People living in Finland will be aware that we have had a long-running saga about whether two grandmothers should be sent back to where they came from.

Both - a Russian (of 80+) and an Egyptian (of only 60+ despite the sob-enducing grandmother label) came to join one of their offspring in Finland.

Unfortunately for them although Finnish law allows for "central" family members to join immigrant members of their family in Finland, this "central" concept includes an unrestricted number of children (and parents of underage children who came to Finland by themselves and then applied to stay) but not mothers of grown-ups.

The Russian grandmother is about to be moved to a modern Finnish-built and Finnish-supported old people's home south of St. Petersburg and the part of the cost of her stay there that is more than three-quarters of her pension will be paid by the Russian authorities in St. Petersburg after they got involved in the issue following Russian press reports.

It's the Egyptian who has caused me to find sick humour in the situation.

Despite the son saying that he is prepared to commit to paying all her costs in Finland, it was finally announced that she would be sent back last Monday.

The son knew of this and so we had - for me - the somewhat humourous statement from him to all the Finnish press that he would not answer his phone so that the Finnish police wouldn't be able to contact him to arrange the picking up for deportation.

This seemed to be a case of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand because then no-one would see it.

However this piece was bettered a couple of days later when the time came for the police to collect the grandmother. The police couldn't find the woman and the reason they gave to the papers the next day was that they had rung all the telephone numbers they had for the son and couldn't get in contact with him. So they would have to think of some other method.

Don't they read the papers?

P.S. What I found equally odd was that the son repeatedly used as an argument (in favour of his mother staying) that he was a Finnish citizen. At the same time he several times stated that he would not follow Finnish laws. ("She leaves over my dead body"; "I will not pay any fine that is imposed on me" etc.)

There seems to be a feeling that citizenship is a one-way street in which you can choose the bits you like and ignore the bits you don't like.

Today's New York Times web site includes a piece on Toyota entitled "Toyota Slows Production in Europe as Sales Lag" and saying it was partly caused by all the recent re-calls.

That prompted me - not before time - to start posting here again with something I noticed in the Finnish press a while ago.

The press guy from Toyota Finland was asked about the re-calls and he said that they were first fixing the cars that were in the showrooms because that was easiest and then when that was done they would (finally - this was already weeks after recalls in the US had gone out) get round to sending out recalls notices to their customers.

My thought immediately was that they don't get it.

Here Toyota were getting slammed in the press for internally boasting about how much money they had saved by delaying recalls in the US by as long as possible (a story at the time) and yet here was the Toyota Finland guy saying that there first priority was to save *Toyota Finland's* money by first fixing cars that no-one was driving and only later fixing the cars of that Toyota owners *were* driving.

Some people never learn.

Well I do (sometimes). No over-priced Toyotas for me when I change my car. No point in paying extra for a solid car that won't break down if it does.

It's a bit embarassing that this quote is from September 25th 2008.

"When I started this on-and-off series about my impressions of my stay about halfway up Finland, I thought it would be about slow drivers (done that one); cheap houses (started that one - needs to be continued) and the fact that there aren't department stores (to come)."

Time has gone by and anyone waiting for the department store story will still be waiting - or more likely wil have given up long ago.

So let's go back to two weeks in Kokkola in North-West Finland where there are no department stores (well nothing worthy of the name as there is neither a Sokos (or a Sokos in disguise like Wiklund in Turku) or a Stockmann).

The fact that you could buy a nice detached house with a reasonable garden within easy access of the town centre was something that led to the idea of moving there or somewhere like it to live.

But then there was the comment from my wife that it's too far away from a Stockmann department store. (There's one in Oulu which is about a two hour train ride away).

My first thought was to think, so what? But then I was informed that as all the small stores had gone out of business everywhere, the only place to find certain things was in the main Stockmann department store in Helsinki. Oulu might be OK because they could order stuff from the main branch but Stockmann was essential or life couldn't go on.

The above is exaggerating of course but the main thrust of the argument that some things weren't available in Finland outside department stores became clear when we wanted to buy a simple wind-up timer for the kitchen.

All the large malls with their modern shops - if they had such a mondane thing at all - had only completely useless and very expensive designer items that probably wouldn't work and if they did wouldn't ring enough to wake anyone up.

Sokos however (even Stockman had only designer models - a sign of the times as this was last year before they started going down market again to cope with the economic situation) had a wide selection of perfectly normal ones including even one that rang loud enough to hear and wasn't shaped like Santa.

However for me the main clincher wasn't that at all.

When in Kokkola we were in a summer house and it was cold and rainy, so of course you read a lot.

In Stockman and in Akadeeminen Kirjakauppa that belongs to it and is located where it is, they have a wide selection of both Finnish and foreign magazines and daily newspapers (typically one day late except (again) in Helsinki where you can get many on the day of publication).

In Kokkola they were hard put even to provide the Swedish language daiy newspaper for the area that covered Kokkola. So if the local library didn't have it (and to be fair the Kokkola library did have Der Spiegel) reading material in foreign languages just wasn't possible.

THAT for me was the clincher. No foreign papers/magazines; no Kokkola. Because you see moving to Kokkola was for when we were both retired (and thus had time to wander through the racks and look for a good magazine, plus time to read it).

So that made two of us. No Stockmann - no Kokkola.

P.S. Yes I know you can subscribe to the foreign magazines, but where's the fun in that? The fun is deciding whether today to go wild and buy a copy of El Pais you can hardly understand or a copy of Focus (in German) that you can understand all too well or even whether to be tempted into a two week old copy of Private Eye. *That's* why you need a department store.

There was an example in the Finnish press recently of how Finnish politicians don't think of the consequences of their actions when making decisions.

For many years the Finnish-speaking part of the population (and especially those people in the areas where there were few or no Swedish-speaking Finns) were up in arms against the fact that in order to finish school sucessfully one of the compulsary subjects that you needed to pass was Swedish (in Swedish-speaking schools this was Finnish but there was no fight against that).

This was know as "compulsary (forced) Swedish" and for many years the political party representing the Swedish-speaking Finns (which was always part of coalition governments) managed to block any changes to the rules, but finally there came the time when the boss of that party seemed to some onlookers to be more interested in being a minister (with a minister's salary and perks) than to threaten to pull his party out of the coalition on any issue and so Swedish became an optional subject for school completion - with the result that a lot of the students either didn't take the subject or if they did didn't much bother about it with obvious results in their level of competency.

That however was not the "consequences of their actions" that I mentioned above.

The consequences I meant were caused by those same politicians not at the same time changing the rules for graduation from University. It turns out that there too there was (and IS) a requirement to pass a Swedish competency exam (or however else they prove competency here) before graduating.

This has led to some Universities taking an all too lenient view of what competency means in order to graduate their students anyway, whereas in other universities students, who are now forced by Europe-wide changes into not being able to stay at University for ever, aren't able to graduate despite being wizzes in their actual study subject.

In order to avoid these problems the Universities were forced to establish special courses for studying Swedish.

The Universities then discovered that things were so bad that many students didn't even reach the level of competence needed to attend those courses and so they set up special preparatory courses that students could take in order to achieve the basic level of competence in Swedish required to take part in the real course.

While writing about this earlier this week, Huvudstadsbladet then noted that in at least one University some students' level of swedish competence was so low that they didn't even fulfil the requirements for the prepatory course for the course for students with poor Swedish.

So they set up a preparatory course for the preparatory course for the course !

Something for Private Eye, perhaps?

 

The Finnish press has been amusing itself at the expense of the young (32 when made party leader), blond, reasonably good-looking, newish leader of the social democratic party, Jutta Urpilainen.

The reason is that in the television broadcast of the local authority elections she answered every single interview question with the same hackneyed phrase that "First I would like to thank the people who worked on behalf of the party and all our voters" (something roughly like that but even longer!) before going on to put some spin on what actually for her party was a bit of a disaster.

(Vote percentage for that party down by several percentage points compared to the previous local authority elections, yet (spin) second largest party (just!) whereas they were the third largest party in the previous general election [held after the previous local authority elections].)

Said once the phrase was of course OK, but repeated every single time it quickly became less OK.

Various people have put up edited "highlights" from that broadcast on You Tube all of which consist of a slightly different question to a slightly different constellation of people and her identical starter phrase.

Finnish newspapers were not slow to pick this up (very soon over a quarter of a million people (out of a country of 5+ million) had seen the You Tube extracts) and the comment of one person to one such set of extracts that now Finland has it's own Sarah Palin.

However the best comment I read was from a Finnish humourist this weekend. It went something like this ...

"They say that blondes can only remember one thing at a time. This is nonsense. Blondes can remember many things at a time - provided they are the same thing".

... and with that I think I'll leave you ...

P.S. The Finnish elections were covered on one channel in the Swedish language and they naturally also interviewed the party leaders.

I didn't watch that channel on the night but YouTube also has a question being put to Jutta Urpilainen in Swedish and her responding in (extremely heavily accented) Swedish that "First I would like to thank the people who worked on behalf of the party and all our voters" !

P.P.S. One of the YouTube Finnish language pieces has the title "Jutta Urpilainen, part 2". In it she has changed her reply. It now goes "As I said before, first I would like to thank the people who worked on behalf of the party and all our voters"!

The prime minister returned from the economic summit in Paris to say that agreement had been reached that there would NOT be a common EU fund to bail-out banks in EU member countries.

(This was said to be because Germany, in effect, applied its veto to the idea. German sources said this was because Germany would have been expected to fork up about half the money ...)

Anyway back to Finland, the prime minister was happy about this lack of a common fund because there was no reason for Finland to support countries whose banks were in a mess when ours weren't. (I don't think he actually said "when our's aren't" but that was certainly what he meant).

Well we'll see in time if our banks aren't in any trouble. (I personally think most of them learned from the previous Finnish (and Swedish) banking problems in the early 90's not to lend quite too much money for house purchases so they may well be OK).  However this is quite a strange attitude to take for a country that is always among the first to implement even completely mad EU directives.

Especially perhaps when you consider that a lot of politicians are for NATO membership. Now why we shouldn't provide money for a fund to help other EU countries (and possibly ourselves) but should provide money and forces to help the US fight their wars (Those politicians seem to have forgotten that the head General in NATO has always been an American - which if this is supposed to be a democratic alliance is a farce after over 50 years) is beyond me.

I lived for eighteen months in Poland in communist times and soon got used to the fact that the local Polish staff in the office used to take any opportunity to celebrate anything (like name days) that gave them an excuse to go to the cake shop (yes, there were expensive cake shops in communist Warsaw) and buy a cake to bring to work. They also were careful to inform us that when it was our own name days (and of course birthdays) that they expected us to do likewise.

Now of course I live in Finland and there they celebrate officially (with the same kind of heavily creamy cake every time - ordered from the official supplier) with a rather more formal do when someone turns 50 or 60 (or leaves) and that's about it.

Well my first ever full book (on a computing subject) has just been published and I've just received my own copy of it so I thought this would give me the chance to buy some (cheaper but better than that official one) cakes and invite some old and new colleagues for coffee (bring your own) and cakes to "celebrate" that event.

Maybe it was the word "celebrate" that was wrong, but my wife (my key arbitrar in Finnish behaviour) soon put me off that idea. "You can't do that. People will think you are boasting. We Finns don't like people who show off".

So that idea was off but I'd earlier had the idea of having the same cakes (and coffee) when I reach 40 years in the computer industry (yes, it's possible even though computers were a bit bigger and just a triffle more expensive in those days) in November, so I asked her about that.

"Oh, that would be OK. You could have a copy of the book with you then."

So THEN it's OK, but not if the coffee/cakes are because I made the effort to write the darn thing.

Sometimes I don't understand the people here. (Quite often if the truth be told).

 

When I started this on-and-off series about my impressions of my stay about halfway up Finland, I thought it would be about slow drivers (done that one); cheap houses (started that one - needs to be continued) and the fact that there aren't department stores (to come).

What I didn't expect is that I'd need to write again about a school shooting.

Now the first school shooting - now just less than 11 months ago - was in a nondescript location with no particular character that was close enough to Helsinki to be mainly filled with people who actually wanted to live in Helsinki but couldn't afford to. In other words whereas it was still incomprehensible, you could just about begin to understand the "this can't be life" mentality of the shooter.

In this new case (which was very close to the route I took heading North, being not that far from the Seinäjoki of slow-moving cars I reported on last time) it happened in a genuine small town where the advanced education institute looked to be both modern and in a beautiful location (and how about that amazingly beautiful yet very modern church?!).

Yet here too, in the mind of the shooter life apparently wasn't worth living. In the old days teachers would be watching out for such students afraid that they might commit suicide. These days, it seems, the potential risks are much greater.

So, yes, the prime minister is right that hand guns need to be in shooting clubs under lock and key only - even if i remember that over 10 years ago (last time there was a stock market crash after an upswing, in fact) a woman affected by the crash had left a Helsinki shooting club with a gun belonging to the club and shot people on the street - but isn't it a bit late after this second incident, what have they been doing for the past almost 11 months?

Anyway, with sports bags so large, restricting hand guns to shooting clubs will just mean that the next time use will be made of a hunting weapon. They, apparently, aren't considered to be a problem outside clubs because they are bigger. Believe that if you will.

As for whether there will be a next time. I'm very much afraid that without a very large change in the law, there will be a next time. Now people inclined to behave in this way have TWO examples to imitate not just one.

That's it for that unpleasant subject. Next time I *will* talk about cheaper houses and the lack of department stores.

One of the other things you notice as you drive in Finnish towns that are further up in Finland is that people drive like maniacs.

Well actually not, the problem is that that don't drive like the people I'm used to in the Helsinki region and this can cause problems as they do things which people in the Helsinki region don't do.

One thing they do is drive very slowly.

We were in Seinäjoki for a day on the way up. The entire centre (so the middle plus maybe 1-2 kms in every direction) of the town had a forty kms/hour limit.

Now I imagine that you are thinking of an old town with narrow, crowded streets and imaging this speed limit was justified. Not a bit of it; these were wide boulevards often with space for cars parked on either side of the road AND two lanes still available in each direction. [Aside: they were also VERY empty of traffic]

In Helsinki such roads both don't exist anywhere near the town centre (in fact I can't recollect seeing anything so wide) and if they did exist they would be 50 or 60 limits not 40.

But that's not all. In Helsinki all the traffic would be driving at 10 kms/hour more than the speed limit. Part of this would be to allow for the car's speedometer to show slightly more than the real speed and the rest of it a calculation that the cops wouldn't bother with you if you were a mere 5 kms/hour above the speed limit. [Which - with very few exceptions like driving directly in front of a marked police car - is what is likely to (not) happen.]

In Seinäjoki, despite those amazingly wide roads, the traffic was indeed driving at 40.

Well, that's not that difficult to get used to even if it seems completely mad, but then those cars stop at pedestrian crossings without lights to let people across. Thus giving the driver of the Helsinki car driving behind then a heart attack because he had reckoned that just as in Helsinki the car in front wouldn't stop unless the waiting pedestrian in question happened to be a drop-dead gorgeous blond female (and the driver a healthy male) and even then in 50% of the cases the car in front wouldn't stop.

Because you see in Helsinki (and in the entire Helsinki area) you not only drive as fast as the speed limit says (plus 10% on the meter) but you virtually never stop for anything except a traffic light that has been at red for quite a while before you arrive at it (or another car because Helsinki does have quite a lot of traffic and thus the occasional mini jams)

Whereas it may be true that if you knock over someone crossing a non-traffic-lighted pedestrian crossing it's your fault, pedestrians in the Helsinki area are not prepared to die to prove that the driver is in the wrong so they wait at the side of the road until they can walk across the crossing without even causing oncoming cars to slightly brake.

You naturally get used to this. partly because if old (foreign) habits die hard and you do stop and wave people across, they are likely to regard you with some wariness - if that is they are looking in your direction at all and are not just ignoring you while waiting for a gap in the traffic.

It's the same thing when turning right. If there's no bicycle coming from the right or left (it can be either and those madmen don't give cars right-of-way) then you turn to the right. Further up the country the cars stop and wait for the person to cross the road even if they haven't quite made it to the corner yet.

The result was that even as a pedestrian I had a lot of problems. I was hanging around at a crossing just waiting for the cars to drive past and they didn't come past me. Yes, they were still stopped there waiting for ME to cross.

Like I said, they're mad outside the South. Certainly both as a driver and as a pedestrian I muttered to myself often enough "they're all mad".

As I wrote earlier I spent a couple of weeks halfway between here and Lapland and to do that and have a car around, I had to drive.

On the way there I started noticing odd things after maybe a couple of hundred miles.

There were two-number (and thus wide and in fairly good condition) roads in the middle of nowhere and often going it seemed from one extremely unimportant (and SMALL) town to another maybe 60 or 70 miles away. Drive across one of these roads and within it seemed 20 or 30 miles there was another of them.

I finally took one of them and it was as empty of traffic as I had imagined - I mean who actually in small, insignificant town X wants to drive 70 miles to small insignificant town Y (which - this is Finland - will have exactly the same shops and the same prices.

You'll perhaps be wondering how this situation came about. After all there are roads in Southern Finland that are in dire need of widening and have been for years.

The answer is Politics. As I wrote before the Center Party is the party of the rest of Finland. Go virtually anywhere outside the far south of Finland and the local voting areas are dominated by the Center Party (apart from a couple of larger towns - SDP - and some areas on the West Coast (Swedish Peoples Party)).

Add to that the fact the the Center Party has almost invariably been in every coalition government and you get a regular game played by the traffic ministry.

First they pick out say 5 roads that are needed to be improved (or built). Two of these will be in the south and three will be in the rest of the country. Invariably then there will not be enough money for all five and one will be dropped. That one will *always* be one of the two in the South.

In fact over the past maybe (I'm guessing, but it seems likely) 10 years that road is the road from Hanko to Helsinki which for most of its journey through Southern Finland is one lane in each way.

