I'll try to keep this one a little shorter than my previous entries. This Finmail is about this corner of the globe that we are calling home for this year. Kaustinen is located near the west coast of Finland, a little bit south of the line dividing the country geographically into north and south halves. Maybe a map will help:
http://virtual.finland.fi /netcomm/news/showarticle.asp ?intNWSAID=27068
Our nearest large town is Kokkola (35,000); we are about a half-hour drive southeast of Kokkola, about on the same latitude as Jakobstad (Pietesaari on some maps). If you could move the north-south line and split Finland according to population, with half the population north and half south of the line, that line would be in the very southern part of Finland, probably just north of Helsinki. (Maybe Finns really do prefer warmer weather after all?) So even though geographically speaking, we are in the southern part of Finland, a lot of Finnish people think of Kaustinen as being way up north. That's about the way a person starts to think of Ely when you visit Thunder Bay or Atikokan and hear Canadians refer to their region as southern Canada. There's a lot of country still to the north. We hope to explore some of the northern part of Finland around Christmas or next summer.
I use my ability to speak Swedish almost every day, but not in the way you might think. Finland has a small population of Swedish-speakers clustered on the west coast and in the archipelago between Finland and Sweden, and Swedish is an official language. Consequently, the labeling on all packaging is in both languages (and often not in English). So usually Eli and I go shopping together and between the two of us we usually get what we want. Very few people here in Kaustinen, even in this area that is relatively close to the west coast, speak Swedish. The line dividing Swedish-speaking Finns from Finnish-speaking Finns is very well-defined, with little mixing (maybe something like the front line in a war?). Kaustinen is very definitely on the Finnish side. The Swedish speaking area is not far away however. I rode my bike over for a visit during our fall break and found signs only 9 kilometers from Kaustinen with Swedish first (indicating I had crossed the language boundary). I have learned how to say in Finnish, "I speak only a little Finnish. Do you speak English or Swedish?" So far, everyone here in Kaustinen, given this choice, prefers to speak English rather than Swedish.
I have visited several churches and cemeteries in the area (the main attraction and highest point in most small towns here). It is interesting to compare the family names here to the last names of Finnish descendents in Ely. "Mäki," "kangas," and "koski" mean "hill," "moor," and "rapids" respectively. In Ely, you see these names in this basic form. In Finland, however, they occur together with another word to describe a place more exactly. For example, in the Kaustinen cemetery we have "Isokangas," "Teirikangas," "Myllymäki," "Kattilakoski," and "Hanhikoski." In the next town south of Kaustinen, Veteli, Eli found some gravestones with his mother Milli's family name "Salmela." We biked there one Saturday with our classmate Helena. She said the name is common north and east of here, and that part of the family quite likely had moved into this area. One other interesting thing about Finnish churches in this region: they are usually built as two buildings, a large belfry separate from the church, both about the same height. I suppose by building them that way, the builders didn't have to build such high scaffolding and they could use it for both buildings.
Kaustinen is in the region called "Ostrobothnia;" in Finnish and Swedish the name means something like "the east bottoms (or lowlands)." The soil is very fertile, and agriculture is the main industry. The areas that are not cultivated are densely forested. Other income sources for this region include forestry, fur farming (of mink, fox, and other animals), a cooperative dairy, the Kaustinen folk music festival, and a new IT industry with employees from Thailand and India. The EU is working hard to develop rural areas, and the local development agency has many projects completed or in the works.
Ostrobothnia is known as an area where people value traditions. For example, the traditional regional wedding ceremony, called a "crown wedding," consists of three days of traditional dances and music. We are learning some of this repertoire in our classes. It was out of this culture of music, dance, and celebration that the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival was born in the late 60's. This annual event is still one of the largest in Europe, nine days of 24/7 music, with the largest concerts attracting audiences of nearly 10,000 people. This is a huge event for this small town of about 4,000. The dairy I mentioned above milks Kaustinen's reputation for valuing folk traditions for marketing purposes; their logo is a cow dressed in a fiddler's vest, playing a violin: http://www.kaustisenosm.fi
Ely and Kaustinen have a lot in common, like all the oddball people around town and the oddball things they do. "South of Kaustinen" is the name of a file in my computer where I am gathering pictures of off-the-wall things I see when I am out and about, usually on my bike. A telephone pole not far from where we live has a moose antler mounted about halfway up it. One evening I was riding my bike on a dirt road through a forest and I saw a carved wooden dog sitting on a stump out in the middle of nowhere. And then there is the "ITE art," sort of alternative, sometimes bordering on grunge art, that -uh- graces (?) the campus around our classroom building.
Take care and have fun!
LynnAnne
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