Finns Gone Wild; One Day Each Spring, Dignity Takes a Back Seat to Bubbly
Two Finns are sitting at a bar, a bottle between them. They polish it off in silence and order another, at which point Finn A raises his glass and says, "Cheers!"</br></br>By the time I landed in Helsinki last April for Finland's annual May Day celebration, this was the joke I'd been told -- by a Finn -- to sum up the northern nation's less-is-more approach to conversation. I'd been living in Iceland, Scandinavia's other oddball nation, for about a year. And I'd heard that during May Day, known as Vappu in Finland, the nation abandoned its famous shyness and let loose.</br></br>My Vappu began on the ground-floor bar of Hotel Torni, a historic downtown hotel and my base camp for the weekend. Built in 1931, the Torni, now part of the Finnish hotel chain Sokos, is renowned both for being the headquarters of Soviet bodies that remained posted in Finland after World War II and for having the best view of the city, from the women's bathroom in the hotel's rooftop bar.</br></br>Though it was Saturday and May Day wasn't until Monday, celebrations were already underway at the Torni's 1930s-era American Bar. On the bar stool next to mine, Helsinki resident Mikko Vaajamo sampled from a personal drink buffet of aged whiskey, champagne, espresso and a strawberry margarita.</br></br>"There are two days when you don't want to have visitors arriving in Finland for the first time," Vaajamo said. "One is Vappu." The other, he offered, is Midsummer's Eve, when things apparently get equally out of hand and could also give visitors the mistaken impression that Finns are always an outgoing, jovial crowd. Vappu, he said, "is kind of a nationwide coverup story."