15:46 Rock Grandma

"The youngsters are really helpful and wonderful", 63 year old Sirkka Pennanen from Joensuu says.
She's here at Rokki collecting bottles and enjoying the atmosphere. She recommends the festival to all older people and the best thing is pensioners get in for free. She's earned about 150 Euro from collecting bottles. In Finland you can take the empty ones back to the shop to be recycled and you get a few Cents for each one.

Sirkka says as soon as the kids have noticed she's collecting bottles they bring them straight to her and have a little chat.

She says she's been quite lonely lately and coming to the festival is almost like therapy.

"I don't have to be on my own, there are loads of people here and collecting the bottles is good excercise as well."

She's been here for the last couple of years and has had nothing but positive experiences. She's not afraid of anything as nothing bad has ever happened.

Sirkka thinks older people have got a kind of negative picture of the whole festival. After all it's the highlight of the summer events calender in Joensuu plus you can earn yourself a few extra Euro by collecting bottles. There's certainly plenty of them about!

She's not even too bothered about the noise as she used to work in a noisy enviroment.

One thing that annoys her is how prejudiced people are.

"Let the kids dress how they want...we older people shouldn't get pissed off about that", she says.

The highlight of the festival for her so far has been a sumo wrestling match.

"That was really funny!"

Live and let live.

Eija S.
Translation: Lärwi xxx

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