A Comet in Moominblog

Jyväskylä is not the biggest city in the world. Its population (spread over quite a large municipal area) is only 10,000 more than the 'greater High Wycomber Urban area' (whatever that is) and about two thirds of a Milton Keynes. It is not going to be visited by any major rock bands on tour, and it was only founded in 1837, yet it shares for me the feeling I get about Vienna in that it seems a good place to live in. Perhaps my judgement is so skewed by the smoking metropolis that is London and the sporadically vomit covered streets of High Wycombe, but still, there you have it. As with everything in Finland, it lies between several large lakes, which were still frozen while I was there, although all but one particularly intrepid skier had abandoned the ice in anticipation of the thaw.

The university buildings seemed to be all over the place, and I think it would be fair to say that it is quite a university town, (except actually a city). In fact, several people I have met or heard about from Austria had spent Erasmus years there, which from a UCL 'only the biggest and most famous universities will serve as partners' point of view, is surprising. I have the sense that awareness of Finland is higher in Austria than the UK, many more people than I expect seem to have at least visited the place. Why this should be and whether this observation is more than mere coincidence, I do not know. The architecture is pretty modern, so it looks alternately shiny and modern and shabby and 70s depending on the light quality and the age of the block of flats. Nonetheless a few older buildings survive around the university and the church near Mirva's flat.

Of course, the first tourist-y thing I did was to climb the observation tower on top of the Harju to gain an overview of the area. Definately everywhere is improved by having a hill, observation tower and large frozen lake. Afterwards I went with Mirva to the 'natural history museum of central Finland' which was great! Obviously I was extremely happy with the geology section. As I had hoped there was a lot of information about the local glacial geology and a bit more on the formation of Finland as a whole. There is nothing like the knowledge that the rocks for 300km in any direction are older than over 99% of the British Isles bedrock... There was also a pretty cool pile of paper representing geological time. It was nearly 4m tall I think and *each sheet of paper* represented 200,000 years of time. Homo Sapiens is somewhere in the region of 200,000 years old, maximum. One sheet of paper in a stack of 4 metres. The current series of ice ages is about 4 pieces of paper. The error on a radiometric 'exact' date for older rocks spans 5 sheets of paper...

The museum also had the stuffed fauna of central finland. I hadn't really thought much about the fact that Finland still has (a few) bears, wolves, wolverines and lynxes, and there were 'underwater' displays where the surface of the water had been made out of some resin surface cast into startlingly realistic waves, in some mysterious process I have no idea about. The fish were cleverly arranged to be attached in such a way that their supports were not visible, looking as if they were just hanging there in the water.

Aftewards, encouraged by the blue skies and bright sunshine peeking through the clouds that had otherwise been constant since my arrival, I took a walk around the lake. My photos from this walk once again speak for themselves, a beautiful walk in bright late afternoon sunshine, everything all the brighter for the snow still on the ground. Amusingly, when Ash looked at my photos from this walk he first thought that the lake was in fact a large snow covered park or other open space... It just doesn't occur to us english to imagine whole lakes freezing...

The day after I visited the Museum of Central Finland. I wasn't sure what to expect from it, but it ended up being a fantastic museum. The reasons for this are several, partly I reckon any museum where you know NOTHING about the subject will keep your attention, and partl it was a particularly well made museum. I like museums where they tell you stuff and show you stuff. I know interactive 'pretend to be a finnish dinosaur hunter' or whatever exhibits are fun sometimes, but nothing beats being shown cool things and told why they are cool. And not only did the museum do this, they managed to do it in perfect conversational english and weave in mysteries (why was this lone broken ski at the bottom of an ancient lake?) with family histories.

Over the two floors, one a general history of central Finland and another specifically about the city, I learned a huge amount. I enjoyed all the differences between the history of a country like Finland, only independant since 1917 (and before about 1400 but that doesn't count cos nobody was writing things down) and a place like the UK, which usually spent its time doing the owning. The lives of the Finnish were shaped by things like log booms, an idea which seems odd to us but had a huge effect on a place like Jyväskylä at the end of the 19th century... All the writing was accompanied by a large number of photos of the things involved. And the large models of Jyväskylä through its history were especially helful for thinking about the development of the town, especially with the bird's eye view I had gained for the observation tower the day before and the persistence of the landmark of the old church next to where I was staying.

Tune in next time when our intrepid hero takes a train to Helsinki...