January 2009

Posted: 2009-01-05

After the summer season we have spent most of our time with the removal. The items of the shop have been delivered to our new premises at Sepänkylä, but they now wait stacked in one of the class rooms for the rooms and renovations to be finished. We have started the renovation job in our private quarters. Some rooms are already in quite a good order and next job will be the renovation of the bathrooms.

Our intention is to start, in the beginning of the summer, a small scale Bed and Breakfast service. One of the class rooms is going to be split into two separate rooms for accommodation and we can use our own guest room upstairs for visitors also. The rooms will be partly furnished with the shop items and the potential customers, staying overnight, can buy things they have liked as souvenirs to take home.

We have now lived in Puumala for about one and a half years. We have gathered experiences and adventures and have learned to look at many things with new eyes. The life in the capital city area is really different compared to this country side where the councils fight with financial problems and inhabitants decrease. There is a lot to think about regarding community politics and personal life.

In the Health Care Centre there can be periods of several days, when there is no doctor available in Puumala. During days like this it is possible to get an on-call appointment in Mikkeli. I do not think that many people with some illness will take a bus from Puumala to Mikkeli and will again change to another bus in order to get to Pankalampi Health Care Centre. They should also survive the same route back, in case it is schedule wise possible with public transport system. There are no private doctors in Puumala and the distance to the nearest town is 60 kilometres. There is a bus to Imatra two times a day during working days and to Mikkeli six times a day.

When visiting Helsinki, mainly for work, I seem to look at the masses of people in different ways than before. There can be several hundreds of people waiting for one commuter train at the main railway station. When there are several tracks and the trains leave several times an hour, the amount of people on the move is enormous compared to Puumala. It is nearly impossible to understand that some people even run to catch a full train that is just leaving, when the next train to the same direction is already beside and empty.

We got a white Christmas and power cuts. The length of the power cuts varied area wise from some hours to several days. Even though the cottages that we are doing maintenance for are located very near to national road number 62, the longest electricity cut at that area lasted about 15 hours. Anyhow, the guests did have patience and understanding for the fact that nature had some affect on their schedules for roasting their Christmas dinner ham.

For the joy of the Christmas holiday makers a ski track was opened in Sepänkylä. From the corner of our plot starts a ten kilometre marked track. This fun cannot be experienced in the southern part of Finland because they do not have any snow (at least so far). It is possible that we will get a skiing season to support the local business.

There already is a new shop at Kulta-Seppo’s house where we used to have our second hand shop. Leila Repo opened a shop called Putiikki Ketunkolo. (Free translation would be something like Boutique Fox Den. Leila’s family name Repo means a fox.) In the nice looking boutique they have a selection of brand clothing and items for home interior.