Today I am stuck on an island. And when I wasn’t stuck on this island, I was stuck on another island. It was the last day of the Glottobank meeting.  Really productive few days, I almost feel like I’m starting to somewhat sound like I think I know what I’m doing. Kind of.

But enough about the work, we got a chance to learn a bit about the island that we’re on late this afternoon.  And we heard some novel pitches, which were far better than the conversation we heard with this photo:

Nick and Mattis spent an unholy amount of time discussing the Mattis’ favorite topic – cognates. They searched long and hard for cognates of the word sodomy.  Apparently lasted until well into the morning, Mattis went to sleep, woke up and then started over.

The tour of the grounds was fantastic, we even learnt some new phrases – post glacial rebound was definitely the top English phrase. Turns out there were two islands here that turned into one, because of post glacial rebound. The lepers lived on one and the mad people lived on the other, although a lot of the women sent here were not actually mentally ill, it was more of a convenience thing for their husbands. The main mental hospital is a beautiful old building albeit apparently filled with ghosts.

Apparently those walls were designed to calm a troubled mind. If I were in there too long, I’d go mad. Thankfully, we were only briefly there before heading off to look at some of the other parts of the island!! The photos below are of the leper colony’s church and graveyard.

The tour of the island couldn’t last forever and we headed off to another island, Lammasaari, in row boats and dinghies. We had a great taste of Finnish summer life, freshly caught pike, a wonderful cabin in the woods, an awesome small sauna and lovely weather. Best of all, no searching for dodgy cognates!!

We answered a burning question, how many PhD’s do you need to cool beer? The answer appears to be four:

Everyone agreed the Baltic was cold enough to keep the beer chilled, they just momentarily forgot about the buoyancy of cans of beer. And then they went for a walk. Amusingly, as they got back a rather large car ferry went past and all of a sudden they realised there might be waves.  They flew down the hill and rescued the cans just in time…

It was an awesome spot to sit and drink and enjoy the Finnish countryside. We ate fresh juniper berries and lingonberries and relaxed. I’ve decided that spending summer in Finland actually looks like a pretty awesome thing to do (I’m pretty sure winter makes up for it, though).

As the sun set, it was time to head back to Seili, sigh, so sad.

Oh, here’s what the Lepradisco looks like in daylight, it’s through that little almost underground door…