Pohjanmaa (Bohoyama)

26 February 2012
Sunday

For someone who doesn't do shops, apart from the occasional in and out of a charity shop, I am like a man transformed. Not for long though. You can't change the habits of a lifetime but here I am leafing through suits in the flea market like moldy pages in an old book. I don't buy anything apart from one day after school. The next day I tell Outi and Annika that I had bought a second hand pair of underwear. Sloggi. There was a momentary look of undisguised shock. But they were my size. And they were clean. And they were Sloggi.

The look on their faces was mirrored a few days later when I said something about the motorway connections here. I was in the car with Annuka, the Chairperson of the kindergarten as she was showing me around Seinäjoki, the fastest growing city in Finland, where I had to go to register myself at the local municipal offices. She drove me around and showed me the biggest roundabout in Finland. It wasn't very special and would be dwarfed by any of the many roundabouts in the Isle of Thanet. People from outside Thanet comment on the number of roundabouts we have - it's a kind of joke that the local people don't know about.

Seinäjoki is growing fast but with no evidence of any planning. There is a mixture of industrial and residential complexes all overlapping. Logistics is a big business in Finland - it needs to be as Finland is a very large country. I had read that the highway system was very good up to Tampere from Helsinki and I said this to Annuka. She looked at me as if she couldn't believe what I was saying. "But people say we are on the motorway here. And that the connections are very good. Even though this is not a motorway."

People in this part of Finland refer to their patch as Pohjanmaa but pronounce it with an extra 'o' after the 'h'. It sounds almost Japanese when they say it; Bohoyama. South Ostrobothnia. They are a very proud people. Everything here is bigger and better than anywhere else. The men are real men, they are tougher and the women like their men that way. It reminds me of the tensions between Osaka and Tokyo. People from Osaka like to big themselves up. Tokyoites don't say anything. They don't need to. It's a bit like people who drive smaller-engined cars when talking to an owner of a V8.