It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after a week’s break in Finnish rural paradise (see previous blog https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/). I’m a bit like that, I’m afraid. Like the old song, home is where you hang your hat. I’m exaggerating, of course, I have hung my hat in a number of places that I hope I will never have to see again. That was definitely not true of Finland when I went there in September 2023, my second visit. In 2022 I came here for the first time because of the Lahti Sibelius Festival and love it so much, I just had to come again – and again, I will be coming back this year, 2024.

The same apartment, of course, why change things when they work so well. So, yes, it was like coming home to return here to Lahti in southern Finland for another Sibelius festival. September in Finland is a bit like September in the UK – maybe a couple of degrees cooler, but definitely not cold.

I was staying in the modern and wonderfully efficient apartment block complete with sauna, a lift, and excellent sound-proofing. It was a great place to wake up in and, it was even better after a mug of coffee.

I was in the middle of town and Lahti is a small compact kind of town, well it’s a small city, so everything, including the beautiful lake-side Sibelius Hall was within easy walking distance. I have always thought I was a small-town boy, and it is true that I like the feel of being in a town with all the convenience of urban living but where everywhere soon becomes familiar and, yes, homely. I live in just such a town in the UK.

So, I felt perfectly at home and comfortable here – even my socks matched the decor.

I have to confess that I remembered the way the blinds sent a dotted reflection of the sunlight onto the wall above the bed. I thought when I first came here that even the light is design-conscious in this country. I say that I have to confess this because it gives me away, I get great pleasure from the way light falls on walls. It is even better when it plays the same trick a year later.

Another routine that never changes is doing my morning martial arts practice. I was back doing it here in the same recreational space behind the apartments as last year, and it felt as if it had already been consecrated as my dojo. Even better, it was still warm enough in the September sun to wear shorts.

Turn left for the Sibelius Hall and turn right for the city centre – whichever way you go, the streets are lined with green, that particular leaf shade that seems to say enjoy us because this is the beginning of our last shout before autumn.

I turned right because it was time for a leisurely, holiday-mood, second cup of coffee and there are excellent coffee houses, cafés and restaurants here in Lahti, and I had the time to linger.

Statue of two Finnish cavalry soldiers, Hakkapeliitta, from the 30-Year War. by Pentti Papinaho (1974) – those horses look as if they could have won the war on their own.

The Lutheran Church of the Cross (Ristinkirkko) (1978) looks different from each side you look at it, but whichever, it dominates the skyline and shows off the brilliance of its architect, Alvar Aalto (1898 – 1976), who was a brilliant architect in a country of brilliant architects.

The brilliantly white interior comes as a dramatic surprise, but it is both in the spirit of ecclesiastical design, but also of the Modernist Finnish delight in clean lines. The acoustics are clean and clear enough in here for the church to be a concert venue and a music recording studio too for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. The magnificent, 53-stop, organ was designed by Veikko Virtanen in 1979, and it is so impressive that it has inspired the annual Lahti International Organ Festival.

Spirit of Freedom (Vapauden Hengetäir) 1952 by Wäinö Aaltonen (1894 – 1966)

Down the grassy slope, and/or the many steps, from the church, in a former brewery building, is Lahti’s new, 2022, visual arts gallery MALVA, which on both of my visits here, put on stimulating and forward- looking exhibitions.

In 2022, they were showing a series of shows by the French artists, Adrien M & Claire B – Claire Bardainne (b. 1978) and Adrien Mondot (b. 1979) – with the collective title Havens of Light, which in their description was digital art and the blending of the imaginary, real and virtual dimensions. It was also billed as being interactive….so much so that it even got me to dance for the distortion mirrors.

Their other project was called Crossing the Mirror – a pop-up book in augmented reality and it’s best explained by this short video.

Even the café space joined in the gallery’s art displays with this reproduction of a sixties living room.

Salpausselkä ski stadium, remodelled in 1972, is a weirdly alien object seen from all around Lahti. I thought it was an abandoned road bridge when I first saw it, but then, skiing is not something I have ever done or ever would. Except maybe, if I wanted to commit an elaborate attempt at suicide. Even going to the top of that ski jump would give me heart failure. I am still impressed by the fact that anyone can ski, let alone do the kind of olympic class ski jumping that goes on here in winter. I’m envious because I know I would love to do it, but would never be able to.

