Setting up the base

The view from my sister's living room, 
with a small finger of the Baltic Sea glittering 
between the fields

 July 17, 2025, or as we say in this part of the world, 17.7.2025. 

We arrived at the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport yesterday after flying from Rochester to JFK to Keflavik. The last trip was brutal - we were tired and jetlagged and still I couldn't sleep on the plane. I tried. Kids yelled and parents were stressed. I watched propaganda videos about why you should visit Iceland (they are right, you should) and PW (husband) and IT (child) slept. 

My mother picked us up at the airport and drove us to my sister's house, two hours away, close to the city of Turku, but on an idyllic island called Kuusisto. More about that later. Sleep rhythm is a mess. I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking I'd slept all night, but it was just four hours at that point. Then I woke up at 10:30 am. 

We ventured out to a shopping center to get a cell phone plan. On the same trip we took care of some of our most important needs: ice cream and candy. Candy store above in the picture. On the way back to my sister's we stopped by a small grocery store and bought butter, bread, blueberry juice and cream. PW is planning to go pick blueberries (when it's not quite so hot) and make a blueberry pie. 

In Finland, you can pick blueberries anywhere except for other people's yards. You don't have to own the piece of land. It used to be called "Everyman's Rights", now "Everyone's Rights," and it specifies that nature belongs to all. You can walk in it, pick berries in it, drink water, even put up a tent, without any special permissions, but not chop wood or light a fire or, of course, cause any harm. It's pretty far from American "Private Property, Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs in yellow plastic.

Finnish Pick-and-Mix type candy store

The cell phone plan caused some headache. We got a prepaid plan, but we're waiting to see if we can get a normal plan for PW. Most Finnish plans offer unlimited data and a certain amount of calls or texts - the opposite to American plans. We can use our normal phones, we just need a small chip to insert. For a normal plan we need an address and it may be that our address, that we are moving into for 6 months, but not changing our "home city" is not enough. We hope not changing "home city" won't cause tons of problems... A "home city" is normally the entity through which you get most Finnish benefits, but you definitely have to live there over six months. So we won't get some benefits, since we have no "home city" in Finland. 

Our IT and his cousin jumping on the 
trampoline in the heat