Joulupukki and the Arctic Circle

Quick note: Joulupukki means Father Christmas, aka Santa Claus, in Finnish. And happy St. Patrick’s Day! So many holidays!

I’ve just woken up from a long (and delayed, again) train ride. I’m in a train car with just a few other people. It’s about 9 in the morning and we were supposed to arrive to Helsinki about 20 minutes ago. But I know for a fact that even though we left on time, we stopped somewhere in the middle of the night for about two hours, putting our arrival time back about two hours and we’re just sitting here on the tracks for no apparent reason. I really don’t know when we will be getting back to Helsinki. As long as it is before 5 PM, I have a ferry to catch!

I woke up yesterday morning in the hostel, pretty upset with myself for passing out and sleeping through what could have been a night filled with northern lights. As I said in my last post, it turned out I didn’t miss anything, but still. I went down to the hostel’s basement where they had a small kitchen and sitting area. I made myself some coffee and breakfast, raspberry yogurt and blueberry pie, yum, and then grabbed my bags, walked back to the Santa Hotel, checked out and left my bags there for the day.

My plan was to first go to the train station to reserve a ticket for the evening train back to Helsinki (the one I’m on), hop the bus that leaves from the train station to Napapiiri, the Arctic Circle marker and the home village of Santa Claus, and then make my way back into town and visit one of Finland’s best museums (self-proclaimed), Arktikum, which is a museum dedicated to the science of the Arctic, and regional information about Lapland and the Sami people. Then I would kill time in town until I had to make my way back to the train station around 9 PM.

It was a good plan. But one not without hitches. I checked out, dropped my bags, and walked back to the train station. It is a small station, it is a small town, but there were some people waiting in the waiting hall for trains. I walked in, looked for the ticket issuing booth and found it closed despite their sign that said open everyday, 0600-2100. It was 10:30. Confused, I looked around for a sign as to why they might have been closed but found none. There was a self service ticket machine though. Here was my minor dilemma. I have the Eurail pass which I intend to use for all my long distance train trips in Europe, including this one, and in theory, I can just hop on and off a train without making reservations. But I can foresee problems with this method. First, what happens if I hop a train that was already sold out. Where would I sit? Would they kick me off? The other problem is one of inconvenience. When I find a seat, what if that seat had already been reserved? I’d get kicked out until I found an unoccupied one. But then could get kicked out again at the next station. In this instance, I would want to find a seat and just sleep. So, for a small 2 euro fee, I can make a reservation with my Eurail pass and forego these problems. But I need a person to do that with. I tried fumbling around with the self-service machine but it wouldn’t let me make the booking with my Eurail pass and I certainly wasn’t going to pay for an actual ticket. I was pretty annoyed at this. I decided to let it go for now and try again at the station later in the day.

I walked outside the station and hopped the no. 8 bus to Napapiiri, about 8 km north of Rovaniemi. As I mentioned earlier, Napapiiri is the village where the actual Arctic Circle is drawn. I really wanted to find the marker and cross it. But Napapiiri is more famous because it is where Santa was born and still lives. He’s hundreds and hundreds of years old. And you can meet him, for free! I was looking forward to that.

A sign for Napapiiri and the Arctic Circle

The bus took me and my Japanese tourist bus mates north, crossing the large, frozen Kemijoki River, famous for its salmon reserves, and dropped us off in the village. Walking off the bus it was a bit overwhelming. You immediately know exactly where you are. Christmas music hangs in the air, holiday reds and greens decorate the cottages around the village, and Santa Claus signs are everywhere. It’s hugely commercial but also hugely fun. You really do feel like you stepped off at Santa’s village. I walked through the main information building and wandered through shops and cafes, the building smelled entirely of gumdrops and sugarplums and pine needles. I continued further into the village to the main square, a small enclosure surrounded by wooden cottage buildings. There was a huge snowman, fifteen feet tall, really impressive actually, standing in the middle with button eyes and scarf and everything. People had gathered to take photos around him. And just beyond the snowman was the entrance to Santa’s workshop, where the man himself awaited. I walked in and found the entrance.

Tourists gathering around the giant snowman

Santa's workshop - Santa's inside!

I have to admit, I was kind of in a sour mood, I guess from the train station but really for no reason whatsoever, but when I walked into the entrance to Santa’s workshop, I was beaming with excitement. My mood changed instantly. I just smiled as I walked slowly through the building. The place was sort of designed like the entrance to a ride at Disney World. Disney expects huge crowds and crazy long lines so they let you queue up through the building, wandering through dark passageways where entertainment awaits along the walls. Here was no different, except there were no people in line. I slowly walked through the dimly lit passageway, admiring the electronic elves and little snow cottage buildings and scenes of present wrapping and letter writing. It was pretty cool. Then I climbed the steps where Santa was sitting in an adjacent room. In the waiting room just beyond the door there were pictures on the walls of celebrity visitors that had come to take their photo with Santa Claus. My favorite was a picture of Conan O’Brien, sitting next to Santa, with a creepy grin on his face. Angela Merkel was there too.

