Silent and quiet Finland today will try to look a bit more like bustling Europe, where initiatives to entertain the citizens who are locked up in their homes are proliferating these days.
It will be at five o'clock, if the initiative launched by Orvokki Hyytinen, a woman living in Oulunkylä (a suburb of Helsinki), succeeds.
Her proposal is that Sandstorm, the jewel in the crown of Finnish trance instrumental music, created in 1999 by Finnish DJ and record producer Toni Ville Henrik Virtanen, better known as Darude, play on every balcony in Finland.
The original idea has to be found weeks ago in northern Italy, where the citizens after several days of confinement opened the windows and played the national anthem as a way to encourage whole cities in quarantine to resist the hardship.
Then others came: applause for the health professionals is one of the most common initiatives, but lately in Spain there are even neighborhoods where people play bingo games from their balconies, attend fitness classes or even organize protests and demonstrate by hitting saucepans. Everything is good if helps to keep morale high and if it is about showing that we are together in these difficult times.
Orvokky Hyytinen told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that she got the idea after seeing images of Italians singing opera from their balconies. After thinking about what kind of music would be best suited for Finland, she discarded the national anthem Maamme and settled on Darude's music.
"Yes, this is one of the national anthem candidates," she laughs.
If this is successful, for a few moments Finland could stop being the quietest place in Europe.