This road also happens to be the route taken by I think 60% of the car transporters taking new cars from the port in Hanko to Russia. That's the reason it has always been on the list; it's a very busy and very dangerous road (although less dangerous than in the early days when both the Russian trucks were of very bad condition and the drivers drove (fast) in convoys because, presumably, they were afraid of Finnish peasants attacking them (which - in case you were not aware of this - is a laughable thought - for one thing it would be hard to find a peasant!)).

Anyway the point is that this road has always been on the list for widening and has always been turned down with priority given to a road somewhere in rural Finland with about 2 cars an hour (I'm exaggerating but not by that much).

Not only that but another road that was given priority was expanding the bypass that goes around the south and west of Tampere (a city of 150 thousand people so not exactly difficult to drive through and there WAS already a perfectly good and fairly wide ring road in place) to full motorway level.

I saw this on our way back when we decided as it was a Monday not to go through the centre as we had done on the way up. Really massive roadworks solely with the intention of allowing cars to join the existing road to do so without seeing a Stop sign. A mere fraction of the sums involved would have improved the Hanko road years ago.

No doubt that was also done in the name of regionalism.

So there you have it. Not for the first time the people in the South pay the bulk of the taxes but the benefits are spread throughout the country.

Not only that but the regional areas outside the south also get subsidy payments from the larger towns in the south that have better economies.

So if you live like me in Southern Finland and drive north, whenever you see a wide empty road or a modern, large library in a very small place, just be proud that there (and not in your own backyard) is where your tax payments are going.

(and whatever you do don't look at the two garaged detached houses with extensive gardens that cost a fraction of the semi-detached house with carport and a mere scrap of land that is all you can afford in the South.)

Yesterday (the last day of August) my wife was saying that this is the last day of summer. As, at the time, it was about 12C and the sun was occasionally shining this seemed somewhat incomprehensible to me, but as with so many things she was right.

This morning when I got up to go to work it was 3C (37F) and I realised that I would have to sit in the car with the motor running for at least a minute to warm it up before setting off for work.

In other words it was already the time to move the inside heater and cable to the car and start plugging it to the timer overnight.

If that isn't a clear indication that the summer is over, I don't know what is.

I've just spent two weeks in a summer cottage about halfway up Finland so I'm planning to write a few posts comparing varying things between that part of the country and the Helsinki area.

But first those Americans and Russians ..

Most of those two weeks the weather was miserable and so despite the luxury of the summer house I ended up doing a lot of reading and finally worked my way through the books I had brought with me to the one that I bought because I ought to read it. (Actually it was bought when I was on a course in Turku and staying overnight and had thus spent rather too long in the bookshop.)

This was a Penguin book with some of the "Letters from America" of Alistair Cooke, who - for those of you who haven't been tuned to the BBC World Service for the past going on for forty years like me - broadcast for about fifty years a weekly, extremely well-written and intelligent "Letter from America" of about 15 mins length. This book contained a selection of the best ones.

I was reading one of the early ones (it's the sort of book you turn to a page at random and then read that "letter" from the start) when I realised how true one long passage is of the US Americans even to this day. You'll no doubt notice as I did the parallels to Iraq at once.

"Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves."

That was written on the 6th of May 1946! Before I was born in fact.

As for the Russians the story there is more mundane.

Apart from reading, I spent some of the rainy periods watching the TV. It was a good, new, colour flat screen TV (if small) but the only channels were the standard Finnish channels that you can get without any cable or satellite connection. So, as it was Olympics time there wasn't much choice and I ended up glancing at "sports" I rarely bother with. What I do however always watch are the athletics events and one of those was the women's javelin - which Finnish TV to their credit showed in full even though the sole Finnish competitor hadn't quite (1.5 meters) made it to the final.

It was a monster battle between a Russian and a Czech and the Czech (ranked higher) finally won right at the last breath with her final throw. Afterwards she was interviewed by a Finnish TV guy. She first pointed out that this was an important day in Czech history because it was the 40th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (something that was well known in Finland because the Finns are still proud of protesting - in an age otherwise known for being very careful not to upset the Russians - against that invasion in large numbers [of which I was a part as I was in Helsinki working as a trainee that summer and took the daughter of my landlord with me as she was keen to go but not alone] and the papers were full of details of the Finns, now high up in politics, who were student leaders at the time).

She then went on to say something like. "There I was on this historic day and I was second to of all people a Russian. I knew I just had to get past her for the whole of the Czech Republic and somehow found the strength to make a throw that beat her."

They then showed a repeat of that final throw and this time around I noticed that the other competitor who immediately rushed up to congratulate her was a Pole. It didn't surprise me.

It was odd because at the time the Olympics were happening the Russians were charging around in their tanks in Georgia and yet in an interview with a Georgian girl about competing with a Russian, she had said roughly that it wasn't *her* fault so why should I be nasty to her.

A strange contrast.

As I've reported before, in Finland cars park mainly in the open at night rather than in garages which makes it almost essential that there is a way to heat them. That way is to have internal heaters (and car motor heaters) that are powered by electricity provided by a parking meter like post with a timer that you connect you internal heater (via an outlet at the front of your car) to.

I've found that it's wise to use this system any time when the temperature is likely to go below +5C (40F) during the night as then you have both a warm engine and a warm interior.

This year I finally stopped using the system for good around the end of May and of course it then took another 6 weeks or so to get round to taking the heater and cable out of the car.

This morning, only 3 weeks later, I could have done with it again. When I got to the car to drive to work it was just 7C (43F) and had probably been less during the night. Even *inside* the office it feels freezing today.

Now Finns look forward every year to their summer. A time away from the coldness and darkness of the long winter. Usually it's worth staying in Finland for reasonable weather - yet never too hot with temperatures usually around 25C (72F).

Well this year we had about 4 days of good weather (at a time with maybe 2 other odd days that weren't bad) and the rest of the so-called summer has been a major disappointment.

So if you meet a Finn in a rainy and depressing winter European city this winter, don't be surprised if he's even more depressed (and in need of a drink) than usual. He hasn't this year got the automatic lifting of spirits that the Finnish summer usually brings.

So much for global warning ... or is this yet another of the effects? Little snow in the winter because it's a couple of degrees warmer, so everything stays dark then and yet rotten, cold, weather all summer.

I think I prefered it before.

As far as I can work out, summer this year was last Thursday and Friday.

They were the only days in the five weeks I was off work (in the traditional holiday period for people in Finland) when the temperatures were such that it actually felt hot.

("Hot" in this country means more than 25C so don't start thinking about Athens in July)

By the time I had to go back to work on Monday we'd gone however back to 10C (48F) in the morning and a fairly chilly 20C (64F) in the afternoon with the sun appearing only now and again.

Typical Finnish August weather in fact.

Can it be that those two days were it for this year?

Certainly in the mornings (when I need both a sweater and a coat to make it to the car without catching a cold) it seems like that.

Like many people who finally come to live here my first experience of Finland was in the summer. Being here in the summer always gives you a rose-tinted picture of Finland because it's in those few summer months that Finns smile and occasionally don't walk staring at the ground.

I was luckier than most because that first summer (where I "worked" (= went to office and stayed there between 8 and 4 every day) for 12 weeks in all (with a few days off in the middle for a student trip to Eastern Finland and Leningrad) I was staying in a room in a private flat that was within walking distance of the city centre and even the southern shore of the peninsular (if I walked a lot).

So I noticed Helsinki as a quiet city that was virtually empty of people.

They were all of course most of the time that I got to central Helsinki (i.e. the weekend) somewhere else (in their summer cottages or on the sea somewhere or maybe even at one of the beaches I never found when I was living there that summer).

Well now it's July and it's just the same. Everyone is away - during the week too - and if they are not at their summer houses outside the capital city area or on their boat in some archipelago or other; they are at one of those beaches that I now know about but am too old (and flabby) to visit except off-shore via canoe.

Sometimes however they are at the oddest of places.

I left home at 7:10 this morning (Sunday) thinking I'd get to the golf course (which officially opens at 8) before anyone else was up and I'd have it all to myself.

At first things looked promising. The suburban roads leading to the motorway were empty as always at that time of hour at the weekend; the motorway stretch had just me and a couple of other cars; the stretch of outer ring road had only a few cars more and the country roads closer to the golf course had only that single little red car ahead of me who was sticking to the speed limit and who I was relieved to see the back of when he/she turned off. So for the last 10kms there was just one car, mine.

I then drove past part of the new course. Empty. Happy days.

Only then I pulled into the golf club car park and it was almost full. (The expansion car park was empty but I was thinking maybe two cars and mine not almost full)

What's more it wasn't just single players like me hoping for a quiet empty course. No, there were noisy groups of 3 and 4. Men of course. All looking like ice hockey hooligans. Horrors.

Aside: Finnish men don't talk in normal circumstances but get a group of friends/acquaintances (especially in their mid thirties) doing any kind of sport and they bond by getting extremely noisy and usually are very inconsiderate of anyone around them. (They are admittedly *slightly* better once they've actually started playing golf especially if a stranger has been added to their playing group)

So, if you ever come to Helsinki in the summer, stay there. You'll enjoy a very clean city; waterfronts etc. and you'll have it all to yourselves (and all the people from the various cruise liners on their way to or from St. Petersburg).

All the Finns have taken themselves off - to summer houses; the sea; beaches; AND (to my regret) to the golf courses.

The Center Party is the party that represents by-and-large the rest of Finland. That is, most of its MPs represent rural districts.

Of course once they are MVPs they spend most of their time in Helsinki and become somewhat suspect to the people who elected them.

Not however it would seem suspect enough to not elect them next time.

So we had in the now distant past the case of a Center MVP who when he was a minister was accused of coupling a personal request for a loan to his own company with him as minister granting some aid to the bank in question.

As a result of the doubts about this he was - after a long process - finally kicked out of Parliament (something that has happened only that once in the almost 20 years I have been in Finland). However not long after there were new general elections and he stood again and the people in his rural community elected him back and he turned up again as if nothing had happened.

(He was finally not elected at the last general election, after being re-elected at least once more after that first time.)

The reason I bring this up now is because for the past couple of years (and especially the last year) the Center Party has had a general secretary who has spent most of his time making public statements that are completely out of touch with what the prime minister and other Center Party ministers have been saying publically.

So with him standing for re-election this time, there was an alternative candidate (a former minister - if I remember correctly, one who temporarily replaced a female minister while she was off "work" to have a baby) who stood on a platform of the party secretary working alongside the leader of the party rather than in opposition to him.

Needless to say, the old general secretary was confirmed in office by something like 1200 to 400 votes. Apparently the (mostly rural) voters at the party congress saw him as a representative of traditional Finnish values as compared to the "Helsinki-oriented" views of the party leaders ...

Traditional Finnish values like disloyalty to your party leader, perhaps!

This is the time of year when final year students having earlier taking their final year exams (the results of which are used when deciding who gets to which University or other further education place) get their final score(s).

It's also the time of year when based on those scores there's a league table of all the grammar schools (US: high schools) in the country and of course the competition among schools in the same general geographic area to be higher up the list than each other (even though we might be talking about halfway down the total list) is tough.

(The "dirty tricks?" are coming soon)

Now what seems to happen is that one person (or set of people) marks the tests and another (presumably more qualified) person then checks that the marks given are reasonable and if not can adjust them up or down.

What also seems to happen is that the head teachers are given the preliminary results for their school based on the first set of marks.

One head teacher (female) in a school in the West Coast of Finland noticed that in one subject 19 of her 25 pupils had been marked down by the checker. So she asked the central system who the checker was and found out it was the head teacher (female) from the next school along the coast!

As a result of the suspicion that this downgrading had been done intentionally to cause that person's own school results to have a better chance of being better, someone else was given the job of re-reviewing the same papers. As a result of that 10 of the 19 papers were put back to where they had been.

It does seem that it was a case of "hang the students from that school and their chances of getting to University, I'm going to try to make sure my school is higher up in the lists than the neighbouring school" but unless the second head teacher is taken to court and the matter judged by the lawyers, we're going to have to assume it was all just a coincidence.

At least officially.

Meanwhile I'm not holding my breath that any further action will be taken. This is Finland after all ...

I have cable television and have a digibox connected to the cable system so that I can see the transmissions (nowadays only digital not analogue) on my TV.

The cable tv system has a base set of about 11 stations (mostly Finnish) which you get (for nothing) if your digibox is connected to the cable system, but if you want more stations you need to sign up for one (or more) of various "packages" which the cable company offers where they bundle several (foreign) TCV channels together.

However in order to get those additional stations via your digibox you need to have a card that costs 20 Euros a year which tells the cable company it is you so that it knows which channels to let you watch.

Fine so far. I had a single digibox; put the card in and I got my standard channels and my additional channels.

However now that there are only digital channels available, I would only have one channel available to me at a time (before I had one analog channel and one digitial channel available) so I bought a new digibox with a hard disk that allowed me to record from two channels at a time and watch a third one (provided it was being sent by the same transponder) which to a certain extent solved that problem. My card telling the cable company it was me was of course transfered to that digibox.

The old digibox (now without card) then went upstairs where it was connected to my PC monitor which also has component input so can see TV pictures. Because it didn't have a card, I was restricted to watching only those 11 or so normal channels upstairs and the seven other channels (1 package of W. European language stations) I had access to downstairs weren't available upstairs.

But then I got a mailing from the cable company that said that they now had a "rinnakkais" (=abreast; side-by-side; parallel; even co-existent) card which would allow me to see my cable stations in another room or upstairs by adding this card to a second digibox.

This would cost 10 Euros a year so it seemed like a no-brainer even though the odds were that I would rarely watch those extra 7 stations upstairs.

The first snag was that the local place (a Stockmann store) that sold (as a reseller) the services of that cable company didn't sell that parallel card. That could only be got at one place in the city centre.

So I trapsed off there after work and found there was a massive queue with 30 people before me most of whom seemed to be negotiating new contracts in order to get cheaper recording digiboxes and thus were taking a lot of time about it.

I finally (actually less than an hour) got to one of the assistants and said I wanted a parallel card. Things were going smoothly until he said "you'll want your package on it?" which was a bit odd as why else would I want the darn thing. But this he trumped by saying that "you'll get the 9 Euros (a month) bill for that just as you do today". This second warning that things weren't right got me to react. "Are you saying that I need to pay for the package TWICE?".

That's what he was saying and so suddenly the no-brainer 10 Euros a year became 118 Euros a year just so I *could* record two of those seven channels downstairs while watching a third of them downstairs AND recording a fourth one upstairs. NOT exactly very likely and thus a complete waste of money.

As I'd spent about an hour in that queue, I asked a few questions to make sure I wasn't missing the point here, the main one of which was that if I can see those basic 11 stations without a card, what is the point of me having a parallel card if it doesn't give me access to the stations I've already paid for ?

There was no answer of course except for the fact that if I had a different package it wouldn't cost me the same amount again for use via the second card but would "only"cost me half as much again ...

Still not a convincing offer especially as I don't have (or want) any of those other packages.

So there you are. More than an hour (I had to go home from work via the centre of Helsinki rather than directly) wasted and all because the cable company's advertising of this new service was less than exact ...

I wonder how many people didn't realise they'd be charge twice for the same channel until they got the first bill. If I hadn't been half awake it would have happened to me too.

We've just been off for the yearly visit to Tenerife, the main reason of which is to tank up on sun during a period when Finland generally has none.

My other reason, which I tend not to shout about, is that I need the occasional rest from Finns and Finland (my wife is excluded from this requirement!). So for me the holiday only starts when the Finnish charter company's bus from the airport has arrived at the apartment hotel (and thus there's an end to the endless babble in Finnish from the representative about the "trips" you could make) and I've checked in.

I reduce this time by always being the first to check in - even though this time there were (shock/horror) 39 Finns checking in to the same (large) hotel compared to the usual 6 or so. My method, naturally, I'm not going to divulge here, but suffice it to say that Finns on holiday walk around as slowly as they do in Finland and any tactical brain they have has obviously been dulled by the plane journey. As (nearly) always I'd completed check in for us just before the first Finns had arrived at the check-in desk with their luggage.

Usually that's it. We have one of the same blocks of rooms as every year (an e-mail several weeks ahead of arrival works wonders) and from there you go directly to the reception and out of the building rather than having to walk through the hotel complex every time. However this time "our" apartments were not available until later in the stay and so we had a new apartment elsewhere in the complex which seemed to be in mini Finland judging by the conversations we heard in the stairs and in the chairs outside that building not to mention in the cafeteria the outside part of which we had to walk through too.

Not good then for people "needing a rest from Finns".

Anyway after a week or so we finally escaped and were back to our normal apartment in a Finn-free area.

However when the holiday was over and it was time to fly back to Finland, I noticed that a) I was glad to be coming back and b) I was very happy to be on a Finnair flight (even a charter one) with the typically very capable (if not particularly good looking) air stewardesses. An efficient baggage handling system and then a good airport taxi service at the Helsinki end completed the picture.

So ignore for at least a month or so any of my mutters about non-moving Finns blocking slow-moving escalators and slow-moving Finns with large trolleys doing their best to block my speedy way through food stores. I like them really ...

(But why can't they learn to stand on the right and to leave trolleys not exactly in the middle of passages ....)

Finnish TV showed a documentary at a prime time at the weekend that was probably made for the international audience as, despite being made by Finns, it had an English soundtrack with the English Neil Hardwick (Cambridge graduate; ex Finnish TV talk show host; occasional actor; TV and theatre director and ex-columnist in the Finnish Time/Der Spiegel equivalent) providing the sound.

It was about - what else (everybody sigh) - the sauna. Again.

My Finnish newspaper said before it was aired that it went on (ca 50 mins) for far too long and they were right. The 30 mins they suggested would have quite enough as it jumped from history to present day and back again virtually ad infinitum.

However the reason for this blog item is the soundtrack. There was a sort of underlying meaning to the way Neil Harwick read his words that gave at least me the impression that he was telling the people able to spot the nuances "yes, this is cr*p isn't it". [No doubt the Finnish people behind the film hadn't a clue.]