If you live in Finland, you have to be tough and you need to be pretty athletic too, especially in the long winters. In front of the ski slope is a sports complex that caters for most sports enthusiasts, including, of course, a football stadium for Lahti FC, a team that has its ups and downs, I’m told, but it is currently in the Finnish Premier League.

Lahti FC produced the player, Jari Litmanen (b. 1971), who is generally regarded as the greatest Finnish footballer ever. His statue ( by Reijo Huttu, 2010) at the club, and celebrates Finland’s all-time leading scorer, its national team captain who also played for Ajax, Barcelona, Liverpool, Malmö as well as Lahti FC. Known as Kuningas (the King) he is an inspiration to all young Finnish footballer wannabes.

The statue may not be great art but it certainly makes its point. As an art-work, I preferred this nearby kiosk with its equally energetic graffiti.

I guess if you have a sporting yearn but you can’t run or ski or kick a ball, you can always be like these. two enthusiastic anglers in the park that leads to the harbour, and then on to Sibelius Hall.

I paid a second visit too to the sculpture park in the woods next to the park to see the colossal concrete sculptures of Olavi Lanu (1925 – 2015) (see my earlier blog) https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/

And then, as on every evening during my stay, my destination was the Sibelius Festival at the wonderful Sibeliustalo, Sibelius Hall, built in 2000 over-looking Lake Vesijärvi, and with one of the best acoustics in any concert hall I have visited.

I was here in 2022, https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/I returned in 2023 and I plan to go to the 2024 festival too when they will be performing, in their 25th anniversary concerts, all seven of Sibelius’ symphonies. I can’t wait, as they say.

Dalia Stasevska, the festival director and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s principal conductor is seen here at the end of the performance of Sibelius Symphony No. 7 during the last concert of the 2023 festival, one of the many highlights of last year’s event.

Another highlight was the Spanish violinist Maria Dueñas as the soloist in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, with Festival guests, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra with conductor Daniel Harding. I am already booked to return and, honesty, I am already excited about it.

Let’s finish with a short video made at a recording session in the Sibelius Hall in 2014 with Okko Kamu conducting the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7.

The post Back to Lahti in September 2023 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

When I woke up the other weekend, I had forgotten that I was in Venice but the view from my hotel room soon reminded me.

On my trip round Switzerland and Italy, I had come to Venice for the weekend and found a small hotel off a back street in a part of the often very over-visited city that was definitely far from the madding crowd.

I was even able to do my early morning taichi on a nearly deserted space by the Grand Canal with a backdrop of essential gondolas.

Then, panama hat essential of course,  it was time for a wander round this wonderfully beautiful place which can also be infuriatingly complicated to navigate with its crisscross of canals, tiny alleyways interspersed by startlingly dramatic glimpses of magnificent medieval and Renaissance palaces.

This is the city of the great Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793) whose comedies, especially  The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni), written in 1745, can still make us laugh in the modern theatre – well when I saw it, I loved it and laughed a lot. Goldoni’s comedies are full of intrigues, confused identity, stolen back street conversations and all the things that we can still imagine in this labyrinthine place.It is quite right that Goldoni has a very jolly statue right at the heart of the town.

This is a place for confusion certainly, intrigue too no doubt, and, as I wandered down small alleyways, over tiny canal bridges and then found that I wasn’t where I thought I was, I was quite convinced that Goldoni found his inspiration here.

It is also, of course, very beautiful but, if you are there in August like I was, it is essential to keep away from the crowded parts if you want to savour the atmosphere of the place. Venice is crowded for a reason, it is really somewhere everyone should see at least once in their lifetimes but, as I was lucky enough to have been here a few times before and seen Saint Mark’s square on a rainy November day when I was the only person there, I decided that I would keep well away from the crowds and that meant trying to make sure I was never within five minutes walk of  the main square or the Rialto Bridge that leads to it. San Marco is large enough to accommodate, or so it seems, every other visitor here at this time, except me. It is great that most tourists in Venice stick together – almost literally in this heat.

Elsewhere there were all those moody streets, some too narrow for more than one person at a time.

The play of light on water and the shadows on Venice’s wonderfully decaying bricks was always changing and alluring…

and those tempting little bridges ahead always drew me onwards, deeper and deeper into this ancient urban landscape.

Looking up at those shuttered windows or wondering what was going on behind closed doors, I often thought of Goldoni and sometimes more macabre thoughts too.

