Guess Who Am I

Just yesterday I realized that there are some other aspects also about living in the countryside. One weekend we came back home from the summer cottage after the vacation and noticed that post office had tried to deliver us a letter but we weren’t home (registered letter so they cannot leave it to our box without a signature). It was Sunday evening (about 4pm) and then I realized that actually we can go to the “post office” and pick it up.

In the Finnish countryside we don’t have official post offices any longer as the Post is saving some money; so they have given this task to the local companies, in our case it is handled by a small grocery shop. And these type of shops are open also during Sunday and even open until 9pm. The official post office would never be open at that time so actually living in countryside has it’s positive sides very much – we get much better service compared to the people living in the city.

We have been living in the countryside for some time now. So what does it mean in practice? Hmmm … nothing? We have cable-TV, there are some bigger grocery shops in here and everything works just like you would expect them to work in the city. Actually, we have something the city people do not have. We do not have a real post office but local shop is acting as a post office and that means that our “post office” is open longer than many post offices in the city. Open even during the Sunday.

But this morning we got one reminder what does the countryside living mean in practice. We got a power outage! Apparently a small animal caused it, maybe a bird hit the power line or something like that. But the electricity went out in the morning and there we were without electricity. After couple of minutes we received text messages from our electricity company informing that they are now aware about the situation and while I plugged our mobile Internet modem (ZTE中兴) and opened the electricity company’s website we already saw all the places which were out of the electricity in their map. Pretty impressive. And it was also nice to notice that the break was actually very short one, after about 45 minutes we already had electricity.

This reminds me that we should get some candles and flashlights for the Winter, maybe we will get some Autumn or Winter storms and then it might take longer time to fix all the problems. And besides, living in the countryside means that you should have candles at home. I think I read it in some guidebook.