Chasing Gazelles

Well, fellow nerds, this week was filled with action for me.

On Wednesday I woke up at 4AM to the alarm of my cell phone (Who Are You by The Who, CSI theme song edition). The urge to hit the snooze button was huge but, alas, I had to get up. I would have to get ready and be out the door by 5AM. I failed and I was out the door around 5.15. Kind of hated myself for that, yeah. See, I have almost an hour long walk to the university and I was to be there by 6AM. I would have liked to take my time, too, since I did have a heavy-ish bag to carry.

This time I couldn’t catch a bus because while a bus would take me to the stop where I usually switch to another one, there wouldn’t be a bus that would take me to my destination that early. I was considering catching the bus anyways because it would go by a stop that was slightly closer to university but I thought it would arrive so late I would have made it to that place by then. I was wrong. Just as I turned to a road away from the stop, the bus passed it. More reasons to hate me and my decisions right there. So, I just continued on, huffing and puffing. I did thank myself for choosing to wear only a t-shirt under my suede jacket despite the fact that the morning was cold. By the time I reached university, I was pretty soaked with sweat. Not th best start for a morning, but what can you do?

At the university parking spot, in front of our strange ball-shaped statue, I was met by several of my friends who were already seated in the mini bus. I was glad to find out I was not the last one there. I arrived five minutes before we would leave, did arrive too late to get a good seat though.

See, we were going to an excursion (field trip), several of us archaeology students along with two lecturers. We were heading for Laihia area, which if over a 4-hour-drive from where we are from. The point of the trip was to go see some ancient sites littered around Ostrobothnia, get to know them and learn to recognize similar ones in the future. We would be doing this stuff for two days and spend the night at what we refer to as a countryside house accommodation. It’s usually some old farm house, in the middle of countryside, with rooms to stay in - such was in this case.

Anyways, we left the parking lot of our university at 6AM. The trip was pretty nice, despite the fact that my friend and I had to sit in the front next to the lecturer who was driving and it was pretty uncomfortable since we are not exactly narrow people. I reckon that my shoulders would have been too wide for sitting there even if I was a skinny woman, likewise with my hips. The plus side sort of was that we could pick the music. The lecturer had a CD selection she shoved to our laps, which was clearly a mistake. The first CD we picked was called something like Tibetan Incantations. The first song alone lasted around 20 minutes (the whole CD has only 3 songs and the CD is an hour long…) and the only lyrics were humani bumbuiyee (which I’m 90% sure we misheard but that’s what we heard). The lecturer thought he would break us with that but no, we laughed. At least my pal and I on the front seat laughed. People in the back? Probably were tortured. The next CD we picked was crazier. I can’t even describe it. During one of the songs my friend stated it was like the Egyptian Elvis. I’m fairly sure it was a soundtrack to some absurd Egyptian musical. I have no idea, but it was pretty hilarious. After this choice the lecturer stopped giving us all the CDs. He limited us to Billie Holiday and Eppu Normaali. Which was fine with me. I was getting sick of 20-minute long strange songs. I think Billie Holiday was my favourite out of the selection…though in all its ridiculousness the Tibetan Incantations were fun too.

Around 10-11AM we arrived at the first ancient site. It’s apparently the best known of all the Finnish Iron Age sites. Wouldn’t have believed it: I and few others were to make a presentation of it on site but we could barely find any information on it! And once we were there the site was rather…modest. The lecturer thought our presentation was fine though and then laughed that this was always the first site he would take people because it takes the hope of glory and cool things right out of you. I didn’t have those to begin with, I was pretty much expecting I would see nothing even close to amazing. It didn’t depress me too much but it did bug me that we didn’t find all the parts of the site, just three burial cairns. We were also trying to locate an ancient field, a settlement area and five rocks with cup marks (usually said to be sacrificial stones). I did see those rocks at another site later on, which you can see on the picture on the right. The cup marks were on top of these huge rocks.