This if nothing else made the whole thing mildly amusing and certainly without that soundtrack the whole thing would have been boring in the extreme - do we really need to know how many saunas the Finnish UN peacekeepers built in the Golan Heights, Sinai; Gaza Strip etc. etc. ?

Oh yes, and if you are imagining lots of female breasts on show, don't. This is a Finnish documentary after all about an almost holy Finnish institution, you'll find more in any 80s German Krimi such as Derrick (or of course any 60s Finnish cinema film with Jörn Donner).

I've forgotten most of the details but the state organisation that deals with foreigners in Finland has had its name changed to reflect its supposedly new focus on customer friendliness.

The idea is that foreigners trying to get permission to live and work in Finland will in future be treated as "customers" rather than (hidden subtitle of the newspaper piece on that) as dirt.

We'll see how that idea plays out ...

That change happened at the New Year so it came too late for a couple of very qualified Russian researchers who according to the Swedish-speaking paper here (Hufvudstadsbladet) yesterday finally gave up after 14 years of barely being accepted here.

The tale is interesting because cases of Black Africans with doctorates who could only get jobs in the sorting office of the Post Office have been folk lore for years, but these are people working in a University environment who look like Finns.

The man and his wife moved to Finland in 1994 because the man - who was then working in Portland, Oregon - was offered a post at the University of Turku.

During the entire period of time until 2005 he was offered only a series of short-term contracts and his position was never made permanent. In 2005 he was told there no longer was a short-term contract and since then "he has worked without pay". What happened in 2005 was that he had requested to be paid the same rate as his fellow Finnish researchers, many of which had lesser qualifications (and, according to one comment in the article, didn't work as hard). The inference of course was that it was this requested to be treated as equal that had led to a sudden lack of a follow-up contract.

Meanwhile his wife wasn't allowed to work at all for the first couple of years before finally being granted the kind of visa that allowed this and then she too became a researcher. In the early 2000's she applied to be a Finnish citizen and had her otherwise valid application rejected because the state organisation (probably the same one that is now going to be customer friendly ....) had not accepted the qualifications of the person (at the University) who had certified that the woman spoke a "state of Finland" language (probably Swedish in her case rather than Finnish hence the above construction - either are however acceptable in Finnish law). Her appeal against this had now been (after 2 years) accepted but that only meant that she would have had to apply again.

(In the meantime the daughter (26) now working as a researcher in Brussels, but as far as I can gather with her base still in Turku - and with a degree from the Swedish-speaking Unversity there ("Åbo Akademi") had been granted Finnish citizenship earlier with no problem.)

Now that girls parents were moving back to the States, fully aware that, if they had stayed there in 1994, by now the man would long have had tenure at some US University.

It's hard for me to relate directly to this. Certainly in my previous company I was mostly treated well and as far as I know had a salary that didn't differ that much from other people with my experience. However salary isn't everything and what I have noticed is that I haven't been used for things that it would have been more logical to use me for rather than a Finn.

In that previous company, I had been the only IT person who had been involved with the entire course of a proposed purchase of a ready-made software application from a US company and had been used throughout (in addition to having a normal IT role) as a link between the Americans and the Finns. Then came the time to visit the US company and ten people were sent from my company for a week to S. Carolina - five from IT and five users. Needless to say (considering the subject here) I wasn't one of them. A couple of the IT people (and some of the users) had never even talked / listened to the Americans when they had (often) come to Finland; nevertheless they were sent to the US.

Similarly when my present company was taken over by a British-based more international company, I expected that I would be used in some kind of role for the transition projects. I wasn't. All the members of the transition projects were Finns and some of them (as I heard when I was located near a tele-conferencing room) had poor English. Nevertheless no thought was given to using someone like me as a bridge.

I'm not sure what we can blame for this. These days it is popular to say that Finland needs qualified immigrants yet at the same time there is either a reluctance to employ non-Finns in jobs which match those qualifications or a reluctance to accept any different approaches to working than standard Finnish approaches. I remember when many years ago I went for a job in Germany and the boss there said that he liked the combination of British and German IT people - roughly because the British wanted to do everything quickly with little or no planning and the Germans wanted to plan, and plan, and plan; thus the combination produced good work in a reasonable time. This wouldn't in my opinion happen here. any attempt I've made to work in non-Finnish ways and perhaps more effective ways has either been ignored or has been shot down in flames.

(In Finland it seems the concept of testing boundaries isn't known. Instead of a gentle rebuke when you in effect poke your foot just over the line (so you stop!), nothing happens. So you move the whole leg across ... and nothing happens. And so it goes on until your entire body is across the line and Bang! you are threatened with dismissal. True story.)

(Another thing that has happened to me twice (at least, I noticed it particularly twice) is that (again in my previous job) steps were taken while I was on holiday to reverse things that affected me. In one case I had spent a lot of time creating and constantly refining an Excel model that proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that buying a third-generation SAN system from H-P was better (for all reasonable variations of parameters ) over a three to five year period than buying a second-generation IBM SAN system where initial costs were lower but where maintenance started earlier and a second system would be needed earlier (etc.). When I came back after holiday my boss had replaced my model with a different extremely simple spreadsheet which ignored all parameters and just simply listed the rival quotes for Year 1. That same boss had a year earlier agreed with me before my holiday a division of work with a Finn only to announce publically on the day I was back (with me hearing this then for the first time) that two/thirds of what had been agreed was my responsibility were to be dealt with by the other person. I don't know if this is part of the same Finnish trait (as in the testing boundaries story) of not wanting to face up to unpleasantness or not.

Whatever, I look forward with interest to seeing whether renaming a state organisation will have any real effect on the "customer-friendliness" of the Finns staffing it. Somehow I doubt it.

At 8:30 *AM* I'll be going to the office "party" of the company I work for. They will be serving porridge and there will be no doubt a short pep-talk from the divisional boss.

We also yesterday got our "Christmas present". It was a book token that had to be used for one of 8 books all of which were in Finnish.

Both are thus better than nothing (my Finnish wife got to pick a book) but not exactly worth writing about.

So why do I ?

Simply because it reminded me of the norm in my companies in Germany. Typical of that time were four things.

1. There was an extra month (or month and a half) salary at Christmas time. (Beats a book token for a single book ...)

2. Each working group had a restaurant lunch in December (during the week) paid for by the company. Food and wine/beer - lasting about 90 mins.

3. The place where we ate our normal office lunch had a special meal with free (good) wine.

4. There was an evening out somewhere for all the company - food, dancing.

2, 3, and 4 beat a bit of porridge and half-an-hour break from work, don't they !?

P.S. I was wrong. The short pep-talk was about a sentence with no pep. But we had to wait about 20 minutes before the porridge (which was rather good and which in England would be called "rice pudding") because of first a couple of interlude music piano solos (from an ex-boss of mine) and then several Christmas songs from a small choir. When I then woke up we could go and collect our porridge.

P.P.S. It's now almost three years since a group of ca 100 people from my previous company were outsourced to this one and today - just as with any occasion for the whole company - it was still 100% obvious that we would all sit together (free choice of table) rather than with the people we now work with. I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the respective company spirit.

Much as I'd prefer to avoid the issue altogether and wish it had never happened, yesterday's shooting in a grammar school (lukio) in a semi-rural area north of Helsinki happened and needs at least to be mentioned here.

I first heard of it when I got home and turned on the BBC which I suppose indicates that no-one was discussing this at work and probably most people were unaware of it until they got home and turned on the regular news broadcasts.

After the BBC picked it up in their one hour news program and had included an interview with a Finnish doctor in charge of a quick response team and who seemed to be purposely trying to be as vague as possible, I turned on the TV and none of the Finnish channels had a special program on this (although of course there were some teletext reports).

When the news finally came on there was yet another interview with a person who seemed to be avoiding giving details and he then finally gave up and said something like "the police haven't told me what I am allowed to say and what not".

Meanwhile the statement on the situation from the police included a phrase like "there seems to be no more danger of any more shooting".

At the time this statement was issued the shooter (to remind you of at the figures late yesterday: 8 dead (headmaster; 5 girls; 2 boys); ca 20 injured some critical), who had shot himself in the head, was in critical condition and would that night die of his wounds. (The daily free paper had the headline next day  "shooting suspect dies" - carrying on this cautiousness with words that has been a (negative) feature of all of this.)

So the police seem to have forgotten the need for openness but the government system swung into action and within hours there were hot lines set up for the counseling of both school children and parents; a press conference from the government etc. (as well as from the police which I mostly missed but I guess they were still blocking and being evasive).

So Finland is being as efficient as usual but I have to wonder about the police. It's hardly their fault this happened so why all the evasiveness when dealing with it. Why not just say right out "The shooter has shot himself in the head and is in the hospital in critical condition" rather than "it seems there is no danger of more shooting" and why still call someone identified by masses of co-students a "suspect" ? It's beyond me but then I'm not in the police.

P.S. The eight shot dead by "the suspect" are of course a tragedy but I was using early figures when saying above "20 others, some critical". One is said to be critical while they rest are said to have cuts from glass (from jumping out of windows ??).

Some people are very sad at the moment and wondering to themselves "why didn't I wait".

These are the people who have just traded in their car (perhaps a 5-10 year old one) and bought a new car.

They have namely just lost a lot of money compared with doing that in 2008 (or in the rest of 2007 but valid from the 1st of January 2008).

The reason is that the level of car tax has been drastically changed.

But first most of you probably need to know about Finnish car taxes. Finland has a two-tiered system of taxes on any new cars bought here. There is the standard Value-Added tax (over 20% - I can never remember what exactly, 22% at the moment I think or is it 24?) that applies to everything, but there's also a special Car Tax.

This car tax used to be something like 122% (yes, really) and long ago the Finnish government realised that as a part of the Europe Union this wasn't going to work for long so they a few years ago decided on a plan of gradually reducing it.

The first reduction was about 10% (so car tax was then something like 110%) and all that happened was that within several months the car companies increased their pre-tax prices for cars being sent to Finland and most of that "gain" was lost.

So governments (quick to learn in this case) obviously realised that gradual change of tax levels wasn't going to work and started wondering about alternatives.

Now, several years later, the change has come and it's a big one. It also came without warning and is valid from the beginning of 2008.

The rate of car tax is now related to the amount of emissions from the car. So a small car with a diesel motor has typically the smallest amount of tax and efficient small engines (such as VWs new 1.4 TSI engine) are "better" than larger engines producing the same amount of power but with higher emissions.

The change in rates is dramatic and it also means that most cars have a lower car tax rate than before (so savings are said to be between 1 and 5 thousand Euros per car for most models) with only a few large cars with large engines having (heavily) increased car tax levels.

What this also means is of course than the price of used cars goes down - especially that of those reasonably large cars than have not seen their sticker price increased (as there will be from 2010 increased yearly road tax charges for them).

So imagine if you may someone like me (in 4 years in my case) who is planning to trade in a 10 year old car for a new one.

Done last month I'd have got a small allowance for my old car and will have paid todays price (at 110% car tax + 22% normal tax) for a new car. I won't have considered the yearly car tax when deciding which new car to buy because last month the yearly road tax was the same for all cars.

Done on the 2nd of January 2008, I'll still get the small allowance for the old car (because at that level 10% makes little difference) but I'll probably chose a car that has its price reduced by anything between 3 and 5 thousand Euros (and it will be one that will not have a high yearly tax rate from 2010).

No wonder people who did such deals last month are not happy today.

The ones that are of course are the people who bought large petrol-guzzling SUVs. They are in some cases saving tens of thousands of Euros (and no doubt there will be a rush to sign contracts for that kind of car in what's left of this year - no wonder the car sales people are smiling).

P.S. One of the people responsible for the public transport system in the Helsinki area has already pointed out one of the risks with much lower car prices - it suddenly becomes feasible to have more cars per family. I take that even further and say that the risk is that we have large increased population of young drivers. I've seen when I was in Germany that 18-25 year old males (usually males) are involved in a large percentage of car accidents and that hasn't been a major factor here because of the cost of getting into the car market (as high initial prices obviously rip down into high prices for used cars except the really old - and they need expensive repairs). Bad times ahead and not just for the bus companies.

In a quiet moment recently (and don't ask me why, but it was while I was waiting for an installation to finish!) I checked what would happen if I typed "Alexander Stubb" into Google.

Not surprisingly this active MEP's own site came first and it was followed by a wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stubb

which contained one glaring mistake ...

When talking about Alexander Stubb's languages (which are many and good) it said that he "spoke Swedish, English and German in addition to French and his native Finnish".

WRONG, completely wrong !

Alexander Stubb is a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and therefore his native language is Swedish.

Naturally he also speaks Finnish because he comes from the part of Finland where Finnish is the dominant language, but his native language is Swedish and he almost certainly (not mentioned in this article which started at graduating from an American college) went to schools in Finland where the teaching is done in Swedish (and where Finnish is the first "foreign" language).

Of course this makes me wonder who wrote the article. They seem to have found a good source of information because the article is detailed enough but the article can't have been written by a Finn because even the many Finnish-speaking people who voted for him in the MEP elections were all well aware that he came from the Swedish-speaking minority (and it didn't bother them).

If you now go to the site you will hopefully (unless this has been "corrected" back) see an accurate text as far as languages go, because naturally I corrected it (along with a few minor typing errors).

P.S. It's nice to be right on occasion. One of the references after the article itself is to Alexander Stubb's abridged c.v (on his own web site). In it you will find something that was considered unimportant to the (US American?) writer of the main text in that he/she while including Mr Stubb's matriculation from an American high school (in 1986) didn't bother to mention that he two years later matriculated from a school in Finland. That school according to Mr Stubb himself was "Gymnasiet Lärkan, Helsinki, Finland" Readers with Swedish will know that "Gymnasiet" is the Swedish word (including a "the") equivalent to the German "Gymnasium" (the Finnish word is "lukio") , and that Lärken (also Swedish - for "the lark") is a well-known Swedish school in Helsinki.

I put three new computer books that I had in duplicate on the desk of a guy who I knew was interested in the subject (with a note explaining the gift).

He works mainly in a different location so I didn't see him for several weeks (during which time the books disappeared), but I did expect to get a thank you note by e-mail.

Did I ? Of course not.

I was then there when he by chance was in the same location. I left the subject of the books until the late afternoon to give him the chance to thank me for them. Nothing. Even when I finally mentioned them towards the end of the day, all I got was a confirmation that he had them. No thanks.

The next time I had a book copy to give away I of course decided that someone else would get it. Again someone for whom the book would be useful. So this time I asked this new guy first if he'd like a signed copy of "Real World Computing SharePoint 2007" (which is what this one was) and he said he would. I sent it by internal post with a personal (and nice) dedication.

Did I get a "Thank You" message by E-mail? Of course not.

If I ever come across him, will he thank me then ? I doubt it.

P.S. Two and a half weeks later I got a thank you e-mail (for the single book). Maybe he's been on holiday ...

All experienced drivers know the feeling. Some places are so well known to you that you drive by memory.In particular you turn at the same point.

Now naturally you have your eyes open so you'll notice having started your turn that a bicycle is coming and you'll have to let it past first but otherwise the turn is just automatic.

Occasionally, though, events conspire to make this not a good idea.

Today was one such day for me.

I drive to work at such a time that the roads are almost empty which leads to all the cars driving at ca 10kms above the speed limit (which tends to be within the area the police let go). This morning, though, I was in a 50 km/hour limit behind a woman who was driving at 40 km/hour so by the time I pulled into work I was a couple of minutes later than usual (and more irritated).

So that was one factor.

The second factor was that one job has finished and so rather than driving into the parking garage as I have done for the past n Tuesdays I was driving into the parking area at ground level as all I was doing was filling an Ikea bag with stuff from my desk and then heading for my normal office in another building rather than working for the day there. Of course I could have also put the car in the parking garage anyway (there's a lift direct to the office) but for some reason (probably saving a couple of minutes driving time) I didn't - more's the pity.

The third factor was that just as I arrived near to the parking area a truck was leaving so I turned left at my usual remembered point just behind it.

The fourth and crucial factor was that in the six months since I had last driven to the parking area they had put up an additional high curb stone to slow traffic coming into the parking area. So you had a normal curve of curb stone (from before) and then an additional *straight* one.

Because of the truck I didn't see it.

Result one tyre/tire that immediately blew and is naturally irreparable.

Luckily I am a member of the Finnish Car Association and have paid extra for free roadside assistance and that includes one tyre change a year. Also luckily I had no difficulty in noticing what the problem was right away (!) and had a row of parking spaces I could put the car in.

So it was grab the mobile phone; ring the number on the card I have with me for that additional service and wait (in -2C so not so bad). After about forty minutes a large towing truck arrived and the guy changed the tyre at no cost to me.

Good, efficient, Finnish service.

So now I have no spare so I'm going to put forward the change to winter tyres; have the same spare in the boot over the winter and then in spring when it's time to change back I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy two new summer tyres.

But for now at least the panic is over - at least until I notice steering problems caused by that almighty bump (I haven't so far, but I've only driven about 1km). Now that I really hope doesn't happen. Paying for 2 new tyres three months after buying 4 new tyres is one thing. But paying major money for steering work because they added a curb stone in a stupid place is another.

P.S. I think I'm OK on the steering issue. Looking back at it I think I only just clipped the edge of the curbing stone with my left tyre. certainly there was only one bump not two so only the front left tyre went over the stone not the rear left.

Note that this is just a single row of curbing stones (serving no useful purpose apart from making your turn more difficult and thus (if you see it!) slower) so your car goes up onto the stone then immediately down after it. In other words I'd have noticed if I'd gone up down then up down again. So, thinking about how a car turns I was obviously very unlucky - turning a fraction of a second later and the whole car would have missed the curbing stones completely; a few fractions of a second earlier and I might well have hit them straight(er) on with no burst tyre.

Still I prefer to use my bad luck up on such a thing. A group of colleagues from a previous work place were in a car waiting normally at a traffic light when a truck ran into them. Result: one dead; one off for six months and one off for a year; back for a few months and then forced to retire because of ill health (at about 45). I'll bet they spent more than one twitchy day (which is what I'm having) wondering what if they had set off earlier; not slowed for the light etc. etc.)

