Saturday 13 March 2010

Spring in the air


Waking up this morning I was surprised to see that the flag was hoisted outside my window and I began to wonder what the reason for the flagging was.

To my awe I found out it was not printed in neither one of my calendars, and I do have two printed Finnish calendars, so turning to the news made me wiser. Today is an optional flagging day, that means it is only recommended to flag and not compulsory, and this was to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the ending of the winter war. I still get a bit confused about all the endings of wars as the way of counting is not the same as in the rest of Europe, just the one second World War. Here in Finland there is the Winter War and the continuing or Sequel War and in both of them the Finns fought against the Russians in the east.<

The weather has been absolutely fantastic, the sun has been shining a lot lately and lots of the piled up snow has melted away. Today, despite it being Saturday, lots of the snow, was gathered off the streets by the city workers and transported elsewhere making it easier to get around walking. It is always cheerful to see the black asphalt come to day from below the snow in the beginning of spring and hear the birds twitter in the trees even with the eventual set backs of snow falling.

Finally it really feels like spring again!

6 comments:

  1. I have to agree with you on the asphalt :-) in particular when it comes to biking :D

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  2. I entered this site by chance, but I found very interesting. A greeting to all the people who visit this page.

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  3. Hei there, I really like your blog. I am moving to Finland in August and through reading your posts I feel a little bit more prepared for the "cultural differences"
    Best wishes

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  4. There is an excellent book called The Winter War, written by an American who lived in Finland while he researched the book. It gives an excellent and easy to follow history of the war.
    I was in Helsinki in February in deep snow and then again in May for beautiful weather. I love Helsinki.
    Debra Kolkka

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  5. Thank you Wiebke and Debra for your nice feed back. You must keep in mind that I do sometimes twist things a little in order to maybe get some discussion going, things are not really as bad as I sometimes make believe...

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