want to ask, to see how understandable they are and if they spark the kinds of answers I need.

Not just dripping either, but quite a flow

Estelle, our inquisitive youngster

Ian has been working with the animals to get them used to him handling them and yesterday he even managed to hug Estelle. She is a lovely, inquisitive alpaca though and has a very sweet nature, which is good if we have visitors. Gradually during feed time, Ian has been tickling them under the chin, particularly Tellus and Estelle, as they are the ones we might need to move around to show or in Tellus case as a stud male. He has worked up to stroking them down their necks and feeling more pressure each time. It's taking time, but hopefully it will pay off in the long run. It is always nice if the animals will actually come up and interact with people. Although we may have to work on that a bit, it is at least a start. Ian has been keeping the animals penned up just lately though. One of the reasons is that alpacas do not have lanolin like sheep to shed water, being animals designed for high desert and not lowland wetlands and so with the prolonged rain, they are getting wet. This not always a problem, but we are due to some drastic drops in temperatures and we want them to dry out before that happens. They will cope with the cold well enough, but not if they are wet, especially our old girl Alicia and we want to take extra care of our pregnant girls too.

Mud, mud, mud! This is the entrance to the girls paddock.
Even though this whole area is on the top of a hill, we
will have to look at drainage later on in the year, to stop a
repeat of the mudbath

Even my cranberries are underwater

We took a trip to a sheep farm nearby and stopped for cup of tea. Thankfully they don't speak much English and it forced us to use some Latvian. Our conversation was rather short, but at least it was a start and they were very kind enough to talk slowly for us and repeat things until we understood. That is what we really need. The reason for our visit was to pick up a whole lamb - of the meat variety and not a live one. Even though it was very fresh, we have to butcher it straight away as we just haven't got somewhere to leave it to hang. Did I say butcher? I should really say we hacked the lamb and you probably wouldn't recognise any of the joints from the butchers. Still it is in pieces that are manageable for us and the not so good pieces are minced and the slightly better pieces are cut up into chunks and we have some things that could be recognised, maybe, as roasting joints. I did slip a bit with the knife at one point, but we won't go into detail, just to say all digits and limbs of ours are still in tact.

Ian made some modifications to his Franken-shit stopper
(yes that is what he named it, and I didn't tell you last week)
These prongs are to help rake up the hay, after he has
cleared the poo up. Apparently the pegs were handmade
on the pole lathe or treadle lathe.

I did say we found our sense of humour, our cup of tea with our neighbours and a bit of bonding over the butchering process helped. It also helped to see our grandchildren on Skype and in a video clip on facebook. It also helps that life is just is too much without a laugh and there is no point in hanging onto bad moods. We maybe still have to work somethings through, but a sense of humour does make things a little smoother to get there.