Original playout date: 21 December 2007
Duration: 8:15
“We leave Imatra and start to go up country to Puumala. On the way, I take a hitchhiker, Kai, who it turns out lives in England only a few miles away from my first wife and kids. He came back to check up on his property, and he gave me some interesting insights into the region only a few of which you hear here, as this was where my panasonic ran out of batteries and the Fuji picks up the thread from the start of the next instalment. At first you can hear I went out of character when Kai was in the car, but I didn’t want to intimidate him and have him thinking he had got into a car with some crazy person driving, so I hope you’ll understand why that bit is off-accent and off-character.
In the gallery section we hear a famous Finnish folksong that is on the radio there all the time, the celebrated “”Song of the Frozen North”” by Keenneetti Baannkkssi, which I was lucky to capture digitally from the car radio.
The lyrics are roughly as follows:
Alohawauiaa oekuuipo
Kuuleimomi kuumiilliimiillii
Okkaheekaae onaappua
Okekuppuunnaa aehiipoinnei
O frozen north,
sleeping land of snow and darkness
I skate on the ice
Of your chilly remembrances.
Joking apart, the co-ordinates of Puumala are:
geo:lat=61.519911922480134 geo:lon=28.17718505859375″
Quote of the clip: “This is the sort of house you might buy in a flat pack.”
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Camera: Panasonic DMZ -FZ30
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – medium use
Location: Finland
Other people featured: Kai of Puumala and St John’s Wood and Kenbank
Genre: Travel
Music used: “Song of the Frozen North”, Ken Bankston
Languages used: English, some Hawai’an
Animals/plants featured: Naturally occuring vegetation
Other remarks: The Panasonic Cam is not great on audio, gives a hollow and reverberating sound.