(I wrote this at the beginning of november)
I don’t know where to start…
But I believe that there are people reading this, having come from big metropolitan towns, asking themselves what the fuck am I doing in this village,
Who would see themselves in this long pessimistic article…
Tampere, four years now…
When I came here, the town was alive, fun, and a lot to see and to do...
Now, after all the time, the town is dying…
Forget about daytimes, even the Saturday nights are dull…
Two Fridays ago, went to bed early, so had an early wake up to Saturday…
Had no fucking clue what to do…
What would I do on a Saturday if not in Tampere?
Go play tennis…
Go play basketball…
Take my sister, girl, or friends, and drive to a lakeside to eat the best fish’n bread ever…
Meet up the guys, and choose which one of the countless big streets we will go to get a coffee…
Go to the uni, and play cards with those people…
Take my sis to the movies – 2, 3 euros…
Go hunting for sales… fifty sixty percent… Again, choose which one of the countless complexes I will go to…
Go, eat somewhere with the buddies… good kebab, and dessert for maybe 8 euros total…
Or, take sis to eat pizza, expensive, maybe 7 euros a man, but then, quality…
Drive to “The priest’s wineyard” and sit outside, have a great cup of tea, and great snack…
The difference with all these is that,
You do not get to see the same faces all the time…
It is crowded all the time…
It is warm at this time…
And feels like weekend.
So, am sitting home on Saturday.
If I want to go see city, only one choice, Hameenkatu... did that eventually…
Had a shop tour, went to the fishmarket, had some fish, walked around freezing, went home…
Wanted to play tennis? Freeze or pay a fortune…
Wanna eat outside… ? If not ready to pay 20 euros… You will be eating shit. – Except some Chinese... They are good… But the kebab, or pizza in town, is literally shit.
(Later in the week…)
The town feels claustrophobic…
Am in the bar,
Every second face, I know…
Every second face knows me…
Even though there are still many people to be met, the will to do so is inexistent… Even though experience showed, extremely interesting people are around the corner…
Just like daytime, if you want to see the crowd, you have only one choice, nighttime, offers two to three choices…
It is a small town…
And the hidden racism, combined with shyness and alcohol, makes the town smaller…
The daytime small town turns into a nighttime torture chamber…
I am aware that these are dilemmas of a single man…
Married and with kids, these problems don’t exist – but I have no fucking intention of bringing up kids in this cold... It is unfair… It is torture… Kids are supposed to be outside without ten layers of clothing…. Yep, I am shallow minded…
Strange though that I am now waiting eagerly for the colder weather to come, so I can start ice skating again, instead of this dull dark colorless, too cold to jog, no ice to skate thing…
And then…
Flights…
Even from the “country of gay men”, Sweden, you can get direct flights to turkey, A hundred euro two way ticket…
Try it from here…
There is no way…
Cheapest flight is three hundred forty euros, and still not direct…
This is a country which has no direct flight to a fifteen million town, Istanbul… Not to Naples… and not even to Athens…
This is a country in the middle of nowhere…
Far from every thing…
Far from every beloved…
To travel to one of the biggest towns in the world, little further than two thousand kilometers, I spend nine to ten hours on the way…
Small country, far country…
Small town…
This morning I woke up sweaty… Claustrophobia hitting me... I needed to move… Helsinki... That’s good... But what to do? In Finland, as a foreigner, either gastronomy, Nokia, Universities of Bowne Global is your solution…. And right now I like my job... Challenging... The thing I will not handle the challenge though is the town... Sad... Good job in a too small town… A town which has a dying “social bar life”… And “social bar life” being the only thing offered in this cold… Is not outside…
Sometimes have dreams which get me out of sleep, afraid to sleep again…
I feel the need to get out, away, to a city with life… To a city, where, when I cannot sleep in the night, I can wake up at two am, get my coat, and take a walk around town, where there are lights, but also people, lost like me in the night, strolling around, eating on the sidewalk, sitting on small chairs, getting their sip of tea… To a city, where after the gym, after a long brainfucking day, with a tired body but a relaxed mind, I can go to a pub or café, and get some drink with the buddies, not being the only one served…
This used to be the case three four years ago…
Well, one way out of this is to stop myself from blocking me from dating…
And the need to block, I feel only for few select ladies… If not one only…
To narrow my focus from the whole surrounding to the miracle of a woman, the drama, the joy and the feelings inside, rather than the shadows of humans out there, out there just like me…
But I cannot stop the block... Will not stop the block… It is not my time to stop it yet... time will come... In its own time…
Until then, or until I leave, this town will be too small,
Me, having good time nevertheless, but also my nightmares of a confined cold coffin, with “Tampere” written on it, or my nightmares of going on a ship, into the water, away from the loved ones, and my nomad life will continue….
The problem with a small town is that it narrows the amount of interesting people, and consecutively the chances of meeting them…
And being a metropolitan town man, having met communists, feminists, assholes, mafia, Mafioso, people who tie others on a stick, naked, in nowhere, just because they did not pay their fees, having met thinkers, philosophers, bitches, atheists, Satanists with a combat knife always with them, having met fake mullahs, nice guys, good girls, crazy virgins, or just the opposite, people who make you judge your own intelligence, people who live with 50 euros a month, with a family, unemployed students who pay a round of bottled champagne of a hundred euros to the table,
And all of these, I and the met were sober,
I feel I am confined in this place, where you mostly meet people under the influence of alcohol, people who consider a two hundred thousand town a huge town, and people who are very stereotypical, similar… Reading only three of four different newspapers, watching four state controlled channels... You cannot expect diversity... And the few times you find it, you are thrown overboard, and happy...
Even this occasional happiness does not stop you from the occasional need to leave everything behind, get out and go...
If only I did not have my reasons to stay…
Finndistan would not exist…
But as long as I am around, and kicking ass, Finndistan will be up and running, full power!
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