Finnish farm adventures

Our host for the three week UT-UMN grad program in communication in Tampere, Helsinki and St. Petersburg was Kaarle Nordenstreng. He is married to Ullamaija Kivikuru, another well-known media scholar in Finland, at Helsinki University. Both are remarkable people in many ways. He has been one of the people behind two major discussions of problems and inequities in the international media system. She has done some fine work in Africa on media there.

Kaarle has always been interesting and surprising. He has done some of the most seminal international communication research for over 30 years. He is a model of how to be really engaged in policy issues and also a very thoughtful researcher and historian. He drives a vintage 1965 Mustang.

He had mentioned several times that he and Ullamaija had a nice farm in the country that he wanted to show us. We really did not understand until we went there quite what that meant.

The farm has come down through Ullamaija's family and dates back to 1680. That is remarkable to us as Americans, since few of our families have even been in the U.S. that long and most of us move around too much to think of living on the same farm for centuries.


You can see the date on the weather vane on an outbuilding that used to be a barn and granary, and has, naturally enough, been turned into a wood burning sauna. Their daughter, who is a lawyer in Helsinki, likes to come home for the weekend and was stoking up the wood (and heat) in the sauna.



The main farm house has been expanded several times, but the core of it is a very large room that was the original house, which goes back several centuries. The central room is visibly ancient, made of logs, with beams for hanging up food and tools.

The kitchen is somewhat newer but still quite old. It has a very old wood fired brick oven for baking that would put most pizza ovens to shame. It has several round timbers for hanging up the kind of Scandinavian flat bread that is round with a hole in the middle. (If, like me, you wondered about that shape, it is for hanging on a long, round pole up in the ceiling.) Ullamaija mostly keeps day old bread there to feed to her horse, who lives in a pasture out back.

One of the more remarkable coincidences of our short visit to the farm came as we drove out to it with Kaarle and his son, Markus (in the cowboy hat). It turns out Markus is a big fan of much of the same pretty obscure country rock and alt.country music that I am. We had a great time talking about it. People from Gram Parsons in the 1960s/70s to Son Volt now. Even more, Markus is a DJ and musician who plays that kind of music mixed with other American style roots music, blues, etc. He has played at South by Southwest in Austin before. Check it out at http://www.myspace.com/markusnordenstreng.