Then, seeing a church tower behind a row of houses, I decided to find out where I was.

There were two people inside this vast and awe-inspiring building which had plunged me into darkness as I stepped in from the blazing sunshine outside. I had read in my guidebook that the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488- 1576),  better known as Titian,  had once painted an altar piece for this church but I assumed that it would have been packed off to a major art gallery centuries ago but, no, there it was. Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in its original setting, in a church that I nearly passed by.

It is easy to get swamped by religious paintings in Italy but this dramatic masterpiece stopped me in my tracks. I, maybe for the first time, sympathised with Mary as she is whisked up into Heaven. She is leaving a panic-stricken and distressed crowd behind her lit with a lurid front light whilst she is drawn upwards to a terrifyingly golden sky with the dark clouds of her maker directly above her head. She is disturbed, confused and awe-struck. It is a frightening image of death.

Then I was outside again, walking through empty squares……

….to the sound of distant and very near bells ringing in conversation with each other over an other-wise silent car-free ambience.

There were times when I thought that Venice had really lost all of its visitors and then I came across Giorgio.

This solitary gondoliero was looking very morose until we agreed a price for a forty minute gondola trip around the Venetian canals.

He led the way down another alleyway to where he moored his gondola……

…and soon I was seeing Venice as it is meant to be seen – from the water.

Giorgio cheered up remarkably as soon as he got into action and maneuvered his gondola down various canals which were only navigable by boat.

This, I suggest, is the true spirit of Venice….even if a gondola ride is also the ultimate in tourist luxuries.

We were constantly travelling between darkness and light……

to the excitingly broad and palatial Grand Canal itself.

….and there it was, the Rialto bridge which leads to Saint Mark’s Square with its glorious Byzantine cathedral.

You follow this guy if you want to…..he was one of the hundreds of tour guides leading long and exhausted looking files of weary tourists around Venice’s main attractions.

The post Life in Venice appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was determined not to let this early departure spoil my holiday so I looked at the twenty four hours in Santorini as a new adventure and boarded the ferry for the three and a half hour voyage through The Cyclades archipelago as an enjoyable part of the expedition.



On board, I found a seat with a view and watched as we sailed away from Paros keeping our distance from the infamous Portes Islets where the ferry Express Samina sunk ten years ago with the loss of 82 lives. The captain is still in prison charged with manslaughter and negligence after the ship crashed into these distinctive rocks just outside Pirakia harbour whilst the crew were watching a football match on television.

The ship still lies at the bottom of the sea but I am told that lessons have been learnt and no ferries are now allowed to go anywhere near these rocks and, for certain, none of the crew were going to be watching the World Cup matches on board.

I am enough of a pessimist though to have kept my eye on the safety equipment just in case and I always sit near the life boats.

My voyage was uneventful and enjoyable as we chugged slowly through the Aegean in the heat of a very sunny Greek afternoon.


Santorini is the most southerly of the Cycladic islands and the only one to have an international airport. It is also a pretty spectacular place with its very own volcano which is still active even if it has been dormant since the 1950s when it last erupted. The island however shows all the signs of volcanic activity with its black sandy beaches and dark volcanic rock formations aping the movement of those dramatic lava flows of earlier times.

In fact the Santorini volcanic eruption that occurred some time around 1500 BC was the second largest since the evolution of man. It transformed the geography of the Aegean Sea and may well have put an end to the Minoan empire when its huge tsunamis devastated islands throughout the area. It also made Santorini towns the most alarmingly perched centres of civilisation that I have ever visited. Many of the buildings quite literally sit on the cliff edges defying the fates to topple them over into the sea.

Ferry disasters and volcanic eruptions were on my mind when I arrived in this extraordinary place which also saw a devastating earthquake in 1956 which destroyed most of the capital, Fira, where I had a room for the night.

Fira is altogether different to anything I had encountered on Paros. It is busier, brasher and unembarrassed about its role as a tourist centre.

The streets are lined with everything you could possibly want if your interests centre round souvenirs or t-shirts and the clubs only really get going between 1.00 and 6.00 am. I wasn’t sure that I was going to succeed in enjoying this place.

I was booked into the San Giorgio Hotel which was hidden away down a side street but which I discovered was only a couple of minutes walk from the heart of the town. I was prepared to have a quiet time in advance of my flight home to England so I was happy to check into my room with its balcony over-looking some residential houses and what sounded like a music school where some very industrious students were playing Bach violin sonatas whilst an old lady was hanging out a long line of men’s clothes on her balcony’s washing line. Sitting there in the evening sunlight and listening to the music of Bach, I decided that this was going to be fun.

