AD-X Part II: Into the Finnish Woods

In case you weren't aware, Finland is not in the same time zone as Denmark and Sweden. Therefore, while we disembarked the ferry at a fairly reasonable 7:00 Finnish time after a leisurely breakfast, this required us to wake up at an ungodly 5:00 according to our internal clocks.


First stop, Paimio Sanitorium, designed by Alvar Aalto, originally as a home and treatment center for tuberculosis patients.

We got to wear some sweet booties, presumably for sanitary reasons.

The roof terrace. Patients had to spend 6 hours a day out here, unless it was below -20C.

More driving ensued, broken only by a lunch stop at a traditional Finnish truck stop.

Even rest areas here are awesome.

This was followed by a visit to the Alvar Aalto Museum. If you're sensing a pattern here, well done. Just wait until tomorrow... Some of you more astute readers may know Aalto in connection with chair design, but really, he dabbled in pretty much everything at one point or another.

Possibly his most famous chair, complete with sweet shadows.

And glassware. This man seriously did it all.

We spent the night in a hostel in Jyväskylä. Let me say at this point that my previous complaints about the difficulty of Danish can be ignored; Finnish is by far the most preposterous language I've encountered thus far. It is comprised primarily of 'K's and 'Y's (Example: 'Kyykkyyn', which apparently means 'Squat'), and seems to operate on the principle that there is no such thing as too many vowels in a word.

But enough of that. Back to the hostel, picturesquely located at the base of a tiny ski area, which inexplicably had its own ski jump. On the way there we stopped at a grocery store to pick up dinner ingredients. We then spent the evening in a traditional sauna, on a lake, in the middle of the woods. 'Traditional' here means that we broiled ourselves to the brink of death, then sprinted outside and dove into the frigid lake. Twas glorious. 

Oh yeah. And we cooked dinner on an open fire. Best night ever? Quite possibly.