Conan O'Brien with Santa

A girl dressed as an elf tried to excite the crowd of kids in line in front me. I felt kind of foolish as a 26 year old standing in line to see Santa. Yeah, I didn’t care. And then I walked in. Santa, with his beard to his knees, probably the jolliest, multi language speaking man in the world, beckoned me over and asked me where I was from. I told him I was from the US and he asked me from which state. I told him Massachusetts. He  said, “You know it’s funny. Whenever I ask my visitors where they’re from and they tell me America, I know they’re not from Texas. Because every time I get a visitor from Texas, they just say they’re from Texas. Ho, ho, ho...” Okay, he didn’t say ho, ho, ho. But I said, yeah, Texans are always doing that. We took the obligatory photo and I thanked him for the visit. I was in a really good mood.

I popped out of Santa’s workshop and walked around the village a little. There was a track in some trees where Sami people in traditional attire had reindeer and some sleighs. For a small fee they could take you around the track on the sleigh. I didn’t partake but it was pretty cool to see the reindeer and the Sami people, even if it was just for tourists. And then I poked around in one of the shops. They had all kinds of interesting albeit expensive souvenirs but I really took to the reindeer meat section. That was all pretty expensive too but they had a type of reindeer sausage, a big one, like you might see on a Siberian train, and I bought one for three euros, I thought it might be good for the train or ferry ride coming up.

Reindeer and sleigh, a track run by Sami people

The village also had an official post office - supposedly one of the busiest in the world. Apparently they receive millions of letters from around the world addressed to Santa Claus and this village. And even more impressive is that they respond to about half of those letters. It is a busy little place. But the elves look like old Finnish women. I bought a magnet there that represents Lapland and the Arctic, and then moved back to the center of the village to a small restaurant where I ordered a reindeer burger and a dark, local beer. The guy who took my order smiled and said, “Good choice - the manly beer.” I needed this positive reenforcement after a day in Santa’s village. The beer was indeed manly, and very good. As was the reindeer burger.

One of the busiest post offices in the world

Before I left I made sure to find the actual marking of the Arctic Circle, just to be sure that I didn’t accidentally miss it and not officially cross over. In the Navy, and this goes for all the world’s navies, there is a tradition that goes back centuries that sailors have a “crossing the line” ceremony where the uninitiated become hardy sea folk when they cross the Equator for the first time. You get an official certificate and a card and it’s a pretty big deal. The ceremony takes all day and I won’t describe it here, but you can look up what’s involved online if you’d like. But basically you earn the certificate. They were offering similar “crossing the line” certificates here for having crossed the Arctic Circle. That’s a cool idea but I passed up the opportunity riding it off as more of a tourist gimmick - I didn’t really earn this one. But they painted a line through one of the buildings full of shops where the line crossed. On it was written the official latitude. I took some photos and hopped back and forth a couple of times, just to be sure.

The actual line of the Arctic Circle on which the latitude is written

All in all Santa’s village and Napapiiri was pretty cool. Suffice it to say I came back to town in an excellent mood. I still had a few hours before I had to grab my stuff and head to the train station so I went to Arktikum, a museum dedicated to the Arctic and it’s indigenous people. Not much need be said on this one - it was a pretty cool museum and it ate up a few hours of time but nothing too crazy here. It had some good exhibitions on the scientific aspects of the Arctic and focused a lot on climate change. They also had really good temporary exhibits. One on the local wildlife indigenous to Lapland and the other focused on Alvar Aalto’s architectural work on many of the buildings in Rovaniemi as I mentioned earlier.

The main strip through Rovaniemi

My picture of a picture at Arktikum, what I was trying to see in Rovaniemi

Another picture of a picture at Arktikum, this is what the Dr. Suess trees looked like from the train ride

After the museum, the sun was starting to set so I took a walk out on the frozen river to capture some of the sunset as it lowered below the forest in the distance. In winter, the frozen river becomes a highway for snowmobiles with lanes and ice speed bumps and road maps and everything. And the river is rife with cross country skiers and their dogs. It was pretty cool to walk around in the early evening and to see all the locals out and about.

A sign marking the cross country skiing with dogs trail along the frozen river

After dark I headed to the local pub for a beer and some dinner, went back to the hotel to pick up my bags and walked to the train station. I found my car, another soft seater car, pretty much empty except for a super loud Russian babushka woman (they’re everywhere!) who kept everyone awake for the duration of her stay onboard. But she didn’t stay long and got off a few hours later. The rest of the evening I spent curled up in my seat, trying, successfully might I add, to sleep. I awoke this morning after the train pulled in late (again) to Helsinki station. I plan to spend the day in and out of cafes, using the internet and killing time until my overnight ferry departs around five in the evening, bound for Stockholm.

Next up: Sweden!