Arctic Insomnia

Arctic Insomnia
This year the Midsummer Night Picnic was inside the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi in Lapland. My reservations about joining the long, straight tourist trail north would have melted away long ago had I known we would be led here by native son Pekka Abrahamsson and his wife Katja. Professor Abrahamsson was the XP2006 conference chairman; he teaches extreme software at the university in Oulu, following earlier extreme activities such as championship swimming, and (as an impoverished student) getting himself home from the French Riviera by buying a bicycle in Nice and riding north.

Pekka and Katja took us to dinner in an elaborate wooden pleasure dome designed for refuge from the winter dark and from the summer mosquitoes. There we were introduced to the kantele, a Finnish kind of harp, by Matti Korva, who turned out to be a relative of Pekka’s. (The Arctic is thinly populated and the winters are long.)

A waitress emerged with a tray of tiny glass bottles on leather thongs, which we immediately supposed to be mosquitoes, one for everybody. Not so: each contained a flake of gold panned from the river. In the photo, Pekka is wearing his around his neck. As do I, now I at last have a pension fund.

Today we shall visit Santa and enjoy a raft ride in white water.