P.P.S. I was back at head office yesterday (I walked!) and had a good look at the set of curbstones. Although the curbstones were mostly rounded at the edges, there was one place (or a building error?) that had probably been hit earlier so that one stone wasn't plane with the rest of them which left just one place where there was a nasty very pointed edge free. Guess what I must have hit ? So it really was a question of a fraction of a second in that turn. Bad luck.

We reached another couple of stages in the approach to winter.

First there started to be items in the newspapers about changing to winter tyres/tires and the various car magazines had their yearly test of winter tyres/tires,.

The rules in Finland are "simple but". Simple is that you must change to winter tyres by the 1st of December. Simple too is that the first day you are allowed to change is the 1st of November. Simple that is but for the fact that you can change to winter tyres earlier than that "if weather condtions demand it".

This has led to the commonly known statement if you are stopped by the police (and my experience of the Finnish police is that you have to be doing something seriously wrong if they stop you while *they* are moving (speed traps and alchohol road blocks excluded therefore) and hearing that you have winter tyres on 5 days ahead of the deadline isn't likely to stop them in their tracks) you just have to say that you are driving to Lapland at the weekend. What could be more "weather conditions demand it" than that?

Anyway that was one sign. The other was more mundane. For the first time since summer I had to connect my car to the electric motor/car warmer in the middle of the morning. Usually I leave it on overnight when there is a risk of frost and it is set to start heating at around 5 for two hours and then stop. Today I knew I was going to leave at 10:40 and didn't bother so at 9:30 I had to head to the car port and plug the thing in (and change the time so it would start right away).

I've followed the way trades unions negotiate in Finland with interest and over the years I've noticed one thing.

The fattest and ugliest trades union bosses are always the ones who are the most extreme.

I suppose it has something to do with them not being loved for themselves but only for the pay rises they screw out of the companies.

The previous example of this was the guy behind the paper-makers strike in the summer of 2006 (2005?) which must go down on record as the most unnecessary ever because they were trying to stop the inevitable closing down of money-losing mills.

Usually the theory has applied to men as most trades union bosses *are* men.

But occasionally you can apply the theory to women and this year we have a real humdinger.

The trades union Tehy (led by a very large woman) has just demanded a pay rise of 24% over 28 months where everyone else has been satisifed with a still high ca. 10-12% over 2-3 years.

Now everyone is aware that the nurses (who they represent among others) need their pay adjusted upwards, but not all at once.  A thinner better-looking woman might have realised this and taken a sensible long-term approach but not of course the leader they have.

All she's achieved so far is to lose most of the public goodwill her members had and the method of "strike action" which is mass resignations isn't likely to get that public goodwill back as hospitals lose all their ability to cure.

Most nurses are nothing like her size. Pity their leader isn't too.

P.S. I wonder at these 12% (over 3 years) figures. They then say 3.5% in the first year; 2.5 in year's two and three. (something like that anyway). Wouldn't that in most countries be called a 3% pay rise ? Is it just a way for the companies to give relatively little and the trades union people to say "look how much we got for you" ?

P.P.S Of course these opinions of female beauty (and male uglyness) are mine only, as is the above "theory". I remember going to dances at University with a guy from Nigeria because his idea of a fine looking woman was a somewhat (!) larger woman than mine and so neither of us had problems in deciding which girl (of 2) was for each of us.

They said there might be snow in Southern Finland today (12th October !) - now doesn't that make you want to come and live here?! - and I suppose we can say they were just right.

I went namely to the shops in Tapiola and more specifically to Stockman where it was the third day of their semi-annual Yellow Days where they *theoretically* have specially low prices and the store is packed.

Even it seems on a Friday morning, although my wife tells me if was even fuller on the first day (Wednesday) at about 10. She wondered where all the people came from because the crowd wasn't composed of obvious pensioners but of people you'd expect to be at work or at school at that time.

These days I go once; buy a packet of biscuits that you maybe can't get during the rest of the year and that's about it. As I wrote above the prices are only theoretically cheaper. I saw a TV in their catalogue and went straight to the web site of a computer/video store to check it out and it was cheaper in that store by a couple of hundred.

Where was I? Oh yes, snow. We finally left the Yellow Days and headed across the small walking area outside in the direction of the second department store (during the Yellow Days at Stockmann, empty!) and then we noticed that the rain we had been walking under to get to the bus to get to Tapiola had now changed to snow. Very wet snow that wouldn't have stuck on the walking area's surface even if that hadn't got heating under it, but snow (of a sort) nonetheless.

It didn't last long there but a bit further away from the sea (and thus a bit colder) maybe it lasted a bit longer because there were a few reports on the radio of the inevitable minor traffic accidents.

Not a problem for me. The bus got us home again and on the same ticket too (valid up to 60 mins after getting in the first bus - or is it 75 mins, I can never remember).

P.S. The comments are about the fact that "Yellow Days" is wrong and the translation is in fact "Crazy Days" or "Mad Days". Yellow is the prominent colour with them packing everything you buy in very garish Bright Yellow bags with dark black letters and the personnel wear Yellow T-Shirts and the ceiling hangings are bright yellow too. (An easy mistake to make, in other words )

No, there's still no snow and, No, the temperatures weren't below zero overnight so I didn't have to put the car on the heater (but I did anyway because it's really nice to get into a warmed up (motor and inside) car at 6 o'clock (AM) rather than one that isn't).

In fact the real sign that summer is over and that winter is just around the corner is that I didn't have a hat on when going for a walk at about 7PM yesterday (or even in my pocket) and I realised i should have had.

This also makes me realise that I also have a number of hats (bobble hats) of different thickness and covering different areas (more/less) of my head (and of course easier or less easy to push into a pocket). They don't take up quite the space of those 10 or so jackets, but I should have mentioned them yesterday I suppose.

By the way, did I mention the different material; thicknesses and length of my scarves .... ?

The last blog (in August) was about the signs that the summer is really over.

It's worth considering that there are benefits to the fact that there are four clear seasons here.

The main one being I suppose that you don't need the Christmas holidays to remind you that you are getting a year older.

The disadvantage is that you have to keep an amazing amount of clothes to be able to cope with them all. I must have about 10 jackets/coats because there has to be something for 20C or so (0F) and there also needs to be something for plus 25C (72F) but windy and just about everything in between. (Not to mention underwear, sweaters etc. ...)

At the moment we are in the short autumn period. This seems this year to mean that it rains ALL the time. Today it excelled itself and any coat would have been soaked in minutes and any umbrella (apart from a very large golf one) would have meant that your head might have stayed dry but not much of the rest. (I drove)

The other fun part of this autumn period is that it always ends with an unexpected snow storm leading to chaos on the roads. (Chaos being somewhat of an overkill description compared to the situation in the UK or even in most parts of Germany when it snows for the first time - has anyone else spent several hours heading up the hill to the Roman ruins after Bad Homburg that first snow day? - but even so).

I've written before here that this unexpected snow storm always seems in the Helsinki area to occur on the 1st of November, but yesterday (and it was only the 7th of October!) the TV weather forecast promised snow for Central Finland on Wednesday and a risk of snow in Southern Finland (which includes us) on Friday/Saturday. I'll believe that when I see it, but if it does come and I'm at work when it happens, the best thing will be just to leave the car here and head home by bus - either that or leave very early or very late. Of course that isn't really an alternative on a Friday (as like most people I need a car at the weekend) so naturally that's when it's going to happen if at all.

----------------------

Meanwhile on a completely different note, I see that Daimler-Chrysler have - after an extensive study I would guess, anything else would be very un-germanic - made the bold decision to change their name to, uhum, Daimler.

This reminds me of something a friend sent me about his international company's name change

"Over the last few years we have taken a number of important steps to create a leading European XXXX XXXX company with a strong international network. Read more about what XXXX writes regarding our company name change."

That change (= important step) was a similar one to changing Daimler-Chrysler to Daimler! So now you know why management gets the big bucks ...

 

My wife remarked yesterday when we were out walking and saw a flock of birds (feathered ones that is) that this means summer is almost over.

Not being particularly interested in wild life (the reason I mostly canoe by myself is to avoid those innumerable pauses when some woman in the party (and, yes, it's almost always a woman) wants to stop paddling and look at some bird or animal). a flock of birds isn't the signal of the end of summer for me.

Instead I have more mundane things that warn me summer is almost over.

Starting the car in the morning for instance ...

Summer is over when you have a slight hick before the engines turns over and when you have to sit in it for about half a minute for the engine to warm up properly before you can set off. (Autumn is over when starting without having plugged it (the motor heater) in overnight to the electric supply is running the risk of it not starting at all).

That (slight hick) happened this week ... (so mid-August)

The other sign (as even if i don't look at wild life, I do keep my eyes open when out) is that women by-and-large stop wearing skirts and dresses and go back to trousers. This seems to happen later than the car signs but that's maybe because  most of the skirt wearers  are hoping against hope that the weather will pick up again.

Sometimes it will too. Usually just (see previous blog) as I'm about to travel abroad to catch the sun.

There are lots of ways to survive Finland as a non-Finn. One, I suppose though I've never tried it, is to be permanently drunk knowing that the social system will probably ensure that you have a roof over your head and just about enough money. (In case you were thinking of this life style then even the Finnish social system doesn't cover everyone otherwise there wouldn't be any homeless here would there - and there are, although not begging on the streets I'm glad to say).

The main method is to make sure that you spend the whole summer (a period of (being very generous) roughly June, July, August) here.

I virtually knew that the stay in Finland of a semi-relation of mine was doomed when she arrived with her kids and Finnish husband in August (so summer gone for that year) and announced that she was spending the next summer in Canada. (and it was doomed as she is now back in Canada and the Finnish house is sold)

We foreigners need the entire summer here in order to put up with the winter and also to give us a respite from the less friendly Finns we meet during the long non-summer. (We also need at least a couple of weeks in mid-winter to get a sun boost - and also the above boost too - but that's another story).

You see the summer is when Finland comes into its own. The people are open and friendly - not closed and not at all friendly which they tend to be in the winter if you don't know them. The temperatures are pleasant wihout being overpoweringly hot; lakes and/or sea are close by; walks in the woods are pleasant; the roads are good quality and mostly empty and in fact the whole place seems empty as lots of the inhabitants disappear off into their (these days you can no longer say "primitive") summer cottages and half of the rest go abroad.

Meanwhile your intelligent foreigner if he/she chooses to go abroad at all apart from that winter trip, goes in early May or September in what often turns out to be a vain attempt to extend the summer. (It's amazing how good the weather in Finland is at the beginning of September the one year you decide to go South then - and of course how bad it is when you decide not to)

So there you are. It's simple. Survive Finland and the Finns by being here all summer.

Or in fact do as many Finns do and live abroad the rest of the year. Now that's a thought ...

In most families in Finland both parents work. They can do this because there is a well-established system of day-care centres at reasonable prices.

These reasonable prices come about because the people working in the day-care centres are, by all accounts, despite (as is typical for Finland) being well trained for the job, badly paid.

If all the places in the official day-care centres are taken then there's a second-level option which is private day care. This is something that seems (from my local experience where we've had two such cases) to be done as a side-earner by fairly new mothers on maternity leave with their own newish children.

But back to the local authority day-care centres. They have fairly restrictive rules for dropping off and picking up times which often leads to one parent dropping off a child on the way to work and the other parent picking them up on their way home. It's always amusing when at a seminar with guest speakers from abroad there are suddenly quite a few people (usually men) leaving mid-way through because it's time to pick up the kids. (It's quite handy actually as cover for when the speaker is driving you mad with his German accent or boring speaking style - but don't tell anyone I told you that).

Most day-care centres are shut throughout the entire month of July when the whole country takes holiday from work even if (as in my case) they'd prefer not to. (In my case the company's customers are all off on holiday so there's not much paid work to do for them and thus we are "encouraged" to have summer holidays then too).

However this week is the beginning of August on Wednesday so (by some very peculiar rule thought up by a Mon-Fri fetishist) the day care centres are open on Monday and Tuesday as well despite those days being in July.

(Don't worry, I'm getting to the mad charges)

So my friend's wife, keen to have the final week of her holiday in peace said she'd take their 2 year-old in on Monday. Luckily my friend had his wits about him and she will in fact now take the 2-year-old in first on Wednesday (1st of August).

Why? Because the payment rules for these day-care centres are that even if the child is only there for ONE day in a calendar month, a full monthly charge (ca 200 Euros or 270 US dollars) is made.

This sort of madness is in fact very familiar to me because in Sweden my son was also in day care but his day-care place was only a half-day place (almost everyone else had full day places but for reasons I won't go into here the half-day place was all the local authority would grant in my case). I had to pay as much for a half-day place as I would have paid for a full-day place!

There have been a few things in the papers recently about the difficulty of getting a job in Finland if you don't speak Finnish.

According to a Polish journalist who was sent here (while other colleagues were sent to other EU countries) while people are quite happy to interview you in English they then won't offer you even a cleaning job if you don't speak and write Finnish.

One of the odd things she reported was that having had an interview she was asked to fill in an application form. She couldn't because it was only in Finnish.

My suspicion is that it IS possible to get a job in Finland if you only speak English, but that it has to be a job in your field; has to be for a multi-national with factories in your country (and the desire to send you back there later). In such a case - and provided you interview while you are still in a quality job in your own country, you might avoid this need to speak Finnish.

If however you are already in the country you are firstly only considered suitable for menial jobs and then there's also this Finnish-speaking requirement.

Of course this is being far too general, but I suspect there's a lot of sense in it.

I, on the other hand, almost didn't get a job in Finland when I applied while living in Germany in a quality job, because I did speak some Finnish (which was worse than I thought it was) and expected this to be an advantage. It was only when I'd clearly messed up one interview by making sure that was known, that I decided that future interviews would be in English only which led to me getting a couple of job offers. But if I'd only had one interview, speaking Finnish would have meant that I wouldn't have got a job in Finland. Ironic isn't it?

The other thing that has been in the paper was a story about the American husband (of someone who had lived in Finland for a while before moving on to the US) greeting everyone he met with a friendly "Good Morning" only to have people look away or look at him as if he were mad.

This was the Helsinki area of course. In the country *and in the summer* people might have replied but not here. I don't actually think that particularly odd. I doubt that people in say New York would regard someone saying "Good Morning" to everyone they meet as particularly sane. Certainly in the large towns and cities in Europe that I've spent most of my working life in, it isn't done.

So that was a particularly stupid example in my view and hardly worth writing about. What does intensively annoy most foreigners is that they get the same response when exchanging a casual sentence or two when at a more common location for such a conversation (or rather when *trying* to exchange a casual sentence or two)

At a bus stop say. In England no-one would take amiss at a normal attempt for a small chat while waiting for a bus. Here you'd speak and they would almost invariably look straight through you as if hadn't said anything.

This is why people in the cash desks in this country always say the same phrases to all their customers. They need to be trained to do so. Casual random chatting with customers just wouldn't happen otherwise.

If you think about it it's also the reason why the "ha ha" semi-humorous small chat between the two (man and woman of course) news anchors always seems so forced. It is forced. They have to practise it for hours as a casual remark to each other at the end of the program would otherwise be beyond them.

A "relative" of mine (by marriage x 2) wrote in her blog before she quit Finland after less than a year of a planned two year stay that maybe if she'd lived in the countryside she could have had more normal contact with strangers. She's wrong, I'm sure, she's mainly (only?) been in the country in the summer - even Helsinki people occasionally speak in the summer ... Just not to people walking towards them and saying "Good Mornng".

When I moved to Finland we had neighbours who spent most of the summer away.

They'd travel on Friday evenings to their summer house; come back on Sunday evenings and spend a solid block of five or six weeks holiday at that summer house as well.

Add to that the fact that all the houses nearby had children who were teenagers (or had left home) and therefore the swing and sandpit area just beyond the bottom of our garden was empty all the time and you had an idylic time most of the summer that I supposed I should have realised was not going to last for ever.

When our neighbours (with one quiet teenage son) moved away they were replaced by a family of five with three young children. They had no summer house and especially that first summer they spent most of their time in their garden (adjoining ours) - unfortunately with a plastic swimming "pool" that their daughter delighted in splashing and screaming in.

For a couple of years it was a nightmare but as always children grow up and start behaving more normally (and especially more quietly) and now for the past couple of years the only minor problem in the summer has been the fact that if I move myself and a couple of books onto our terrace, you can bet your life that within minutes at least of couple of the (five people) neighbours will go onto their terrace which by an amazing feat of bad design (but typically Finnish) is built (like the balcony above it) right alongside ours and thus they are a foot or so away from me (behind a wooden wall/fence)

I'm alone so I'm quietly reading a book and disturbing no-one. They are almost always at least two so talking now and then. Usually quietly but the comparison to the total silence there was just before is noticeable.

Last year I then just moved to the front garden where there were a second set of chairs set up, but that was a nuisance because of course I had to go in; lock the back (terrace) door from the inside; go out at the front door (not forgetting my keys) before I could settle in again.

Now, however, as I discovered yesterday evening I have a new and very effective option.

I simply put on the very effective (and expensive) Boss noise-reduction headphones that my mother bought me for my birthday recently (that ended in a "0" so she wanted to get me something special).

Even though they let some sound through of course, they proved to be very effective in giving me the same level of almost total peace I had many years before. They probably wouldn't work if the neighbours were shouting at each other, but as I wrote above they are considerate and speaking quietly and so the Boss headphones seem to get rid of almost all their speech.

Not bad considering they were bought for air flights ...

(and they are also quite effective (not 100%) in drowning the noise of the neighbour's son praticising the piano [which my normal headphones only succeeded in amplifying the sound of compared to no headphones at all, which was a disaster when I was listening to classical music (in the quieter parts) as the tinkling of the piano came through - listening to rock music was no problem....])

