July 10, 2012
Day the last. An early start on a nice tour bus because we are spending the day in the country. Maybe rain, maybe not. We start at the Lotta Museum in Tuusula where we have a lovely lecture on Finnish folk music and get to sing the Finnish lullaby you see above. It is like our Rockabye Baby and since Finnish is phonetic, we could do it with just a little help. Our grand finale was singing the best known melody of Sibelius' Finlandia which put us all in a proper frame of mind, particularly since there were cinnamon buns and coffee afterwards as our reward.
The Lotta Svard was an organization of women that operated from the early 1900's until after the second world war with the purpose of supporting the Finnish military and promoting civil defense. From the 1100's until the 1700's, Finland was a province of Sweden until they were taken over by Russia. The country remained somewhat autonomous until 1917 when the overthrow of the czar in Russia resulted in independence for Finland. Then WWII saw the country sandwiched between Russia and Germany. The end result was a huge war debt to Russia which took them until 1952 to repay. A tenacious bunch.
On to Ainola, the home of Jean and Aino Sibelius where they lived for more than 60 years. I will be buying a CD of Finlandia when we get home, I think performed by an orchestra conducted by Esa Pekka Salonen.
Final stop was Hvittrask, the home and work place built and occupied by three of Finland's most famous architects, one of whom was a bachelor. Juicy story when Eliel Saarinen (his architect son was famous in the US) became enamoured of architect Herman Geselluis' sister. This turned out to be okay because Herman fell in love with Eliel's wife. It was probably a bit of a challenge to explain the switch to the subsequent children but they were artists, after all. As you can see, the weather got better and better as the day went on. Lucky we are.
We had a delightful going away dinner in the hotel. Said goodbye to our four closest friends since we are all heading out at different times in the morning, we at 5:30 A.M. All the better to sleep on the plane I think.
P.S. I see that I used "it's" in yesterday's blog when it is clearly "its". Horrors.
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