A Perfect Day

We have been asked quite often what do we do or how we spend our time. Usually we have answered “nothing”, which probably describes it best but does not satisfy curiosity at all. When there has been too many such questions, we get tired and answer that we are all the time so bored because there is nothing to do. But to tell you the truth, here is how we spent one day before Christmas.

Today Santeri woke up early in the morning and Päivi slept until noon. She had a bad cough a couple of days earlier which prevented her from sleeping. Now she was able to take it all back. Sleeping is a luxury. We are staying with Santeri’s former babysitter and her family: husband and four already grown-up kids and two dogs. Our hostess had cooked lovely porridge for the breakfast taking us to a trip down the memory lane to our childhood days.

It was the eve of Christmas Eve. Previous Christmas we spent in New Zealand cooking some traditional food and walking outside watching stars, and before that we were in Brazil at the beach where lots of people were having barbecues and drinking joyfully. This year there was a lot of preparations to be done to celebrate Christmas in the traditional Finnish way. The girls made gingerbread while we peeled huge piles of swedes and potatoes for casseroles. The shop brought some ham and turkey. Salmon was bought already the day before after a lengthy shopping tour in town. It was salted for preparing in a Finnish-style smoke oven. It is really hard to keep one’s fingers off the delicacies.

In the afternoon Santeri surfed on the Internet writing a letter to his former colleagues, checking out how computer viruses are written, finding out what are blog pings and feeds, and reading some news. Päivi was reading Finnish books she had borrowed from our hostess. There are not really many occasions to read Finnish literature when travelling, except the old classics that can be found in the fantastic Gutenberg.org service. We have downloaded and printed many of the books. Our hostess wanted to listen to some Finnish music as well so we played her some of our favourites including Ismo Alanko, Kauko Röyhkä, and Ultra Bra. The feeling was almost surreal when in the middle of this typically Finnish ambience we saw some little monkeys jumping in the garden. The dogs barked at these frequent visitors. The monkeys were annoyingly far out of reach for them, eating rambutan fruits in the trees.

We had cooked for a couple of days, but now our hostess prepared the dinner. It was a delicious fish casserole and tandoori chicken. There was some garlic potatoes left from yesterday, too. After eating we landed on the couch to caress each other for a while. Then Santeri looked at the pictures from a Finnish magazine while Päivi invaded the computer to write this blog. After that we decided to wash some clothes. There was a washing machine at our disposal making it a lot easier than normally. Santeri took a shower to prevent clean clothes from getting dirty again, and finally we went to bed. It was evening or so, at least it was dark. We embraced each other, made love and Santeri fell to sleep. Päivi stayed up with our hostess a little bit longer and continued the Christmas preparations, bottling some home-made ginger ale and finishing the casseroles.

This day was just like any other day, a perfect day.

Merry Christmas from Malaysia,

Päivi & Santeri