There was a rather charming short 30 minute "visit" by Bettina S. of the swedish-speaking TV here in Finland to the Finnish Ambassador in Athens who in an earlier life was a politician who had been a minister several times and also head of the Swedish-speaking People's Party.

He'd then moved sideways (?) straight into the job of Finland's Ambassador to Norway (by comparison the recent Ambassador to Great Britain was the former head of the larger (four times larger) Conservative party) and after the standard four years there he'd moved to become Ambassador to Greece and he was now into the last six month period of that time - after which no doubt he'll retire (he's that age I suspect).

He is not your typical Ambassador that's for sure, getting up at 6 summer and winter (11C) to swim in the residences pool before taking the bus to the embassy (and as he claimed passing some of his colleagues in their chauffeur-driven cars on the way!) and the clothes he had chosen to meet the film team (Bettina S. + cameraman + sound guy) were slacks and an open-neck shirt worn outside the trousers. (Like most Finnish men of that age he is rounder than he should be).

Still he seemed to know his recent Greek history even though his language claims were quickly put to the test by Bettina S. when they tied a rapid death and he also had selected a park/hill to take them to which indicated he had an idea of its geography (Athens at least too).  His method for quickly learning his way around in Athens was very familiar to me from my early days in Budapest. I'd take out the cinema guide; find a film I wanted to see irrespective of where it was playing at and drive there. Invariably I'd get lost several times on the way and need to stop and pull out a map, but very quickly I found myself doing that less and less often as I soon had the general picture of Budapest imprinted on my brain. Because of the traffic differences (in Communist times in Budapest in the early 70s there were few cars) the Ambassador did his driving and getting lost expeditions mostly on Sundays but the technique was still the same (although they didn't mention on what basis the destinations were chosen).

Now those mis-interpreted statistics ..

During his time in Athens they had moved to a new embassy in a modern high-rise building and he got to design the layout. He decided on an open-plan office for all (actually including the ambassador but wiser spirits said maybe the next ambassador wouldn't like it so he accepted having walls around his own space) because that for him indicated the openness of present Finnish society. (Something we could question in its "openness" to immigrants of which compared to most other W. European and especially Nordic countries the percentage is low)

Bettina S. commented that some people don't like open-plan offices and his reply was that half did and half didn't so someone was not going to get their choice.

My own feeling is that that position is too simplified. People who are against open plan offices will tend to be very strongly against them (as I am following some horror days in such a place) whereas very few of the pro-open office people will be as strongly in favour of them.

In Statistics lectures they called what he didn't do "weighting" if I remember correctly ...

The new Finnish cabinet can be summed up in three phrases

- blackmail pays off

- women majority

- best-looking woman in previous cabinet dropped

I suspect the third one won't be on many people's lists but I thought that she was quite a good Culture minister and not the stupid ex-Miss some of her critics would have you believe. A couple of times I saw welcome signs of a sense of humour where other ministers in true Finnish style seem to be po-faced all the time. There was at one time some talk of her spending time late one night (at a party conference) in the room of the party leader (and prime minister). I think we can safely say that - as was said at the time - nothing happened. Conspiracy theorists would probably say that dropping her was the prime minister's revenge for that lack of "action" whereas in fact it was probably caused by a large loss in her personal vote in the latest election compared to the previous one (although that vote loss almost certainly happened because the PM switched constituencies and was this time in the same one as her, leading them to divide her old vote between them).

The first item in the list above refers of course to the unbelievable act of the PM in proposing the former many-years Foreign Minister (in the era of the Soviet Union) for the job of Foreign Trade minister. This amazingly big-headed ex Foreign Minister (Paavo Väärynen) from Lapland had first of all been a candidate for election to the Finnish parliament at the same time that he was an elected member of the European parliament but had then once elected to the Finnish Parliament as well had refused to register as a new member of that parliament unless he was given guarantees that he would become either Speaker of the Parliament or a Minister - otherwise he'd abandon his membership and just carry on as a Euro MP (you can't be both so registering for the Finnish parliament would have compelled him in a few days to give up the Euro seat). Everybody - including most of his own party - was disgusted by this tactic and were glad to see the back of him (as they thought) as he went back to Brussels. However the PM put him on his minister list and it takes a bold Center Partyist to vote against the PM so Väärynen made it (but only just - there was still a large minority prepared to stub party discipline in order to try to get rid of him).

I pity the new Foreign Minister because (theoretically) big-head as Foreign Trade minister is his junior in the Foreign Ministry. Now that guy (Kanerva of the Conservatives) not only has pressure from "below" but also doubly from above as the PM likes to dabble in Foreign Affairs as well and then there's the Social Democrat President who also has a Foreign Affair role to play as well when she feels she wants to (she can pick and choose which EU meetings she attends (with the PM) and only if she doesn't want to does the FM get a look in. Still it's hard to be sorry for the new FM because a couple of years ago there was a scandal about the guy sending explicit text messages (SMS) to young girls and women (he's 59 now) and of course in typical Finnish politician style nothing happened and he was kept on as deputy Speaker.

Finally the second (more women then men) is only a surprise because of the numbers of female ministers. Most people expected political correctness (50%) in all parties except the Greens and that's what happened with the Conservatives and the Swedish-Peoples party. The Greens as expected voted in 2 women [0 men] (to my relief as their women are better than their men) but then rather than the 4/4 split the PM had been suggesting for the Center party, his list (5 women; 3 men including himself and big-head) was topsy-turvy too so now the Cabinet has 12 women and 8 men (although to no-one's surprise the men get the very top posts PM; Foreign Minister; Finance Minister; Super Minister (Labour+Interior(?)).

Meanwhile it's already been announced that one of the new female ministers will be going on maternity leave in a few months (just as she spent several months off during the previous 4-yr government). She's one of the stars of the Center party and has been moved from the Foreign Trade post (that she did well) so the Environment Minister post which the PM is said to regard as an important one these days (it never was before). If it's that important why give it to someone who's going to take time out in a couple of months ? (or is that just the old MCP in me speaking?).

P.S. I suppose we can all be grateful that Kaukko Juhantalo wasn't re-elected otherwise given the Väärynen thing the PM would no doubt have given him a minister job too. (For newcomers to the Finnish political scene, said Juhantalo was forced to leave the parliament because of a scandal involving his time as a minister and connected to loans for a bank and bank loans for his own company [I'm not saying any more). After it took well over a year for the process of running this expulsion from parliament through channels and he finally left, the voters of his constituency virtually immediately voted him in again at the following election and so we saw him (on TV) wandering around in the parliament as if nothing had ever happened. Really really sickening but would have been beaten by him becoming minister again. The PM is obviously capable of completely stupid choices (Väärynen) so we can be thankful that even Juhantalo's voters finally decided to pull the plug just in time.)

Yesterday's paper reported that the average temperature for December 2006 in the Helsinki region was +4C whereas the average for December for the period 1900-2000 was -2.1C

It always amazes me that when they come out with such statistics they never say what exactly they mean. How do they calculate the average temperature ? Is the daily figure the average for the entire day; based on four (or two) readings (night and day) or is it I suspect based on the temperature at one daytime hour like 12:00 or 13:00. I guess we'll never know but I suspect it's the latter - that would better match the month even though it was minus degrees at night, by no means as often as usual.

Today was minus degrees but luckily we've recently had so many days of plus degrees that the gravel paths were able to soak up the recent days rain in time before the minus degrees would have frozen it to ice, so the paths through my local woods (walking which with an MP3 player in my ears [Archos 401 with 20GB] is my main winter exercise so it's pretty important I can do it at a quick pace) were very easy to walk on for once.

Aside: Why is it that four guys running together or three people walking with those ridiculous "Nordic Walking" sticks are always so boorish as to assume that any single walker walking towards them will make way for them [=step off the path] instead of them sticking to their own side of the path when there is meeting traffic ?

Just another example of people not being used to living in places with more than a few hundred inhabitants I guess although surely not all of them are "just off the farm"?

Despite the unseasonal warm weather (for those of you outside Finland it's been +/- 3 or so degrees C for weeks) and the lack of snow (a few patches if you looked in the garden but nothing on even paths through the woods), there's still the typical winter problem of having to watch where you walk.

OK with the choice of bare paths; paths with ice with gravel in them and paths with ice only (compared to all the combinations of snow+ice [including the deadly thin snow over flat ice] we usually get) it's fairly simply to walk on this stuff but given that most of the paths are free of ice and ice tends to be where the "street" lamps aren't working so you can't really see it, you still have to walk fairly slowly most of the time and especially watch your feet.

Which reminds me that an extrovert Finn is one who looks at *your* feet when he's talking to you ...

People spending their first winter in (Southern) Finland may be wondering what there was to worry about. Apart from a brief flourish of snow at the beginning of November there's been no more and mainly plus temperatures of 5C or more (40F) and rain - lots of rain in fact.

Well, be reassured, this isn't normal by any means. What we usually have at this time of year is -5C to -10C with if we're lucky snow on the ground (and if we're not lucky no snow for long but +/- 2 or so with an endless cycle of snow coming / snow melting / water freezing [loop].

So in a sense this is an advantage. But for those of you newcomers who are depressed by the lack of sun (which has popped its head out for maybe a maximum of 30 mins in the past two weeks) combined with the very very grey look of everywhere (caused by the lack of snow), now is the time to rush out and buy yourself a sun-imitation (i.e. a so-called "Bright Light" - the Philips brand name) and switch it on once a day for about half-an-hour and hope that your body is fooled by it. It seems to work for me - although why I can't imagine, as I'm fully aware that it's only a light panel.

[Note to people who haven't seen these - it's not a solarium, it's just a panel about the same size as a 26" wide-screen TV's panel but placed upright.]

A while ago I advised people to go to Suomalainen rather than to Akadeeminen Kirjakauppa if they wanted to buy books in English because the prices were likely to be less there.

I had a couple of free hours in Helsinki on Saturday so I decided I'd better check out the main Akadeeminen Kirjakauppa at the back of Stockmann to see what sort of selection they had and if those prices were still more expensive.

The bad news is that they are. Marginally - maybe a couple of Euros more per non-fiction paperback (i.e. those from £9.95 upwards) but still a perhaps noticeable amount over time and certainly more of an encouragement to forget buying the book then and head off to the Internet and a British or US (or even German - Amazon Germany now has a fixed rate of 8 Euros for postage to Finland irrespective of how much is ordered - there's no point in buying English Language books there [too expensive] but CDs and DVDs might be an option as of course are German boardgames [still the best]) site instead.

The good news is that these books are very accessible at Akadeeminen Kirjakauppa (go in through the doors on the Bulevaardi; go straight ahead until you reach the escalator; and just before it head off to the right) and there are many more of them than at Suomalainen, where you have to find the particular non-fiction section you are interested in (so for instance "Hstory" and there there's English lanaguage history books on one side; swedish language history books on the other side etc. So if you want English language books on Travel you have to find the travel section) whereas in Akadeeminen all the English language *paperbacks* are in the same place with the travel books just a bit further along. Travel books meaning the chatty kind of travel books like those by Bill Bryson rather than Lonely Planet and the like - those are in the travel section even in Akadeeminen.

Actually I spotted three of the four non-fiction paperbacks I'd bought (at full UK price) when I last visited my parents in the UK (in Akadeeminen). So there was nothing wrong with the selection as far as my tastes go, but yes, the converted price would have been a bit of a turn-off.

As an aside one interesting thing I noticed is that the Suomalainen system of having the english language non-fiction books arranged along with the other languages according to the interest area (history etc.) works very well in their smaller shops because I tend to go into them when I have a few minutes to spare (which usually means my wife is shopping nearby but could as I've noted before mean just that I have a few minutes before the bus goes). Then I can zoom straight into my usual areas of interest and quickly see what they have. But when I visit the larger stores in the centre of town it's useful to have all the english language versions of whatever non-fiction area close to each other.

Pity about the A.K. price levels though - they are getting closer but still aren't quite at my level.

P.S. I didn't actually find any paperbacks that were in both shops so that I could directly compare the prices, but one curious oddity was that I did find a book at Suomalainen that I already had bought in another Suomalainen branch. In fact it was the last book I bought and I'm still reading it. This may not seem strange until I tell you that not only did it have a different (slightly lower) price but it also had a different cover and was much lighter! The solution was equally odd. The new, cheaper book was a Penguin (a UK publisher in my youth) but was a US edition with $20 as the price on the cover whereas the book I had bought earlier was Pimlico (a Random House UK imprint - i.e. a typcially *US* publisher ...) at £11.99. My copy was much heavier than the US version I saw yesterday because the paper used was of better quality with however the slight problem that that brought with it of a binding that doesn't allow you to open each page properly (so its good that the end of the lines are well in from the right-hand edge of the page!). Well, *I* found it curious.

I've discovered that it's not really a problem driving to work and back in the winter. Often the roads are in fact less slippy than the pavements because the spikes on the tyres have done their work well, but still there are a few reasons why I yesterday bought a bus pass for the next four weeks and will therefore be using the bus for the journey to work and back.

Reason 1 is that driving home in a snow storm (and especially with the windscreen freezing up so you can hardly see) is not my idea of fun. This doesn't happen often but when it does you make all sorts of promises to yourself such as leaving the car home at the mere threat of this; or leaving work several hours late so that no-one else is on the roads.

Reason 2 is that spikes have a nasty habit of loosening from the tyres of the car in front of you and crashing into your windscreen. If they do there's a chance that you get a deep enough scar in the windscreen that it will expand over time and even if you are prepared to risk it, the people who test your car every year won't pass you unless you get it fixed (and sometimes that means getting a new windscreen for several 100 Euros).

Reason 3 is that when the weather is bad, it's very easy to get into the habit of going to the car (20 meters); driving to work; parking the car in the garage and walking maybe 50 meters to the office (repeat in reverse order to get home) AND doing nothing else in the way of exercise. Taking the bus has the major plus (!) that it forces you to walk to the bus stop and in my case that (carefully selected) bus stop is a brisk 15 mins walk from my home.

Reason 4 is that having a bus pass means you are more rather than less flexible. You can - without needing to bother about parking spaces - make a detour via the centre of town; you can get off at one of the two large shopping complexes on the route etc.

Add the lot together and it's actually a pleasure to use the bus at this time of year.

Oh yes, and for those of you wondering why I didn't add as Reason 5 the delights of getting into a cold car in the morning. Well the heater on timer takes care of that and during the day the parking garage is at least warmer than outside.

 

P.S. You'll be wondering about the title. Well today was my first day by bus and it seems there's a snow storm out there. So the bus driver can take charge of getting me home ...

There's seems to be an unwritten law that the first snow always comes to the Helsinki area on the 1st of November and that it is always a surprise.

Certainly most people thought I was mad this year when I booked my tyre change (to snow tyres with spikes) in the first week of October for the 30th of October. I thought I was fairly mad too especially as the temperature continued to be over zero for weeks after the day when I had popped in to a deserted tyre place to book my time. However I took some consolation in the fact that this time at least I would not have each day in November to consider whether I should - on that day - change my tyres or not. (Tyres must be changed by the 1st of December).

However, that natural law came into force again and although snow didn't actually reach Helsinki itself until (drum roll) the 1st of November, there was enough panic out there for there to be a massive amount of cars at that tyre place when I went there for my booked time. (Snow had reached Vantaa just North of Helsinki and temperatures were dangerously close to zero and the rain still hadn't stopped yet looked like changing to sleet (and worse) at any time). The guy in front of me was told the wait until he got it to the place where they would change the tyres was 2 hours (which by experience means well over 2 hours) and yet I sailed through and in ten minutes my car was lifted in the air and the tyres were being changed.

That left a warm glow ...

 

P.S. The 1st November "rule" is amazing. It's probably been true for at least three-quarters of the time I have lived here, although I do remember there once was a golf competition at the beginning of October that was called off because of snow on the course. I remember that well because I drove for about 40 mins in a snow storm to get to the course for that competition. Something that most other people had the sense not to do ...

Just over two weeks ago I was invited by a Finnish MVP to a meeting of the people (mostly Finnish MVPs) who are behind a new Finnish technical web site. The meeting was going to be held several hours drive away so I didn't much fancy going, but I said that provided I could be there for a maximum of four hours that I could go. (The four hours being the time my wife would be happy in the neighbouring town)

I got no response from that e-mail so several days later I asked again and was told that he was still waiting for a reply from someone else.

Even more days later and now in the week preceding that Saturday meeting, I was invited by Microsoft to a meeting of Finnish MVPs (and thus including the same people) and this time it was close to Helsinki and transport to the location was provided. So I sent a message saying in view of this new meeting (which was less than a week later) was the original Saturday meeting now cancelled?

I got a reply to this saying that he was still waiting for that one person's confirmation so I replied saying that there didn't seem much point in travelling so far when we were all going to be at the other meeting a few days later.

I then waited and waited. Saturday came and went and there was no response (and needless to say with no message giving me a *time* to attend that meeting or even whether it was still on, I didn't drive for several hours to get there).

Now for the subject of this blog item.

Forget for a moment that I didn't receive a reply to my first message in this entire thread of messages and needed to prompt the original sender, because that is typically Finnish (= roughly "don't say anything if you have nothing to say" or in other words don't expect any confirmation of the receipt of a message you send to a Finn), and concentrate on that last exchange of messages.

To my mind I was making a comment "there doesn't seem any point" to which I was expecting a response on the lines of "there won't be enough time at the second meeting to dicuss this" or "it's a different group fo people" or in fact anything.

According to my wife (a Finn) however when I said to her that I didn't understand why I hadn't heard anything back on this, I was saying "I'm not coming. I don't see the point."

So you see how one person's "give me a reason why I should come" is another person's (or in fact it seems an entire nation's) "I'm not coming" (which of course in Finland gets no response either - see first comment)

Yesterday was not a good day.

But the worst thing as it happens was what was supposed to be the "cheer me up" part.

I've namely been waiting for the Amazon CO UK price of the 33-dvd Complete Shakespeare Selection to go down to a reseasonable level. First they had been offering 20% off; then 30% but then as I waited for 40% to come it had gone back up to 20% again.

