A ode for Finland @celestal

100th Anniversary of FINLAND as a country that is still so very young :-)
And has been under so many different circumstances, influences from Russia no doubt but with out the pageantry.
It even has been a kingdom for a few months i believe .

As a child i think i was about eight years old we , my parents and i , did a trip to Scandinavia and Russia. We started in a bus in Helsinki, where i still remember of the high of the ski jump ! but more i do not remember from Helsinki you must know my parents promised me i was allowed to horse ride on the holiday and i could not wait until we would be there. Our guide was a Finish lady and also the bus driver was Finish, history did not intrest me so to the guide i did not listen much, but the bus driver thought me how to count ! uksi kaksi kolme nelja visie koesie seetsjemen kadeksan udeksan kumenen, uksi kome kaksi kome.. and so on, i was very proud on that, and as you see i never forgot it !

After a long bus ride, i think more north and we passed the wild life, like reindeer and even a eland ! more on the top we stopped at the tents of Laplanders, but i do not know if that belongs to Finland but i think it did, because i do not remember passing a border. loads of flat land with a lot of water and woods, we stopped at a place where we would stay for a few nights and where i could horse ride.
I think the name of the place was Mesilla or Mellisa , i try to look it up when i am finished writing. it is Messila !! That little village was like a park -with little wooden houses, in the middle of the woods, there was a place you could visit where they did old traditional kinds of work, Witch is still vague in my head, glass blowing , silver smith and wood works, i bought a keyring made of a little slice of wood, and some nice Finish bronze jewelry for my mum what now belongs to me. It for me was also my first introduction to the sauna, and roll in the snow after woulds, although there was no snow :-) After this we still did Lapland and even stept over the north circle to see the midnight sun, where you normally get a certificate for, but that got lost in my parents house. It was extreem cold i felt it to my bones in my red leather jacked. We ate whale and i found it disgusting dry and tasting of livertear ?? oil. When i look online i see a monument, i do not remember seeing that :-) i just remember, a stone we had to stand on and than we got our certificate ,the sky was dark and the sun shine, a crazy sensation ! The restaurant was very big, i think loads of Busses came there with tourists it had a enormous window in the front where you could look outside, the rock what i see online, like being on the end of the world, i did not see, but it might just well be that my mum would have found that to scary for me. :-) not my picture
it comes from this website : http://www.effevee.be/wp/zweden-noorwegen-finland-middernachtzon/

We drove to Russia, the border was something very special and impressed me a lot but that is a different story, we were visiting Leningrad, now called sint peterburg what it was called before it was Leningrad as wel ! Nice all the memory s , thank you for letting me live my memories once more , and congratulations !

I do want to share this still with you, they are giving a concert in Dokkum (holland) for 100 years FINLAND !
https://www.actiefonline.nl/nieuws/algemeen/26306/concert-in-grote-kerk-dokkum-finland-100-jaar-