It was all helped enormously by the enthusiastic hospitality of the hotel’s owner Yourgos, who had picked me up from the harbour and went to a lot of trouble drawing maps of where I could go and what I should do. He even struggled to stop me lifting my very heavy case. He could charm even the gloomiest soul away from thoughts of earthquakes, volcanoes and shipwrecks.

He also told me that I could use his roof for my kung-fu practice. Suddenly I was at home again and my spirits rose even further when the late afternoon light added its clear blue to a geometrical composition of architecture and washing that just had to be photographed.

He must have been a martial arts sympathiser because on the staircase up to the roof was a mural of Ancient Greek boxers just to put me into the mood.

Up on the roof, that evening and the following morning, I did my martial arts exercises, White Crane Kung-fu – here a straight sword pattern –  feeling that I was on top of the world…and, judging by the view, I think I really was up on a level with Mount Olympus. 

All I had to do now was to decide what to do with my one evening on Santorini. You have probably already guessed that it involved dinner and alcohol and you would be right but where to indulge was the question.

I had not expected though that the bars would be quite so spectacular or quite such a challenge to anyone with even the slightest sense of vertigo.

Look one way and it is a classic Greek cocktail bar with dutiful waiters and an absorbing drinks menu but turn the other way and you are sitting with one of the most sensational views any restaurant in the world could offer.

Eventually, after a couple of glasses of ice cold Greek beer, I even looked down at the sea below and managed to resist the urge to jump.

Luckily my mind was diverted from diving by a Greco-American couple at the next table. Costas and Diane Touliatos-Miles are fellow website publishers (http://www.hellenicnest.com) and we soon got talking about Greek’s place in the modern world now that the euro crisis was calling for change.

Diane is a professor of musicology at the Missouri-St Louis University specialising, as you do, in Fourteenth Century Byzantine music and her husband, Costas is an economist and evangelist for all things Hellenic in his now native United States. They were my last travelling companions on this adventure in Greece and they were excellent sound boards for my early impressions of this absorbing country. They had plenty of far from obvious things to say about the relationship between Greece and America and Britain. I shall be visiting their website in the now natural way that travelers who meet in strange places can stay in touch in the much smaller virtual world.

After dinner I walked up the steps to the highest point in Fira not really realising that what I had considered to be high up was only really the beginning of a climb that seemed to take me up above the clouds, if there had been any, just as darkness fell.

That night I dreamt of, yes I am afraid so, earthquakes, volcanoes, shipwrecks and plane crashes
but none of the disasters came my way and, just maybe, it was all due to reading too much Homer and his epic about man as the plaything of the gods. I am now safely at home, away from Zeus’ unpredictably pointing finger and Poseidon’s watery wrath. Here in leafy but not nearly so sun-drenched England, my little rose garden has gone quietly wild in my absence but my love affair with Greece has only just begun. Was that a roll of thunder I heard just then?

The post Don’t Look Down, You Are On Santorini appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The purpose of the trip was to study a branch of Kung Fu known as Dog Boxing with the renowned Master Lin. That too was a life changing experience but, if you want to know more a bout that, there is a record of the trip in the menu above under Martial Arts.

I broke my journey to change fights in Hong Kong and, whilst I was there I bought my first digital camera, a Canon EOS 400D, and I instantly became shutter crazy.

These are my first digital photographs, divided into two sections: People and Places. I plan to put them up in the Photography section in the menu above – something I shall be adding to over time. Click on the image to enlarge.

Kung Fu took up the main part of my time out in China, I was studying in Fuzhou, in Fujian Province, right down in the South, but there was still plenty of time to wander around seeing the sights, experimenting with my rudimental Mandarin Chinese and, in a simple way, to form what I hope will be a lasting relationship with the country.

Apart from my time in Fuzhou, I was also able to travel to some of the Buddhist temples, notably the Southern Shaolin Temple, tranquil places associated with the birth of Kung Fu.

China certainly suffers from many of the things criticized in the press but it is also, to my experience, a land full of things to learn, alternative ways of seeing things and, again in my experience, a country full of friendly, smiling people.

PEOPLE

PLACES

The post My photographs from Fujian Province, China appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.