But every couple of months I've continued to check it out and yesterday it was 40% off and I was ready to buy.

Needless to say a set of 33 DVDs is still a fairly high price even after 40% off and this was no different at 120 pounds or ca 180 Euros ( 225 US dollars) so I thought I'd be clever.

One of the things that really (really) irritates me about Amazon's UK branch is that they always insist on adding *Finnish* taxes. Now books in the UK are 0% tax and books here are 8% tax so they always add that up-front. The reason this is irritating is that the customs waive the tax (as not worth collecting) if a parcel comes that hasn't had tax pre-added and which doesn't have enough books to take the tax cost above a particular limit. You can in fact always get 2 books in and often three.

Now 8% on books costing 5-10 pounds each while annoying isn't that annoying but this time we were talking about 120 pounds or 10 pounds tax and 5 pounds (at least) postage to here. So I got this set sent (free posting) to my parents address and they'll pop in a DVD or two into a parcel they are sending anyway (such as for Christmas) and I'll collect several when I next visit them.

Great idea ? Well it seemed so at the time.

Maybe you've worked out why it wasn't a great idea ?

read on ...

Why it's not a great idea:

These are DVDs not books. There is no noticeable difference in the tax on DVDs in Finland and in the UK. In fact it looks as if the tax here might be slightly less. Even including postage I would have - to get the whole lot here in one go - faced a bill that was less than 2 pounds (3 Euros; 3+dollars) more.

Once I'd realised that I of course rushed to the Amazon site to amend the delivery address or cancel the order. Only to find of course that when you don't want it to happen they have been amazingly quick / had it in store and now the order is being prepared for despatch and can neither be cancelled nor changed in any way.

So I've tried in desparation an e-mail to their help system but by the time they read that, I doubt if even they will be able to amend it / stop it being sent.

So I guess that today hasn't turned out to be a good day either.  (and, no, I'm not going to order anything else to cheer me up)

P.S. I actually got a reply rather quickly and the first part did seem specific to my question (more than three-quarters of the message was boiler-plate and only just on topic) and of course it *was* too late.

They didn't suggest that my mother could send it back for a credit, but I'm not going to do that - she has enough unnecessary trouble anyway because I didn't think. Thank goodness though that in the UK they still deliver parcels to the door.

(Unlike all the countries I lived in since 1975 - I remember how odd it seemed to collect parcels from the post office in Sweden. Actually that's no longer true. In Finland you can return the form and mark it for delivery of normal (post office) parcels to the door *if you want to pay for this extra service* - meanwhile all sorts of postal services (not only the expensive couriers) do deliver to the door for nothing although at least one of them tries to disguise that fact and instead tries to get you to collect the parcel from their depot within 48 hours "otherwise you will be charged for storage".)

There's a wonderful, large, bookshop in Central Helsinki called Akadeeminen Kirjkauppa (Academic Bookshop). It belongs to the department store Stockmann and there are smaller versions in the neighbourhood of (or in) most of the other Stockmann department stores. But the one in the centre (Aalto-designed?) is the one where it's a pleasant to browse.

There's just one problem - the prices are high for foreign language books. So much so in fact that I never browse the English language books there any more and in fact rarely go there as it's frustrating to see books that cost 50% more than the UK list price - especially when these days it's possible to buy books from Amazon UK (or Amazon US if you have time to wait for them) for much less than the list price so that even after the inevitable postage charges you usually pay less in total than the UK list price (provided you don't go mad and want express courier).

Of course to a certain extent the price difference to UK list price is caused by the 8% tax on books here as compared to the 0% on books in the UK (and in this respect it is *extremely* annoying that Amazon UK charges people ordering from Finland that 8%) but that doesn't explain the sort of markups that Akadeeminen Kirjakauppa has.

So what to do? Well, I don't buy paperback bestsellers any more (I wait until the library has them) but several years ago when I did the other main Finnish bookshop chain Suomalainen Kirjakauupa (Finnish Bookshop) used to have quite reasonable prices and also had much better prices than Akadeeminen on computer books (which I anyway bought from the US with 40% discount ...) so what's the situation today ?

I would probably never have known. I visit my parents in the UK once a year and stock up with paperbacks when I'm there and I still have some of them unread or partly unread so I wasn't likely to make a special trip to go to any bookshop and the ones in my local centre (Tapiola) to be quite frank are pretty poor. But it just so happens that I occasionally go to Helsinki by bus (as it cuts down somewhat (!) on parking problems and parking costs) and if I go by bus, I go back by bus and nowadays we have a new bus terminal with both airport style indications of when the next suitable bus is leaving and (if you have say 10-15 minutes to wait) a very handy branch of Suomalainen Kirjakauppa to browse in. So I sauntered in in my usual "I'm not going to find anything useful here, but I might as well look anyway" style and immediately find something that looks very interesting (in this case a paperback on Russian Empires). An equally casual look at the price and, heh, what's this it's the same price as in the UK. Three minutes later I'm out of there heading for the original bus and now with a book in my hands. What's more the situation has repeated itself and not only at that branch. There was a review in I think the Economist of a Russian novellist and war correspndent and I saw a paperback with extracts from his wartime diaries (comparing those with his official reports!) and that too was little more than the UK price converted. Finally yesterday there was a very heavy and thick paperback with a history of Europe after 1945 - list price UK £10.99 and Euro price here 18.50 which too is only little more than the converted UK price and imagine the weight problems bringing such an over 900 pages mastadon back from the UK (if indeed I could find it there).

So good people. By all means go to the wonderful, large Akadeeminen Kirjakauppa in the centre of Helsinki opposite Stockmann's but if you want to actually buy anything go out of another entrance of Stockmann; cross the road over the tram tracks and go into Suomalainen Kirjakauppa.

I was just helping to tidy the house a bit when I thought it would be useful to get rid of the pile of books and CDs that were waiting to go back to the Library.

The usual method (and quite common for me on Saturdays as it's a pleasant walk) would have been to walk the 20 minutes to the local library. But in the pouring rain ? Perhaps not.

So then I thought of driving to the next centre where there's a library with a car park right outside which almost always has spaces free. It would mean a 20 year/meter walk in the rain, but it wasn't raining that heavily. But then my wife said that she wanted to go to a particular bookshop chain for a paper shredder (!?) and of course there wasn't one where I was planning to go to but there was one in the opposite direction which meant that *she* would now walk in the pouring rain. So it was time for a re-think so I suggested that we could instead go by car to yet another library branch.

This one is in a large shopping centre which also has a branch of that bookshop chain and that shopping centre naturally enough has a large car park underneath which means neither of us would get wet at all (apart from getting from the house to the car).

That car park has always been half empty whenever I've been there before, but today was Saturday and this was Saturday afternoon when this kind of large shopping centre seem to attract people who don't actually want to buy anything (or go to any library) but just want a safe place to walk with their kids. Walk slowly, that is, this is Finland after all (or as always stand all across very slow moving "moving" stairways) and of course it was raining ... So that "usually half-empty car park was completely full (five cars entered the place just ahead of me and the sign was saying 15 free places) and it took quite a while to find an empty space and then of course to actually get to the library with a bit of weaving around all the (slow-moving) people.

Sighs. When will they learn that it is not illegal to actually walk down or up moving staircases and that it IS illegal to block these moving staircases (or is it just illegal to look bewildered if someone coming from behind says "excuse me"?).

It's always fun for Finns to look at Sweden and see things go pear-shape over there. It's just a great pity it's happening to the new coalition government because I have got so fed up with the smugness of the former Socialist prime minister Göran Persson and really wanted the centre-right coalition there to work.

To re-cap the new government has only recently been formed and yet two ministers have already been forced to resign.

One of the key factors has been the non-payment of tax for people hired to look after small children (i.e. they were paid cash-in hand) with a minor but nevertheless curious fact that several ministers hadn't paid their TV licences for years (in the case of the culture minister who has just resigned for 16 (!) years - and she would have been responsible for public broadcasting).

What the trade minister did especially wrong was to first say that she couldn't afford to pay tax for the nanny. At which point the press in full flight discovered that she owned a house (or was it an apartment) in an expensive part of Stockholm and also a pricey "summer house" in one of the more exclusive summer house areas. They also discovered that that "summer house" (in brackets because it's bigger than my normal house) had been bought via an off-shore company to avoid paying purchase tax ! So she was the first to go.

There's now only (as far as I know!) one minister left in trouble but he's (again as far as I know) only not paid tv licences so might survive.

(There was also something about another minister but a witch hunt is more difficult for the press in her case because she's the first non-white minister so I suppose she'll survive).

Unfortunately Finland has its own problems. The sole candidate for party secretary of the Conservative party here had to withdraw from that office a week ahead of time while the police investigated claims by an ex-girl friend (an Estonian). After they had broken up she had used (it's said) his flat (for which she had a key) for sex against payment (leading to a "keeping a brothal" charge for the guy as owner of the flat) and when arrested for that she had accused him of beating her up several times.

The guy's press conference gave the inference that there was nothing to the brothal charge but that perhaps the beating up charge was less clear as the statements here were confined to roughly "I was defending myself".

So we can't be too happy about the problems of the Swedish conservative party when our own conservative party (although not in government at the moment) has problems of its own.

Pity that ....

Every so often on the (Finnish Public Broadcasting) Helsinki radio station that broadcasts "World Radio", there's a home-produced five minutes news program which has different names in different languages - so for instance in Finnish it's "Clear Finnish"; and in Swedish it's "Finnish which you can understand"  - but is actually Finnish spoken clearly and slowly and using words that most people understand.

The only time I ever listen to this is on Saturday at 6:55pm because I spend most late Saturday afternoon's listening to the sports coverage on the BBC World Service. This especially means the English Football League and it's of source of great annoyance when having listened to 45 minutes of the second half of a Premier League match plus say 3 minutes extra time (of four) to have this d***** "Clear Finnish" program jump in and grab the last five minutes of the BBC transmission.

It's even more annoying that they insist in spending the first minute (when I could have been listening to the football) on their trailer before finally starting the news itself.

At this time of year, however, when we're still in Summer Time, it's not so bad because all it means is a five minute break in transmission in the middle of the BBC's transmission which continues after that 5 minute break.

So this is the time I don't turn off the set in disgust and actually listen to it.

I've heard them try to explain what the word "karhu" (bear) means before [I think they said "a karhu is a large animal"] and that's reasonable enough because it's not a particularly common word when you are first learning Finnish, and I don't mind them speaking slowly and clearly because that's the point of the program, but this week they really started treating the listeners like total idiots.

I can't even remember the first couple of really simple and unnecessary explanations because I was too busy trying to shut my open mouth but then came the hammer.

"Kimi Räikönen finished 11th in the qualifying for the Japanese Grand Prix". "This means that ten drivers finished ahead of him."

Come on guys, we need not speak Finnish as well as natives, but we are not total morons.

The Helsinki area has a lot of libraries and a very good computer and delivery system so that you can order a book that is anywhere in the system and it will be delivered to you at the library branch you choose (for 50 Euro cents).  You can also renew any item via the Internet four times (which means you can have at most a book out for almost four months at no cost).

Similarly you can borrow a book (physically) at one library and return it at another at no charge - something I make heavy use of as it's there but even so I'd prefer they spent their budget on books instead. [Not that they would, they seem to be wasting it on Internet access and the like.]

This is in fact works so well that in order for books to actually be available for the customers of the branch that bought it, they are now introducing a new system whereby (some?) new books will be placed on a special shelf (called that well-known Finnish language term "Bestsellers"). Books on that shelf will only be available for borrowers who visit that library (i.e. can't be ordered); can not be renewed; and must be returned in person to the same library branch.

I found this out at the Kauniainen library which I would guess was one of the instigators of that program. The Helsinki area's library system is actually a cooperation between the four local authorities - Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen - and whereas Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa all have many library branches, Kauniainen has only one (and as a wealthy upper-middle class area probably allocates per head more money to their library than the other local authorities). So Kauniainen was probably more irritated than most about seeing all the new books they were buying vanish to non-Kauniainen readers before they even in some cases reached the shelves.

So that's one new thing - which I discovered when borrowing magazines (back issues) and books and CDs and a DVD in Kauniainen on Saturday. (It's handy; open on Saturdays and has - as there are about 40% Swedish speakers - a good selection of books in Swedish).

By Monday however those CDs and the DVD (Lost in Translation - which i enjoyed) had been listened to/seen and the Tapiola library (about half the distance away of the Kauniainen one and a pleasant walk) was now re-opened so I could take those books back.

One of the odd things about the libraries in the Helsinki region is where each local authority puts their "central library". In Helsinki the central library was located in Passila which is outside the centre and although it's one stop away on the suburban trains from the railway station (which *is* in the centre of Helsinki) people just don't go there. In Espoo the only real "centre" is Tapiola and yet the central library is located in Leppavaara which is on the edge (bordering Helsinki) and until recently had a low population too. Until recently as well the "central" library was even off-side in Leepavaara whereas it's now in the new shopping area complex (although for some very odd reason whereas you can visit the shopping area without needing to go outside after parking your car in the parking garage, you *do* have to go outside (in the freezing winter weather, say) to get to the library).

All the above is saying is that the Tapiola branch library although well-located and well-frequented hasn't by any means been the largest branch in Espoo by any means.

It almost certainly still isn't, but it now has about 40% (?) more space as the new design includes a set of stairs down to the basement (that was previously used for storage - functionality now transfered elesewhere) and that is where you'll now find the foreign language (+ Swedish language) books and the reading room. That area is maybe 50% of the size of the main floor but they have retained an open plan area (why open plan - it looks an eyesore) for intermediate book storage on that main floor which then reduces space there hence my 40% in total.

All in all the new look Tapiola library will take some getting used to and by the look of things I shall still be going to Kauniainen if I want some newer Swedish language books - maybe more so now they have the "Bestsellers" system keeping those books on the shelves !

P.S. In a way the "Bestsellers" system meaning as it does physical visits to different libraries to see what they have that's new, brings back memories of the Gothenburg branch library system in the second half of the seventies. At that time the loose immigration policies had started adding to the percentage of the population that didn't have Swedish as mother tongue and yet the authorities still seemed to imagine that given language courses every one of those immigrants would in time speak Swedish. So small branch libraries were set up in the newly-built areas where immigrants mostly lived and they had mostly books in Swedish (although perhaps more than the usual percentage in "immigrant languages"). I used to do regular tours to those small libraries because I discovered that (for two reasons) they were the only place to find brand-new books in Swedish. [The two reasons were firstly that as they were new branches they had new books and secondly that as most of the population of those areas didn't read Swedish those books were left on the shelves.]

One of the two Helsinki ice-hockey teams suffered a 10-1 loss the other day to a team that has been last in the table almost ever since they joined the "Master" League.

That by itself was - even though Hifk (the Helsinki team) hadn't been playing too well this year - a major surprise, especially perhaps as they for the second season running have employed a new NHL trainer (after last year's NHL trainer was bought across to the local Helsinki rivals Jokeri (who have won all except one of their matches so far)).

But this piece of dry humour ...

When the score was already 8-1 someone wrote to an Internet chat site roughly the following.

Noting that the NHL trainer hadn't yet called a time-out, he wrote "maybe in the NHL they save time-outs for more critical situations".

 

The Finns always say that Finnish is a difficult language to learn.

Many foreigners take them at their word and don't bother.

(These days you can just about get away with English in fact, although I wouldn't want to.)

But then some berk comes along and says that Finnish isn't difficult to learn at all. This time (a couple of weeks ago) it was an English professor.

He's mad of course.

It may not be difficult to get used to the 14 (or is it 17?) cases; it may not be difficult to get used to having no "the"s and "a"s and having prepositions stuck on the end of words or even having words at the beginning of a sentence actually belong to words halfway through the sentence because their endings are the same.

It certainly isn't difficult to get used to stressing the first syllable all the time; rolling your "r"s as if you were in the north of Scotland or even to pronounce two "n"s (and every other letter you can think of) differently from a single "n" - although that last one is something that I've spent 17 years trying and failing to get right.

So I suppose from the mad professor point-of-view Finnish is an incredibly easy language.

But wait until you start trying to understand what people are saying and you realize that not only do you not understand the entire sentence, you don't even understand the subject of the conversation.

Because one thing with Finnish that *is* certainly difficult is the fact that you can't guess the meaning of words based on knowledge of Germanic; Latin-based; or Slavic languages. In fact you can guess the meanings of hardly any Finnish words - you just simply have to know them.

Of course from a mad professor linguistic point-of-view that's irrelevant. But try holding conversations and you soon find that instead of the "know 50%, guess the rest" that was the situation when I started learning Swedish, you have a "know 90%, haven't a clue" situation when it comes to Finnish.

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Ah, but it's easy for Hungarians, I hear you cry.

Well yes the grammar is very similar so from a mad professor point-of-view they are incredibly similar and a snap to learn one if you speak the other. But that's as far as it goes. Hungarian words are not only with a (truly) handful of exceptions completely different from Finnish ones, they are also different from Germanic; Latin-based and Slavic languages too. So in Hungarian too you spend all your time trying to add to your vocabulary so at least you know what people are talking about.

Thus, just as with Finnish, not having the time to get that so-called simple grammar right ...

------------------------

In fact the only other nation that seems to find it remarkably easy to learn Finnish are the Estonians (I had in fact to be told that the new office cleaners are Estonian because I couldn't notice any difference).

It doesn't work in reverse though. Finns can't speak Estonian for toffee. To my mind it's the same as the Dutch and Germans. Similar languages but one is easier to pronounce than the other (plus one is a smaller country than the other).

 

I suspect that many people thought when I wrote a while back that summer was over here that I was having hallucinations.

But on Saturday morning (16th September) I had to play golf at 9 o'clock in an end-of-season competition and when I walked to the car the (Finnish) neighbour just driving in to the car park remarked on how cold it was.

The car showed 3 degrees but that was in the car port and as soon as I left that it showed 2 degrees. But having headed westwards for several kms, it moved to zero and stayed there for most of the rest of the journey.

