Visited Helsinki To Meet Relatives

The youngest paternal uncle of my mother's emigrated to Australia in his early thirties. That was in the 1950's. He did not stay in Australia for long, though. After a few years of living in Australia, he moved to the state of Oregon in the United States. From there he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He's lived there for about 60 years. His wife is from Switzerland and the two met on a train in Europe. My great uncle is in his 90's and currently living in an assisted living facility. His wife still lives at home which is not ideal. They'd be lucky to be placed in the same facility. It comes down to the spouses needing different levels of care. Fortunately for them, all their three children live in the Vancouver metropolitan area.

My great uncle and his wife have three children the oldest of whom, her husband and three adult children are currently visiting Finland and their Finnish relatives. My sister and her sons and our family went to Helsinki to see them today evening. They have a pretty tight schedule with a lot of places to be and people to meet. They're going to visit Tallinn and Northern and Central Ostrobothnia in the 10 days or so they're here. My sister and I decided to take them to Meripuisto park in southern Helsinki my that family and I visited a couple of weeks ago.

I've met my great uncle a few times. I met him for the first time in Finland when I was eleven years old when he came to visit relatives with his son. I met him for the second time in Vancouver a few years afterwards. We were guests at his older daughter's wedding. That was 31 years ago. The last time I met my great uncle, the last one of the eight siblings still alive, was about 25 years ago when I was serving in the military as a conscript. My parents picked me up from the garrison on the way to Central Ostrobothnia on a Friday evening. We were on my way to my maternal grandparents' house.

The wedding 31 years ago was the last time I met the couple we just met today. In the meantime, they had had three children and raised them to adulthood - the oldest of them, their daughter, having got married already. The kind of vast distances between countries on different continents make rare meetings like this feel a bit like scenes from the film Interstellar. Your memories of each relative the next time you meet will be hopelessly outdated.

But technology is something of a game changer. If you want to keep in touch, you can, and despite never having met these three second cousins of mine before, I have had a few conversations with them on Facebook over the years and now that I have met them I will probably be in touch with them more frequently in the future.

My 10-year-old daughter stole the show again. Her passive English vocabulary is about 6800 words and she has a very good grasp of English grammar. She's speaks fluently and without any major errors. It was funny when she nitpicked about someone's use of vocabulary pointing out the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. (Tortoises all dwell on land.) She speaks American English. Just today my daughter and I had a disagreement on the pronunciation of the word liquorice. She maintained that it ended in an "ish" while I did not believe her. It turns out we were both right.. Canadians pronounce it like Americans.

I don't normally speak American English and you may have noticed my sticking to British (or Commonwealth) vernacular and spelling rules here. But with my Canadian relatives I do. I takes some mental gymnastics to keep the two variants of the language from mixing. Why British English or Southeastern English in particular? I find it easier to pronounce correctly. Also, England is a lot closer and I know some people (go players mainly) in England that I meet much more frequently than my relatives in Canada. We hear it quite often on TV, too. Another thing is that there is a bit of (one-sided) competition between the British and Americans over whose English gets to win over non-natives. North Americans do not seem to care and are generally quite accepting of different ways of using English. But I've actually met some English people who've liked my preferring to use their dialect.