Do you come turn into my wife?
A diary entry about a food hall and my struggle to talk Finnish
It has been a difficult week.
My two little ones have been exchanging viruses with each other the past few weeks. Soon as one had stopped coughing their lungs up in the evenings, the other quickly started. This week they had the good manners to be ill at the same time. We’ve had our hands full as a consequence, but at least they’re healthy at the same time now.
This is why I have something a little different, a little bloggier, than usual this week. But, in the spirit of trying new things with this fledgling newsletter of mine, I hope it brings a smile.
Saturday, March 2nd -
Now the weekend has come and noses have stopped running, my wife, kids, and I leave the flat early. Here in Finland, as I am led to believe is much the case elsewhere, it is March again. On friends’ Instagram feeds in the UK and Continental Europe I see Spring has started to cautiously peek its cheeky little face out from its winter rest.
This isn’t so in Finland.
Spring doesn’t follow winter here. Winter passes into something best called un-winter. Finland is a country of endless pillowy snows in December. Come June the offensively vibrant nature is enough to make you think humanity might not, in fact, be running headlong off a cliff while guzzling a bottle of lighter fluid. There is no such beauty to be found in un-winter. All is grey now. The world is the colour of day-old cigarette ash left in a rain-soaked ash tray. Un-winter turns this place of profound beauty into the offspring of Mordor and whatever crappy town you grew up in.
You get the idea.
It’s the ice that gets me. With the un-winter warmth, the rain arrives. The first in months. It leaves every pavement, patch of grass and pathway an ersatz icing rink of compacted snow and slush. I must have relived the moment I asked my wife to marry me roughly 143 times this February alone for all the times my life has flashed before my eyes on feeling my legs fly out from under me.
This, by the way, is what chiefly gives me away for the foreigner I clearly am. That and my infant-sized Finnish vocabulary. The Finns, you see, have some kind of walking technique down pat that, if not a clear example of genetic memory, is at least developed at an early age.
As penguins do, I suppose.
On our way to town I mitigate all this by generously volunteering to push the pram. In these trying weeks it has conveniently acted as my own zimmer frame.
My wife (being Finnish) is able to walk like a penguin after all.
We live in a historic city called Turku here on the south-west coast of Finland. The river running through it is called the Aura, which, it just so happens, is the name of my favourite Finnish cheese. I assume this is connected, but should really check some day.
Our first activity in town, as agreed with my 4 year old son, Samuel, is to visit the medieval ruins that sit beside the river. It’s a remarkable place. Deep in a subterranean museum are relics from hundreds of years ago. Cellars, newly revealed stone streets, even animal bones of old pets. My son and daughter ignore it all and play with a large doll’s house set up for kids here. And, with them playing nicely, I am drawn to the remains of a kitchen. The explanatory text beside it tells me they know it was a kitchen for the oven and pans found here, as well as the many chicken and fish bones.
Most “mysteriously”, this text says, is the discovery of a human finger in the kitchen.
Considering what I know of restaurant kitchens in 2024, and how even more brutal life was generally 500 years ago, this fact doesn’t seem mysterious to me in the slightest.
With the kids entertained, and our daughter looking dangerously close to turning from rubby-eyed to cranky, we make a quick trip to the old food hall. The Kauppahalli, as it is called in Finnish. Along with the astronomical observatory outside my apartment block, things like this food hall were the reason we moved to Turku. It isn’t a huge city. But it has a reputation of being something of a Finnish food capital. This food hall is one of the reasons why.
The hall smells of toasted cinnamon, old books, and freshly opened oysters. It is the smell of a food market that knows what it’s talking about. I’m here to see if I can find my favourite cut of beef: hanger steak. We rarely eat beef, but hanger was something I cooked a lot of in Sweden. I’m keen to try it again.
The meat counter is below a large and, I assume, old code of conduct sign. It depicts a shady looking man with his collar up, a pompous looking man in a fedora and cigarette in mouth, and a woman with a dog. I assume this means no smoking and no dogs, but what the shady looking fella is doing wrong I still need someone to explain.
Something I love about Finns is their willingness to let me talk hideous Finnish at them. They don’t, as was my experience in Sweden, slip immediately into English. Instead, they simply look at me for a moment as though I am a dog that just asked where the nearest petrol station is, before talking in clear, slow and generous Finnish.