Golf was then played in several layers of clothes (as thick jackets etc. were still at home - oops) which was fine until the sun started heating things up a bit and I was probably over-dressed for the last couple of hours.

But, fun ? No, it wasn't much.

We had the Asem conference here and anarchists had called for a riot.

So the police called in reinforcements and cordoned them off and managed to contain things with comparatively little violence and certainly much less damage to property than would have been caused if they had been allowed to get going before being policed.

Certainly much less damage and complaints about police brutallity than in other cities that have recently housed similar events (including Gothenburg, Sweden). In fact all people seem to have complained about is that they ("onlookers") hadn't been allowed to leave the area for a few hours (easily explained by "we could only allow a few people out at a time because otherwise the anarchists would have simply grouped somewhere else outside the cordon").

Despite this total success in containing a potentially dangerous situation with little violence the press are seemingly enjoying finding any stick they can to bash the police with. One such is that a lawyer had sent a large number of copies of a fax offering his services to named prisoners (40+ or so faxes) and these hadn't been delivered to the prisoners who therefore hadn't been able to ask for his services. (Police comment: we had better things to do that act as fax delivers")

Sometimes the police can't win. If they hadn't contained this in the way they did, there would have still been complaints of police brutality yet at the same time the press would have had a field day writing about all the destruction caused by the anarchists and "where were the police?".

As the police pointed out officially organised demonstrations (a number in the twenties of demos were held) were allowed to procede along agreed routes, yet none of the anarchists would agree to talk to the police before their "demo" about their route and march aims. It's hard to say why then they should be aggrieved about not being allowed to march (and destroy).

The Finnish Stock Exchange is very much dominated by Nokia. The effect on the (Hex) index is rather large whenever Nokia shares move up or down.

But this piece isn't about that. It's in fact about why I was interested in that LogicaCMG bid for WM-data.

Mainly it was because of the effect it was (and is) seeming to have on my shares in Tietoenator which is the largest Nordic IT services company (Number 1 in both Finland [ex Tieto; ex Tietotehdas] and Number 1 (?) in Sweden [ex Enator]) but also because I, a few years ago, had some shares in Novo Group and I sold them after a bid from SysOpen but *before* a much better bid from WM-data, so I was wondering whether history was going to repeat itself (except that I don't have any WM-data shares) and a counter bid for WM-data was going to come in at a price higher than the 27.75 SEK (ca 3 Euros) that LogicaCMG were paying. [A counter bid at 30 SEK or more makes the accepted offer no longer accepted and the two main shareholders can back out].

What happened with Tietoenator was to my mind odd.

First on news of the LogicaCMG bid for WM-data, the price of Tietoenator shot down, because the market saw this as increased competition.

It's hard to spot the logic in this as LogicaCMG has virtually no business overlaps with WM-data (60 people in a Stockholm office) and so for quite a while there would in fact be LESS competition while people here got used to new reporting channels; new tools etc. etc. All the mess in fact that goes with any takeover or merger. I.e. in my opinion Tietoenator have a major opportunity to increase their own market share in their two key markets while one of their main rivals in those markets is forced to re-evaluate itself.

After however the price had - as above - shot down, and then seem to stabilize at a new low plateau, it suddenly shot up again (to roughly the level it was before the drop - and it's kept on creeping up from that level since) because - the papers wrote - of "sentiment" that  Tietoenator might also be a takeover target from an international giant.

Again missing my point above that in fact a rise in share price could be justified by a (year's?) window of opportunity while "WM-data - a LogicaCMG company" is sorting itself out.

Do I think that there is any justification in thinking there might be a bid for Tietoenator ?

Well I hope not. The share price is at the moment at around 23 Euros and the natural price for the company to my mind is around 30+. So even a 20% increase on today's price made as part of a bid for the company (making 27.60 Euros) would for me be a disappointment.

Anyway I like the fact that there is at least one major Finnish (Tietoenator's MD is Finnish and the company head office is in Finland) IT services company left.

This is in a way an explanation of why I wrote the previous item about LogicaCMG's managers not getting WM-data and especially not getting WM-data Finland.

It all started with a question from an analyst in the web conference after the "agreed offer" had been announced. He asked about the name that would be used by the WM-data companies once they were part of LogicaCMG.

The answer from the chairman of LogicaCMG was that at first the name would be "WM-data - A LogicaCMG company" but that within the first year that name would change "except in Sweden where the company has an established name" and he then went on to specify all the other countries in turn starting with Finland and say that they would all change their name to only "LogicaCMG" within that first year.

This struck me immediately as a major mistake as WM-data is well-established in the Finnish market and has positive name recognition helped by the publicist efforts of the Finnish managing director who has throughout the years kept popping up in the local press (and who a couple of weeks ago was the subject of a four page article in the Finnish equivalent of (a more up-market so closer to the german Der Spiegel) Time).

Recently I was at a Microsoft event so I asked a couple of people there (one from Microsoft and the other from a foreign-owned competitor to WM-data here) what they thought the reputation of WM-data in Finland was. (To get a truthful result all I said was I don't think the reputation is all that bad.) Both said very clearly that WM-data has a good name in the Finnish market.

I followed this up later that day with asking a friend who actively uses the web for information whether  she thought WM-data had a positive clang to it in the Finnish market and she immediately pointed out a couple of Internet services that were very useful to her that had been provided by WM-data.

So there you have it. WM-data has - at least in my straw poll - a positive name in the Finnish market and yet LogicaCMG are planning to abandon the name and in effect start afresh with "LogicaCMG". Surely they've heard of brands being worth serious money ?

As an aside the guy from the foreign-owned competitor said that only now after more than four years of serious investment in the Finnish market is his company getting any name recognition.

That statement (and general principles about the value of brands) ought to make somebody in LogicaCMG headquarters in England think a bit before they make rash decisions to abandon a known brand - with a positive image - in favour of a totally unknown brand - with no image at all.

In fact the statement in the press conference made me sure that they had only been talking to Swedes before making the offer to buy what they thought was a "Swedish" company. Which leads me back to that other piece ...

We're getting nearer to the time when the LogicaCMG bid for WM-data (mentioned earlier) goes through and still there has been no counter-bid.

So it's perhaps time to think about what LogicaCMG think they are buying.

My guess is that they think they are buying a Swedish company with branches abroad in the same way that when they bought a French company last year, they also bought its subsidiaries. If so they need a few lessons in Swedish companies.

Here's one.

I very much suspect that LogicaCMG runs it's present subsidiaries (all countries except Britain; the Netherlands and France) from head office. There's no doubt a country manager in each country but in effect most decisions are made at head office and orders issued to the local subsidiaries. That's how things worked when I worked for ICL in its heyday.

Not so in the case of Swedish companies.

I worked for SKF once and that multinational always "advised" its subsidiaries (including the larger ones such as Germany; France; UK and Italy) that they should do (or not do) certain things. Only the UK realised that this advice was in fact intended to be an order, the others just treated it as advice - the Germans no doubt took it literally whereas the French and Italians knew the intent but pretended they didn't. So we once had the "advice" that no subsidiaries should make long-term contracts with computer consultancies; followed rapidly by the French subsidiary's binding 2 year contract with a computer consultancy (before this advice became an order one presumes - i.e. while they could still claim "but this was only advice" with an innocent expression).

In a similar way WM-data Sweden seems to have been very hands-off as regards to the Finnish subsidiary (and in return the Finnish subsidiary very hands-off in respect to the Swedish mother). This seems to be mainly due to the fact that Finland has consistently provided the largest profit margins of any part of WM-data *including Sweden* (see the WM-data company reports for the past several years) whereas Denmark and especially Norway have made until recently consistent losses leading to them being more closely monitored by the centre and to them (now and again) having Swedes flown in to take over and try to sort things out.

One other reason for the lack of direct head-office control over the Finnish subsidiary is that the Finnish subsidiary from being a ten men and a dog typical branch office of a foreign company (which it was when I arrived in Finland) has expanded via the acquisition (and occasional selling) of various purely Finnish companies into a virtually stand-alone *Finnish* company and typical for the relationship between Finns and Swedes is what one could term the ice-hockey match mentality - i.e. it's more an "us versus them" thing than a partnership thing.

My last company here got a couple of experts from Sweden to help them get used to working with the new Swedish mother company. They were initially given a decent office as befitted their status in the mother company but within a month were relegated to a small airless room without a window and were henceforce virtually completely ignored until one of them gave up commuting Monday-Friday to Finland and went back to his old job in Sweden having (because he hadn't been allowed to) achieved nothing during his time in Finland. You got the impression that the Finnish management was saying loud and clear "you may be our bosses now but there's no way we're letting you interfere in matters concerning Finland" (or perhaps not so loud and clear!).

My impression from the web cast given by LogicaCMG for analysts (still available on their web site) is that the view LogicaCMG's management have of WM-data is very much one based on conversations with Swedes. If so it will be completely inaccurate as far as the relationship between the Swedish "mother company" and the Finnish subsidiary is concerned as it will no doubt be about how the Swedes think it is rather than the reality on the ground.

[An interesting sidebar here is that SKF used to always have a person from head office seconded to the subsidiary (usually in a key role in the finance department). His job was to understand what was going on internally in that subsidiary and report back. The same method, I noticed, was used in Eli Lilley as I saw when I briefly worked for their German subsidiary. As far as I know this is a method that WM-data have never applied to their subsidiaries. Certainly I've never heard of a Swede working for WM-data Finland on a permanent basis and anyway without knowledge of the Finnish language (which virtually no Swedes have unless they have a Finnish background) they wouldn't be able to snap up anything useful (from corridor talk). ]

It'll be interesting to see if LogicaCMG management ever wake up to the fact that they have bought companies in four different markets rather than the single centrally-controlled company they seem to think they have bought. Certainly the fact that they already had 60 people in an office in Stockholm will not help them in any way in understanding the Finnish subsidiary as those people will just be as "capital city, Sweden" biased as the WM-data Swedish top management - perhaps even more so; WM-data does have a not-insubstantial network throughout Sweden and are thus forced, in Sweden, to look beyond the capital city.)

But then maybe they'll not get the chance. There are still various legal and other hurdles to jump before the purchase becomes final.

In some ways it's nice that Finland has four clear seasons and doesn't have the same kind of weather all year round.

But as always with this kind of thing, it would be nice to be able to dictate the length of the various seasons. At the moment (and unless the greenhouse effect changes things more rapidly than we expect today) there are two short seasons (Spring and Autumn/Fall); one medium length season (Summer) and one far too long season (Winter). In fact we could even make a further distinction and say that Spring is very short and Autumn just short as that's more like the truth of it.

Anyway now, while Southern France is no doubt still enjoying beach life, summer is over and despite occasional flourishes like yesterday it's over for good and within a month or so we'll be wondering when the first snow is going to come (usually 1st November is a good bet).

But this piece is actually more about Summer and the effect a short summer has on you.

The first thing is that there's a general lifting of spirits when summer finally gets here. People tend to smile more and generally be friendlier to strangers.

The second thing is that there is a constant awareness (if you've lived here through earlier summers) that summer, once started, will soon be gone. This can, if you're not careful lead to you spending far too much of your time on one summer activity to the extent that the summer looking back is a big blur.

In my case there has been at least one summer when I did virtually nothing else in my non-work time then canoeing (to get up to 1,000 kms in 3 months) and sleep (tiring work, canoeing). Another (pre-canoeing) year I had 100 golf rounds. Now I try to combine both of those activities with lazy days or even with shopping days or use a free day to get rid of some unneeded stuff from the house which is easy enough when the weather is bad but torture when it doesn't rain for weeks.

"Torture" because at the back of your mind you know that every year as soon as you get to the end of August it's no longer going to be much fun canoeing and once you're passed the middle of September the same can be said for golf (and most other outdoor activities with walking lasting until it's really icy underfoot).

So throughout the Finnish summer there's always the feeling you should be doing something else - making use of the warm weather in a different way - and a constant balancing of activities to try to achieve something of an inner balance.

Something I doubt they ever have in California....

P.S. To prove how this "end of summer" wears on your mind here, you just have to look at these blogs. I now see that I already wrote a piece on the end of summer in late August. Luckily the main thrust of this piece was different, but still.

Readers are referred to the previous blog article for the general details of how transport in the Helsinki area is organised and for the meaning of the 0, 1, and 2 options. They were correct.

What wasn't correct was the information about the new L and 3 buttons which was taken directly from a short information piece in the main Swedish language paper (in Finland) Hufvudstadsbladet (Hbl) using information issued by the Swedish language branch of the Finnish press bureau.

What seems to have happened is that the Swedish language branch of the Finnish press bureau translated a piece of information issued by the regional traffic authority incorrectly and Hbl in picking up the translation rather than looking at the origional text made public this error.

The reason I was able to spot this was that two days later, the main Finnish language paper (Helsingin Sanomat) printed half a page (with pictures) on the same subject. They of course were able to use the original news release and so we see that -

the L option is for travel in the "local area" (i.e. travel from and too any of Kerava, Vantaa, Espoo(incl. Kauniainen) and Kirkkonummi) that doesn't include Helsinki. Nothing to do with trains at all except for travel within Kirkkonummi where this "ticket" is restricted to train travel only (in Kirkkonummi)

the 3 option is then for travel within those same (L) areas but which also incorporates travel within Helsinki.

 

Perhaps more interesting is to how this mess-up in information came about.

The Finnish text says

L käyttävät Espoossa, Kauniaisessa, Vantaalla, Keravalla and Kirkkonummen junaliikenteessä.

or

L is used "in Espoo", "in Kaunianen", "in Vantaa", "in Kerava", and "in the trains of Kirkkonummi"

(note that "in Espoo"  is one word in Finnish)

This is very clear - in the trains applies only to Kirkkonummi because only there do you have "of" before the name of the area.

The Swedish faulty "translation" (as used by Hbl - but using Finnish placenames in my translation) was however

Med L-knappen kan man köpa en värdebiljett i tågtrafiken i Esbo, Grankulla, Vanda, Kervo och Krykslätt

or

With  the L button you can buy a "value ticket" in the train traffic in Espoo, Kauniainen, Vantaa, Kerava and Kirkkonummi.

Here, there is a restriction to trains for all the areas.

 

Yet another case of "you can't believe what you read in the papers". Some people don't take both newspapers so will be stuck thinking that L is only available in trains.

 

Apart from the rather expensive option of actually buying bus tickets from the bus/tram driver or train conductor when you get on the bus/tram (or are on the train), there's the more usual option of electronically putting money into your smart card.

There are two main choices.

A) You can put money as money (!) on your card and gradually use the card money for journeys. This is roughly the same as buying your bus (etc.) ticket from the driver but is at a slightly cheaper rate and is more convenient.

B) You can put money as a time period on your card. This gives you the right to use buses (etc.) in either one local authority or (at roughly double the cost) all local authorities (Helsinki, Vantaa, and Espoo[including Kauniainen]) for a specified time.

Earlier this was for 30 day periods starting from the day you bought the ticket but now with smart cards you can specify both a start day and a finish day when paying. The only limit is that there is a minimum period of (I think) about a week.

The pricing for this is that there is a start-up cost so things get cheaper per day the longer the period is. But you also have to consider days (like weekends and public holidays) when you might well not use a bus (etc.) when working out which ending date you want.

I tend to always start on Mondays and finish on Fridays (not the same week - see above) and either end when there is a public holiday on the Monday following or when there is a holiday period (Easter; Christmas) or even (naturally) before I go away on holiday.

In the A) case when you board a bus (etc.) you choose between 0 (tram only - single ride); 1 (the local authority you are in now -with transfer right) and 2 (you are going to cross a local authority boundary in the course of your journey - otherwise the same as 1). The price naturally rises from 0 to 1 to 2.

The system is a bit crazy in that if you have pressed 1 but then later change to another bus going to another local authority and thus press 2, you will be charged both the full price for 1 *and* the full price for 2 even though the system knows of course that you have already been charged for 1. This is a hangover from the old system of tickets where if you had a 30-day ticket for one local authority but wanted to go to another one, then you would need to buy a 2-zone ticket even though you'd paid already for one zone. (and this also applies to the smart card B) type "ticket").

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The only reason you're getting all this here and now is because the smart card readers are being changed. As if 0,1,2 was not enough (and I've had my card brush against 1 when I wanted to press 2 thus leading to extra costs for me) we will now have L and 3 buttons.

L is for paying for a ticket for the train and 3 is "for a ticket that is also valid in Helsinki".

This latter needs an explanation. The further outlying areas of Kerava (to the north) and Kirkkonummi (to the west) are joining the system. They will of course pay more and they will have two choices - either come to helsinki by train (only = don't then go further by bus/tram) or come to helsinki by train and then carry on the journey via bus/tram.

What I don't understand is why all the readers are being updated. Surely they only need these new ones on the trains? But that isn't what the article says.

 

P.S. It's come to me. They can also come to Helsinki by bus. But surely only *those* buses and the train need the L possibility (although transport even in Helsinki will need the 3 possibilty just in case one of these "country" people *start* their journey home on a local (to Helsinki or Espoo or Vantaa) bus/tram).

P.P.S. There are only trams in Helsinki. For the moment there is also a metro (forgotten above) in Helsinki but Espoo are about to decide whether to extend it into their area (where there is a good network of direct buses to Helsinki already)

In England traffic roundabouts are usually when two busy roads cross each other and you want to have the traffic sort itself out rather than have traffic lights. They are quite often in South East England especially when two dual carraigeways cross, but also on a smaller scale in small towns when perhaps one road merges with another at an angle.

Mostly I've seen a logical reason for them.

In Finland they seem to be almost a mode item.

In the summer I drove in a small town called Jämsä. The main road by-passed the town and there was one roundabout on it for the benefit of feeder traffic. However when you got onto that much less important road (which also by-passed the town) with little traffic and unimportant roads joining it there was a sequence of another three roundabouts none of which seemed to have much point.

