Three days in northern Finland

The reason for the trip was a small one — a friend was about to leave the north for a job in Hamburg, and we had said for years that we would meet in Rovaniemi before he did. So I took the Friday off, took the train up to Stockholm Central in the dark, and then spent most of Saturday on a bus.

The bus is worth a paragraph on its own. The schedule said eleven hours from Haparanda to Rovaniemi with two changes; in practice everything ran on time, which is the kind of small miracle you appreciate more the further north you go. I sat next to a retired electrician who was returning from a wedding and who spent two of those hours describing the wiring he had pulled through his summer cabin in 1986. I understood maybe a third of it. He had a very thick accent and a very precise way of describing junction boxes.

Rovaniemi itself is a city that looks larger on a map than it is on foot. I had booked a small attic room near the river, and on the first evening I walked along the Kemijoki for an hour, mostly because I had been sitting too long. The river was not yet frozen but it was thinking about it. There were three swans, the kind that look unbothered by anything, and a single fisherman who appeared not to have caught anything in a while and did not seem to mind.

The café

The reason I keep going back to Rovaniemi is, embarrassingly, a café. It is on a side street north of the main square and it does the same three pastries every day. The owner remembers people for years. She remembered me, which is alarming, because I had not been there since 2021. She also remembered that I prefer my coffee in the wrong cup — a heavy, narrow ceramic one she keeps on the back shelf and that nobody else seems to like.

I sat there on Sunday morning for an hour and a half. My friend was late, the radio was playing something slow and Finnish, and the light through the window was the very pale, almost-blue light that you get in northern winters when the sky is overcast but not heavy. I wrote about half a notebook page and drew a small map of the streets around the café, with arrows pointing to the places that sell good bread.

My friend arrived eventually. He had been delayed by a flight from Helsinki and by his own slow morning. We walked along the river again, talked about Hamburg, about old neighbours, about whether he would keep his bike. I gave him a bag of dried lingonberries that I had bought in the airport in Helsinki on a previous trip and never opened. He pretended this was a normal gift.

Coming back

The ride south was less eventful. I slept through most of the bus, woke up at Kemi long enough to buy a sandwich, and then slept again. There is something about overnight buses that turns time into one long fluorescent corridor; whether that is restful or not depends on the bus.

I got back to Stockholm on Tuesday morning. The kitchen was cold, the kettle worked. I unpacked, put the camera on the desk, and wrote most of this on the back of a printed train timetable I had picked up somewhere in Lapland. That is the only reason it is short.