Matka aloittaa kotona

The journey starts at home. Well, at least for me, I regard Finland much as a second home, as strange as that may be for an American from a middle class upbringing raised in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. Having pursued my university studies from 18 to 22 at the Helsinki School of Economics (now Aalto University), I effectively came of age here and was undoubtedly shaped into the adult I have become through the foundations set here. I could hardly think of a better place to start my trip.

While regularly lopped off of many maps of continental Europe due to its extreme northern latitude and effectively islanded to the south and west by the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, the north by Arctic Norway and Sweden, and the east by Russia, it is lamentably overlooked by most tourists. In four years living there, I think I met a grand total of perhaps 10 Americans, less than any other country I have spent a significant amount of time in.

It is a calm, quiet, and beautiful country, and Helsinki is simply one of the most modern and liveable cities I have ever experienced. It’s an efficiently connected urban capital entirely accessible via bicycle paths and public transport you can set your watch to, and it’s harmoniously interwoven with parks, forests, and coastline. Most tree tops exceed the height of the skyline, and outside the historical center of the city, it’s almost as if the city was built within a forest, leaving much of the natural landscape intact. It was a suitable habitat for the seed of my life-long passion for backpacking to have been planted and an intimate, grounding connection to nature to take root.

How may I have chosen Finland as a destination for college at such a young age?

Well, I ever so serendipitously dated a Finnish girl living in Texas with her family for three years during high school and later came to learn that if I was one of the 10 international students accepted annually into the top business school in the country, that I would benefit from a top-level, tuition-free, education lectured in English. With only modest financial support to be expected from my parents for higher education, I was faced with a debt-laden path to university in the US or a free ride in a European country with heavily subsidized student benefits in the form of housing, healthcare, and transport. Toss in a heavy layer of adolescent love and the choice was obvious, albeit still a bold one. To this day, it may have been the most important and formative one of my entire life.

While the relationship did not last the entirety of my stay in the country, I quickly found myself relishing in the experience of living abroad in a place where your feet provided your freedom to movement after growing up in car-centric America. Instead of sprawling suburbia, strip malls, 5-lane highways, and seas of parking lots, I was able to bike endlessly through forested paths from urban fringe farmland to the heart of the city or take sleek and reliable trains, trams, and buses. Add in a drinking age of 18, novelty of learning a new language, excellent disc golf courses, and proximity to the rest Europe for occasional travel, and I found myself quickly established and thriving. I also came to develop a deep seeded circle of friends, as most do in college, that continue to remain among my closest confidants to this day. More on that in the next post.

Upon the conclusion of my university studies, and despite my love of Finland and pending offer to join the largest multi-national corporation in the country, I assessed my career paths in Finland when limited to only English language sectors and determined that I could better pursue my idealistic career and life aspirations back in the USA, or elsewhere. While I valued the pragmatism of having studied international business and finance, I was not yet enamored with the idea of a corporate life working to sell widgets.

For years later, though, I questioned whether this was a terrible mistake upon encountering the fierce reverse culture shock that hit me upon return to America. Ultimately, it proved an immensely insightful foresight to have made that decision to leave, but I always hold this country dear to my heart and will regularly return to walk her forested paths, listen to the melody of her rustling birch leaves, and indulge in the essence of her saunas (“sauna” is the only Finnish word to enter the English lexicon).

I’ll close this first proper post with reference to Isabel Allende’s autobiographical account Mi Pais Inventado (My Invented Country) in which she captured a sentiment I struggled to come to terms with for years after my departure from Finland and subsequently Chile, Ecuador, and Nicaragua – what is my culture and self-identity?

Albeit in her more dramatic case as the daughter of a diplomatic family who entered exile after her uncle, the President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was assassinated in coup in 1973, she came to live in eight countries in Latin America and Europe, later settling in California and becoming a US citizen. As she aged, she struggled to place her own identity, having been shaped by so many cultures and countries while feeling estranged at times from her nations of birth (Peru) and citizenship (Chile).

She so eloquently resonated the dilemma I came to find myself in: American-born, European-educated, and grounded by and enriched through years volunteering in the impoverished, yet beautiful countrysides of Ecuador and Nicaragua – who was I and how can I appreciate the unique perspectives that at times made it challenging for me to place myself wholly within any of them?

Is it fair to claim cultures I was not born into, but came to be shaped by?

I think so, and I am grateful for it, no matter how complex and nuanced that makes me – after all, I consider myself fortunate to call more than one country or culture, home.  

I thus spent the first week of my Journey to Nowhere in Particular in Helsinki, Espoo, and Hartola, visiting my closest friends and hanging with their families. My subsequent post will spotlight our time together and reflect on the development of our camaraderie. As a place I am intimately familiar with, I did not go about as a typical tourist, but I did capture some iconic places as I revisited some of my favorite places in town and took a walk down memory lane.