The butcher I catch the eye of looks like a mix of Yoda and Albert Einstein, erring on Yoda’s amount of hair. As he flops down a thick, red slab of meat onto his chopping board, a familiar flutter effervesces at the top of my stomach. The same flutter I often get when forcing myself to talk Finnish with someone new.
“Yes,” I say in Finnish, “hello.”
“Hey,” he replies, “kjetko help?”
I ignore the words I don’t make out and continue:
“Yes, I hope you can help. Umm, I look for cow piece. Diaphragm. Do you have the cow’s diaphragm?”
He looks at me as though I’m a dog asking for the nearest petrol station. I try again.
“In England it’s called Hanger Steak… you know? Diaphragm? Is this the word? Diaphragm of cow?”
“Haisista kuule löytämään Market Square keksista… ” he replies, shaking his head.
This is the problem with my speaking Finnish with anyone outside the classroom I learnt in a few years ago. Finns simply talk too fast. Too quietly. Worst of all, they don’t actually speak Finnish. Instead they speak what is called puhesuomea (trans: spoken Finnish), a colloquial form that often bares no resemblance to what I learned in class.
I am, however, used to this. The same thing happened when I tried speaking Finnish the very first time almost 9 years ago. That was on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. The person I was talking to was my wife.
She was my girlfriend then. We’d been in a long-distance relationship for a few years and, despite our never having lived together, I was ready to propose. We were in Finland for a holiday at her family’s summer cottage. It was the perfect place to ask her. And, being the impossibly cringe person that I am, I chose to ask her in Finnish.
I started by Googling the relevant vocabulary. I then tried to figure out how to pronounce the alien words by way of random YouTube videos and strategic questions to my wife’s family of similar looking words.
I’d never shown any interest in such matters before but I’m pretty sure I didn’t elicit any suspicion.
I asked her on a small jetty overlooking waters of the Finnish archipelago. I would tell you the sky was blue and the sun perfect and the breeze gentle, but I would be lying. I wasn’t paying attention to any of that. I didn’t get on one knee, but I asked, and I asked in Finnish.
“Do you come turn into my wife?” I said.
She responded quickly. And she responded with a staccato of words that made as much sense to me then as a Dalek talking in morse code.
But then, after what felt like hours but was, I assume, moments, she added a simple yes. She put her arms around me.
I like to think the sky was perfect blue. It’s the only way I’m able to picture it.
“Do you speak that I go to looking in Market Square?” I reply to the butcher.
“Meat salesman kuurluu seisisto, maybe,” he says.
“Thank you that you are generous and gave me your watch,” I tell him, before turning to look for the girl I asked to turn into my wife 9 years ago.
Before leaving the food hall I decide to take some pictures to share with you here. I use the opportunity to ask the merchants if they mind me taking them. In Finnish, of course. They all quickly say yes, and, just as quickly, turn away so they aren’t too much in shot.
At home, our young daughter napping, the rest of us sit and eat some of the Karelian pies. Small pastries of rye flour filled with a rice filling. The sun shines through the window with a light I haven’t felt in months. Blinding. The light of a fridge door opening at 2am. A light strong enough to render our entirely unpolished wooden floor suddenly glaring.
I think it might even be the light of something other than un-winter.
Thanks for reading this week. If you are a paid subscriber you can read my essay on Nordic food that includes a recipe for Karelian pies below.
And if you read this far, I’d love to ask you to be a paid subscriber. Doing so will really support my work here and the success of this newsletter. I’m offering 25% off with the coupon link below!
PSA: On the matter of what my then girlfriend first said in Finnish when I asked her to marry me, she tells me today it was "todellakin tulen". The best way of translating this is "absolutely I will"
It's a lovely story...and now more to add to the things we share - meeting my Swiss wife when I didn't speak German and she barely spoke English was...interesting and challenging. Learning German, then discovering no one in Switzerland actually speaks German - they have their unwritten dialect that varies in every Canton and isn't close at all to German...and of course, I could write an entire piece on the challenges of working in a professional kitchen with a severe language handicap...and on it goes, which I'm sure you are more than familiar with!