GoneWacko’s Blog

Of Vappu Festivities and Lost Wallets

May 3, 2008 on 12:20 am | In Life |

So, as promised, a bit more about my attendance of the Vappu festivities in Turku.

On Wednesday, March 31, the pagan/satanic (and Roman Catholic, but this is Finland, damn it!) holiday of Vappu, or ‘Walpurgis Night‘ is celebrated in various countries; mostly in northern Europe.

Unfortunately I do not currently have any pictures of the events, because I don’t have a proper camera myself, and I haven’t leeched any pictures from my friends yet.

In my particular case, the day started with going to work while enduring very nice temperatures (some 22 °C) and sun. During lunch time, my boss came around to see what we were up to, and told us we had to leave early that day so that we could go to Turku and get drunk (although not with those words).
My boss is a nice man.

Some of the other residents of Hakastaronkatu 15, or Hakis as we affectionately call it, had made plans which included staying in a hotel in down town Turku. Three minutes of enquiry later, it was decreed that I would join them in Turku for the traditional consumption of alcohol and the picnic in the park, the day after.

That afternoon we took the train to Turku, dropped off our stuff at the hotel, and went to the Turku marketplace, where something like 30,000+ people had gathered (I’m not sure what the exact numbers were; There may have been many more people around) for a variety of traditions.

After some time of standing around, 98% of the people present suddenly got out some white student caps and put them on after frantically waving them in the air. One of the Spanish students I was travelling with told me what they were - basically, the idea is that you get them when you graduate from senior high school. You are only allowed to wear them during Vappu, and you are not allowed to wash them - ever. Some people clearly lived by the latter rule, because some of them were so dirty that it could only have gotten that way by enduring something like a stream of puke landing on it…

Anyway, all the people started moving to the river side for another Vappu tradition: the washing of statues. Don’t ask me why they do it, but they do it. In this particular case, it was being washed by some dentistry students, so they used a gigantic toothbrush.

After these events, we went to have some food at a Grilli, which is a bit like a mix between a snack bar and a hot dog stand. Here we met some other people from the loverly town of Salo, as well as some Dutch people we had met some weeks before then. Small world.

Later that night we went clubbing. First we tried to get into a place called Onnela; Where the age limit was 20. I could not get in with my measly 19 years-and-10-months of time spent as a living being, so we tried another place. Åbo Diskotek (Åbo is Swedish for Turku) had an age limit of 22. Standing in line hand-in-hand with one of the girls of our little entourage, I got in without anyone asking me for identification…

Anyway, since I was pretty tired (mostly due to a drinking game which went on until 2:50 the night before), I didn’t really have that much of a good time there, but it was fun none the less. Later that night we went to the hotel to sleep.

The next day, we had a picnic, which is a tradition on May Day, the national holiday on the first of May. The weather was nice, so there, again, were many thousands of people present in the park.
Some horribly emo band played for an hour, and then a bit later some weird retro-electro-funk-pop ensamble played a few songs, just before we decided to head on home.

In the train, I had to show the conductor my student card which gets me a discount for the public transport system. When we got out of the train, I walked for some 100 meters before realizing that the pocket that normally contains my wallet, felt surprisingly devoid of any contents. My heart rate suddenly shot up, because my wallet contains my driver’s license, credit card, bank card, insurance card, student cards, etcetera.

Realizing that I had left my wallet in the train, I went back to the station. There, the woman behind the desk managed to contact the train. Luckily you buy tickets for specific wagons/seats when you get a ticket before entering the train, meaning that I could pretty specifically tell the conductor in the train where to look for my wallet.
Three minutes later, he called back to tell me that he found the wallet. The train he was on would be going through Salo on it’s return journey again at 9:30 PM, so if I could be at the station at that time, I could get my wallet back.

Obviously, this quickly made me a very relieved person. Later that evening I did return to the station, met the conductor (he actually recognized me immediately), and got my wallet back, contents very much present and intact. I’m 100% sure that, in the Netherlands, I would never have gotten back my wallet. Not only would it not have been possible to contact the train again - because there’s a train every 10 minutes or so - but it would also be impossible to tell the conductor in the train exactly where I was sitting.
Not to mention not-so-honest people getting their hands of the thing first.