Refuges and Havens
Helsinki Dérive, Part Seven
If patriotism is a refuge for the scoundrel, then Starbucks is a haven for Americans abroad. A Frappuccino evades all cultural or linguistic bounds, a convenient balm for when you’re marinating in a handful of completely incomprehensible languages while waiting for your spouse to do her thing at Stockmanns. At home, we’d avoid that green mermaid logo like the plague, opting for Extracto, Case Study, or (when feeling obligatorily corporate) Black Rock. On our first trips to the UK, Starbucks meant a predictably tidy restroom for the price of a latte.
This particular outpost of Seattle’s finest roast lies across the street from the Moomin Shop which happens to be in the same building as the Swedish Theatre. I ask Nancy as we step over the cobblestones whether I’m reading too much into the juxtaposition of the continued contest of Jansson’s nationality. Yes, I’m totally overanalyzing. The bilingual road signs and transit announcements would be a constant reminder of the Swedish-Finnish helix of Helsinki’s history, but nationalizing Moomintroll seems heretical, if not just plain crass.
The clientele in the Moomin Shop is almost stereotypically Asian, clusters of shoppers trailing snippets of Japanese, Mandarin, as well as trace elements of Korean that resonate with distant familial memory. I suspect that a particular purist perspective would blanch at the notion of Tove Jansson’s subversively gentle tales monetized into Finland’s answer to Hello Kitty. As I watch Nancy picking out zipper pulls for her bandmates according to her take on how they line up with Finn Family Moomintroll, there’s something to be said for those characters retaining their essence despite being pumped through the kawaii-projector for the world stage.
Nancy managed to power out of her crud to spend two and a half hours finding some genuine gems in the Espoo “recycling center,” and coasting back to Kamppi on Red Bull fumes, we refueled at the Yeastie Boi, arguably the only hip-hop bagel shop on Earth, definitely in Helsinki. An oyster mushroom banh mi with a bagel for the baguette is an inspired menu item; side dishes of fried halloumi sticks and kimchi raise eyebrows as well as the appreciation for how flavors cross borders and time zones. Thanks to the restaurant’s “remedial rap for normies” playlist, I learned that KRS-One produced “Sound of the Police,” a track I first heard pounding in a Carnaby Street shop decades prior and had spent the intervening time randomly going “Whoop whoop, that’s the sound of the police!”
It’s a quick walk from Yeastie Boi to the shopping hub of Esplanadi, and while this is only my second time in Helsinki, the streets are starting to form logical connections to places of interest. I’m reminded of the times I’ve played Grand Theft Auto when the city begins to make sense after going back and forth between missions and hideouts. A minor detail catches my eye: a sticker on one of the countless electrical boxes. “FCK RFGS,” it reads, a riff on similar decals that instructed fascists to bugger off, and it doesn’t take much imagination to fill in the missing vowels. It’s a rock in the shoe, a stubbed toe, the reminder that not everyone welcomes everyone and that scoundrels are about. And like that pebble, that thought sticks with me.
With her Stockmann mission complete, Nancy finds me yet again typing away, in a back corner of the polyglot Starbucks, the foamy remnants of a Frappuccino keeping the keyboard and tablet company. It occurs to me that I do need to use the bathroom, but ironies of ironies, this particular Starbucks lacks a public toilet.