From there, we ventured on to other sites. Essentially I could just describe this as going to in the middle of nowhere, then deeper to middle of nowhere and then hiking in difficult terrain deeeep into a forest, trying desperately to find a route to walk on where you wouldn’t hurt yourself too badly while keeping up with a lecturer that’s in ridiculously good shape and moves in the forest like a gazelle. It was around 7PM till we finally headed for the farm accommodation. We were all exhausted. My feet were killing me and all I wanted to do was to crash onto a bed, no matter how lousy, and stay there for the rest of my life, curled up in a fetus position.

When we finally arrived at the farm, I was initially rather disappointed. The house we were going to stay in didn’t look terribly inviting. Boy was I wrong. Upon entering the house, I first noticed that we had a shower and a proper bathroom (not an outhouse or anything crummy like that). I and a friend who would be sharing a room with me squealed a bit right there. After taking few more steps the Mrs of the house introduced us to our refrigerator, which we were incredibly happy about, considering many of us had food that would go bad without one. There was a small kitchen with a microwave oven and everything. And in the actual rooms, there were TVs, chairs, a table and the beds, oh the beds, so soft and comfortable! It was like entering a small heaven. There was a grill outside free to use so we could fry sausages and everything.

The TVs were especially important since a bunch of the girls really wanted to check out a hockey game: Czechs vs Finns. I’m not usually into hockey but I got into watching the game with the rest of the gals in the same section of the house. Found myself participating in critiquing the game tactics of the Finnish team, even yelled at the TV a couple of times. There is indeed a hockey fan inside me, I suspect. Usually I only care if it’s the team of my home town playing and even then my interest is limited but, I got caught in the moment I guess. The night was pleasant: Managed to take a shower, which I desperately needed after sweating and going through all sorts of bushes all day.

Oh, I must mention. The couple running the place had two cats. Their names = awesome: Carl Gustav (of Sweden) and Catherine The Great

*Krehm*…The next day was pretty much rinse and repeat. I just got more tired and sooner. This time around we had a local 82-year-old man working as our guide. He’s an amateur archaeologist, which means that while his theories are often bull crap and his scientific knowledge is limited, he knows the terrain like the backs of his hands. Let me tell you, you wouldn’t have believed he was over 82 years old. He had more energy than most of us, he was certainly in far better shape than I was. He would ramble about how he wound the sites he showed us, which at first was rather adorable, but as I grew more and more tired my urge to clobber him to death with a stick grew stronger.

I think I snapped a bit when we hiked in extremely difficult terrain for half an hour, one way, only to arrive at a god damn pit. We hiked all that way just to look at a pit in the ground. I had seen pits like those before in nature, I had seen pictures of them, I did not need to travel hundreds of kilometres and hike through thick and thin just to look at one. Then we would stand there for ages as the old man rambled. At least rock piles (cairns) were something to look at, pits not so much. At that point my capacity to care plummeted. As if that wasn’t enough, when we finally started hiking back, I tripped and my palm apparently hit some sort of plants because I got sting hairs stuck on my palm. I couldn’t get them out without tweezers but no one seemed to have any. So, there I was, stuck with an unusable hand, going through difficult terrain, trying to grab onto things with my working hand so I wouldn’t fall again. Hours passed before my friend dug up some tweezers and I started to desperately try and get rid of the damn sting needles while on a moving car that was going through a bumpy dirt road. Eventually I did succeed to get rid of the buggers.

We started our return to home late in the afternoon. I was so glad it was over. My feet were killing me and I was tired of everything. As we got close to home we started playing the Tibetan Incantations CD again for old times’ sake. We all found it way more amusing that we had before. We already plotted for getting copies of the humani bumbuyee song so we could have it as our ring tone, along with setting up strange rituals that would involve chanting the song. As we got more tired, our discussions got weirder, I’m not even going to go into all that.

Then I was home. I was so glad. So very glad. I took a shower to wash away the sweat and what ever got caught in my hair in those forests and then I just crashed onto my bed. Managed to eat before I passed out completely. This morning I would have had a class but I couldn’t bring myself to attend it, despite the fact that I woke up at 6AM already. Yeah, that was pretty much it. A lot of hiking, a lot of pain, difficult terrain in the middle of nowhere.

I regret to say I didn’t have a camera with me, which was probably a good thing considering I tripped more than once, but I did take some shots with my cell phone. Quality is crappy but I guess it's better than nothing.

PS: My feet still hurt.