Where I live in Espoo (just outside Helsinki but still a built-up area) they are in the process of building two roundabouts.

One is a place that had traffic lights before (that never caused any problems) and is where two very minor roads join a slightly less minor road (which does get a reasonable amount of traffic). The traffic lights coped well enough except for maybe 15 mins a day ....   I doubt if the roundabout will help in that 15 or so mins.

The other is on the road near my house that *used* to - in parts (but not that part) - be full of traffic at rush hours but which nowadays (after a motorway addition got most of most of the cars) has been narrowed; made a 40kms zone (with a single speed bump at one end [but for both directions]); and so has much less traffic than ever before. That roundabout is being built where there are side roads leading to residential housing and where there have never been any traffic lights before - nor have they ever been needed.

It seems like the local council having done all the cycle lanes it can is now using its people (and my tax money) to do really unnecessary things.

Or maybe they are taking part in a non-publicised "who has the most unnecessary roundabouts in Finland" competition. They'll need a few more to beat Jämsä.

I saw a report today that said that Spring in Europe this year started a few days earlier than usual and that summer was likely to last a few days longer.

Here in Finland that wasn't the case as the late winter was colder than the early winter and now we're in the typical decline that is August with more signals that summer is coming to an end than anything more positive.

It's very odd at this time to watch French TV which seems to be full of outside broadcasts from the beaches in the South of France while we are beginning to think of getting the winter clothes out.

Well, more like the autumn clothes because one actually quite positive thing here is that there really are four seasons (requiring three - spring and autumn clothes are about the same - sets of clothes). The only bad thing about this is that I'm sure most people would welcome a longer summer and a shorter winter.

Actually winter would be OK too if we could do without those (many) weeks at the beginning of it when it is just dark and getting darker and cold and getting colder without having stabalised on a few minus degrees (say -10C) all the time and with snow on the ground to lighten things up. Those days are regretably few and far between in Southern Finland so we have instead just the misery of plus/minus zero weather with icy roads and no sign of the sun for weeks.

No wonder that there is a mass migration to the Canaries in December/January/February although in most cases the "migration" is only for one week or two (to charge up with sun) rather than the several weeks that only well-off pensioners can afford (The Canaries are no longer cheap).

For me the end of summer means firstly an end to my canoeing as the water is too cold to fall into (not that I have fallen in for over ten years but it could happen) and then about a month later there's an end to my golfing as the courses get hard and virtually unplayable and you need to dress up very warmly in order to survive a typical round. I see no point in putting off the inevitable so I roughly stop both activities according to the calander (or the first signs that "this isn't going to be fun, anymore").

One of the big news yesterday in the Finnish computer industry is that UK-headquartered LogicaCMG with branches throughout Europe but mainly concentrated in France, UK, and Holland had made a bid for WM-data (with offices throughout the four largest Nordic countries and mini offices in Estonia and Poland).

Curiously some people seemed to think that LogicaCMG had *bought* WM-data while the more accurate (there seemed to be less of them!) reports said the truth namely that this is a bid.

While it is a bid that has been approved by shareholders representing more than 50% of the votes in WM-data it still needs to be approved both by 90% of the shareholders of WM-data and also by the shareholders of LogicaCMG.

Now I don't see any problem with either of those as the bid is well over what WM-data has been trading at recently and from the point-of-view of LogicaCMG it extends them from 60 people in Stockholm to good penetration of all Nordic markets (with the emphasis however on Sweden and Finland [which seems to have been ignored by just about everybody]). However there's a further thing which is stopping this Bid from really being a Buy - if someone else comes in and offers at least 30 Swedish Kronor per share (the present bid is worth 27.75 SEK/share) then the deal is off. It's not that much more ...

Curiously that's how WM-data was able to double its size in Finland a couple of years ago. Another company placed a bid for Novo Group which was much bigger than it. That put Novo Group in play and WM-data rushed in with a higher counter-bid which secured the company for it.

So it's quite possible that one of the other big international companies, seeing that WM-data is in play, will make a bid of 30.00 (or more) for it. The only one I think we can exclude is Tietoenator as the two together would have far too large a percentage of the Nordic market for the competition authorities.

Meanwhile I'm in a strange way just happy that I don't have any WM-data shares. I did have a few hundred shares in the Novo Group two years ago and I sold them after the first bid came in and in fact only 2 days before the much improved offer from WM-data. I wouldn't want to experience that sick feeling again !

Every day for the past week or so, I've woken up to the smell of burning.

It hasn't rained for something like 6 weeks in this part of Finland and the woods and fields are extremely dry, but this smell isn't coming from any Finnish forest fires instead it's coming from several hundreds of miles to the East where fires outside the few built-up areas are being allowed to burn themselves out because the fire services only have the resources to deal with the most pressing cases.

The fires are both to the North-West and South-West of St. Petersburg but are mainly concentrated in the North-West i.e. in Karelia some of which was - until the end of the Second World War - part of Finland. They are raging in some cases just across the border and the Finnish border towns of Imatra and Lapeenranta have naturally much worse air because of it than we do in the Helsinki area several hundreds of kilometers away.

When there was a major forest fire in Estonia that the Estonian fire people were fighting a losing battle against, they called on Finnish assistance and with the combined efforts the fire was put out.

The Russians however haven't called on Finnish help.

As always they are too proud to ask for help, yet at the same time their fire service is only able to cope with a small number of the fires and it's natural that when for instance - as happened recently - there was a large fire in a famous park in the town of Viborg (Finnish Viipuri) they would concentrate on that rather than on saving some acres of timber in the countryside.

I suspect that it is official Russia that isn't asking for help and that the firemen themselves would be only too pleased to be able to take a night or so off while someone else (with perhaps more modern fire-fighting equipment [the Estonians if I remember correctly didn't have planes that could drop water]) took the strain.

So there you are. Russia - rich through oil revenues but still without a re-built infrastructure following the upheavals of the past 15 or so years. As an Economist by training I can appreciate the Putin approach of first getting the state solid (oil and gas) revenues and then start applying them in improving living conditions and infrastructure, but as a person suffering these burning smells, I wish he'd start with the Fire Service.

 

I went to collect my new Identity card yesterday. I'd needed to renew my driving licence and thought I might as well get a Finnish Identity Card at the same time as my British passport expires in November and I want to travel in January. According to the official information Identity cards are valid for travel to all EU countries and a couple more (Norway and Switzerland I think).

When I applied I was told that once I got a notification from the authority that hands these out, I could come and collect it. (There was a fixed date to collect the driving licence).

The notification from the authority ("population registry") came and I waited a couple of days to make sure the card had arrived at the place where I had submitted my application and then went to collect it.

There was a massive queue but luckily there was a separate ticket for completed things so I didn't have to wait very long. They couldn't find it and so asked me if I was a Foreign national - if so I'd have to collect it from the Foreigner's section around the corner. She kindly checked the computer when I said that I'd handed in the application form in that room not in the Foreigner's section and found that it had arrived.

So round the corner I went to the Foreigner's section where luckily there was no queue. But it took 10 mins to find my ID card and having been given my driving license as proof of identity right at the start and having finally found it they *then* refused to hand it out unless I presented them with a passport. I had a Finnish driving licence in the same name with picture; a work smart card in the same name with a recent picture etc. etc. and of course the ID card and the accompanying papers had the same name and similar picture but no go unless I had a passport. There was nothing on the notification I received about a passport either.

At this point I thought I'd got them. It's perfectly possible for a Finn to apply for an ID card who doesn't have a passport, so they can't possibly require a passport in such a case. Ah but they're a Finn. But I showed you a Finnish driving license already what's more Finnish than that. No, the boss has left already, and only he can make a decision to hand out something without a passport.

"OK. I'll go and get my passport and I'll be back in 20 mins." (I know when I'm beaten - in fact the whole attempt to get it with a driving license was doomed to failure as soon as they mentioned the word "passport".

As I was leaving they handed me an envelope that was addressed to me. "What's this". "It's a letter (that they hadn't got round to posting - I'd heard that part of the conversation earlier) saying that you need to present a passport to collect your ID card" !

20 minutes later I was back. The place was still empty but it still took another 5mins to find my ID card which had been moved from the worker's desk in the meantime.

But finally I did get the new ID card and could now face my passport change with the knowledge that I had an ID card to fall back on for my EU travel while the passport application was going through the British Consulate's bureaucracy.

Hah! That's what I thought until I looked at the ID card. On the back it says

"This is a certified Finnish Identity Card" (fine so far)

but also

"Not valid as Travel Document"

(the lack of the grammatically necessary "a" before Travel Document - for which there was space - is a typical Finnish English error)

[The front is also interesting. There's a section for Nationality (actually only the words for that in Finnish and Swedish). I am apparently a person with XXX nationality. It makes you wonder.]

So either all the information in all their Finnish and Swedish language documentation about ID cards being used as travel documents is incorrect or I've fallen for the usual One law for the Finns; One law for the non-Finns rule (valid of course for whichever country a non-local lives in - there's nothing specially Finnish about this) and been screwed again. (as for all other purposes than travel my driving license is sufficient proof of identity for credit card purchases; bank business etc.)

Sometimes I feel like doing an Annikka Sörenstam and becoming a citizen of the country I happen to live it - at least then whenever I read the rules about something, I'll know they apply to me (and I'd be able to vote for the people who decide on what to use my tax payments for). Not that I'd feel that I was a Finn, I'd just have documents saying I was. I suspect that Annikka isn't going to be any less Swedish for becoming a US citizen either.

 

P.S. The official documents I had seen earlier which described how the ID card was valid for travelling to EU countries etc. didn't make any distinctions between Finns and non-Finns. The police web site has a very clear description

Henkilökortti (myönnetty 1.3.1999 lukien) ja sähköinen henkilökortti (myönnetty 1.12.1999 lukien) käyvät Suomen kansalaisilla myös matkustusasiakirjana.

The ID card ..... can be used by Finnish citizens also as a travel document.

ulkomaalaiselle myönnetty henkilökortti tai sähköinen henkilökortti eivät käy matkustusasiakirjana

ID cards that have been granted to foreigners can not be used as travel documents.

 

If I'd read that web site before I applied,  I wouldn't have applied and I'd have saved myself 40 Euros.

This is however small potatoes compared with renewing my British Passport where the charge is 141 Euros and where they require colour photograhs (whereas the Finns "prefer" black and white). Now here's hoping the photograph that was good enough for the Finns (but now in colour) will be good enough for the Brits. It's closer to a "good" photo than to a "bad" photo in the document on their web site, but who knows if they'll get a measuring tape out to measure to the exact mm.

According to a column in the current Business Week magazine (I have the digital edition so for you readers of paper versions, it may be the next magazine), the US is now fourth in the "Global Creativity Index" which a professor has created to define the attractiveness of a country to foreigners.

The very odd thing is that the top three countries are (in order) Sweden, Japan and Finland.

The reason this is odd is that both Sweden and Finland have very high tax rates (although Finland at least has some kind of rule that cuts taxes for (some?) foreigners for the first six months (pity - indeed great pity - it didn't apply to me when I first moved here!)).

It's also odd because Finnish business leaders - yes, including the former boss of Nokia - are always saying that Finland needs to provide financial incentives to attract the kind of highly qualified people that hmmm.. Nokia ... needs.

If they take a look at this "global talent magnet" list they'll see there's no need. As I've said for a long time, people come to Nokia in Finland to improve their cv and as a long-term investment - not for the money - so there's no need to offer them financial incentives.

and anyway, once they are here, they might realise (as I do) that there are benefits to living here that can't be counted in money terms

(cycle tracks and good public libraries to name just two)

 

One of the continually running stories this Finnish summer - especially in the Swedish language press - has been the attempt of the Helsinki local authority to grab a large part (20%) of the local authority Sipoo (swedish=Sibbo) to the East. This area includes Sipoo's largest tax payer (a food company) and thus represents about 30% of the tax revenues of Sipoo.

Helsinki's claim on this area has nothing to do with history, it's just that they want to build houses there. The problem is that they seem to have done a lot of lobbying of the Government before they bothered to tell anyone about their proposed takeover and the Government (or at least part of it) seems to agree with them.

Sipoo are now forced to propose that *they* make land available in that now disputed area for house building. This is completely against the stated will of most of the people who now live there because they live there *because* it is a rural area yet close to Helsinki (and ironically many of them moved there from Helsinki).

Arguments used by Helsinki include the rather mad "people in Helsinki ought to have the right to have a house yet stay in the Helsinki local authority area".

In short, in a sensible system they wouldn't have a hope in h*** but in this system, the government (and especially the Center party part of it who don't get many votes in the south and so probably don't really care) might just let them get away with it and ruin Sipoo's economy making it ripe for a further takeover of land in a few years - maybe even all of it will go then.

Another curious fact in all this is that Helsinki and Sipoo are not adjacent as there is a odd small triangle of land between the two that is owned by Vantaa which is the local authority to the North. In the proposed deal they were supposed to get compensation consisting of a larger piece of land in Helsinki but on the border to Vantaa. The people living there didn't fancy the idea (Vantaa has higher taxes) and so that idea was dropped. The last thing I read was that Vantaa were now going to get no compensation at all for that **key* piece of land without which the whole land grab wouldn't work. What you might think was that that sliver of land was so valuable that Vantaa could get for it almost anything they want - but no, they are giving it up for nothing! Either their leaders are fools or there is something nasty going on here.

P.S. Why are the Swedish press interested in this ? Sipoo was until recently one of the few local authorities left with a Swedish-speaking majority. So there's that fact coupled with the fact that the Swedish(-speakers) Folk Party is influential there and the fact that one of the roles of the Swedish language press is to support Swedish-speaking people many of whom still live in rural areas along the south and west coasts - just like those in this part of Sipoo in fact.

 

Summer is here and with it Finland is invaded with  Finnish ice-hockey players who spend most of the rest of the year playing for NHL teams in Canada and the US.

The first direct sign for me this year was when I was waiting to cross the road to get from my canoe club to my car. It's a 30km/hour road that leads from nowhere to nowhere but does go alongside a scenic inlet of the sea so I suppose it was the ideal place for someone to ostentatiously show off their wealth by driving along there in a large, open Ferrari with the obligatory blonde in the passenger seat. It was actually quite amusing to see a car with that performance slowing to 30kms an hour in order to safely negotiate the speed bump opposite the canoe club.

It's of course completely mad to own such a car in Finland as the maximum speed limit is 120kms/hour and that's only on very short stretches of motorway so the normal maximum is 100kms/hour (or roughly 60mph).

A few weeks later I found out in an article in the paper that this was probably (see the note) the summer car of Teemu Selanne who is ... a Finnish NHL ice hockey player (actually rather a star among Finnish ice hockey players so perhaps more worthy than many of his exhorbitant salary). [Note: I'm assuming here there aren't two open red Ferraris in Finland.]

Fast forward a few weeks and there was an article about a luxury "yacht" (looked more like a power boat with cabins to me than a yacht with a sail) that had gone aground outside Helsinki and had just made it to the shore where it half sank.

This turned out to be the summer boat of ... Teemu Selanne who wasn't even on board but had lent it to some of his friends (including the guy who navigated to the wrong sign of the marker and had therefore struck that ground). The reports showed that the boat had ca 50% more people on board than it was registered for, but the police didn't seem to bother a bit about that but instead had gone in for a drugs test and alchohol test on the "driver" both of which had proved negative.

The newspaper reports also mentioned an interesting fact. The boat was worth 600,000 Euros or 750,000 dollars and it's new price was double that. (It had been bought a few years earlier second-hand for a price roughly between those two prices).

So you have a boat worth three-quarters of a million dollars and you just lend it to someone who can't read the navigation signs on the sea properly?

Ice-hockey players are national heroes in Finland. A year or so ago, one of the ice-hockey stars was given a drive in a rally car in the Finnish Rally (part of the world championship). He trained on **open country roads**; and had an accident - I'm fairly sure it was a solo accident with only the co-driver hurt. But as even here you can't just post guys at both ends of a stretch of public road and thus convert it into your private testing ground there was a stiff fine.

Hang on the name of that Finnish ice-hockey player will come to me soon ......... ah, yes, Teemu Selanne.

On the plus side the same Teemu Selanne was many years ago one of the founders of a children's charity here and every summer the ice-hockey players make use of their fame to play in money for the children's charity in their annual summer tennis and golf competitions. Charity foundations and the like are not common here as most rich people no doubt feel just what I say when approached by a charity on the street i.e. "I've paid already" - in their case naturally in taxes. So those ice hockey pros have brought one good thing with them from the US along with the flashy cars !

 

 

The thought of writing this piece came oddly enough when reading an article in the on-line version of the UK computer magazine PCPro - to be exact the Real World section at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld - about portables and about the writer not understanding why people travel with laptop bags. ("Often, they'll even have a brand name such as Toshiba, Dell or HP blazoned across them, but it might just as well read "Mug Me, Now, Please".")

However if you do travel from Finland back to wherever you came from the chances are that you are flying back and then you have the problem of the queues at Helsinki Vantaa airport.

In the good old days Vantaa (I'll use this as shorthand from now on) used to have dedicated lines for checking into each flight. However then some genius decided this was inefficient and a single queue for all (almost all - I've never worked out what the two at the end that are outside this system are for) Finnair flights - which of course means all Finnair and other OurWorld partner companies.

The first time I arrived at the crack of dawn (seriously, it was way before 6) for a charter flight, the queue went first zig-zag in the area closer to the check-in desks (and with the zig-zig area roped off) and then went in an almost straight line into the next terminal and almost made it into the final internal terminal. (These are next to each other and not that far away, but you get the picture).

So back to the end of the queue we went and as there were 6 or so people checking us in things went quite quickly (although I was grateful for being at the airport 2 hours early) until that is when we were halfway along the zig zag area when it suddenly slowed. I looked and saw that about half the checkers-in had decided they'd finished for now (off for a coffee break perhaps) leaving just 3 to handle the queue which hadn't got any shorter.

Finally we were through and then there was in the same hall the queue (straight and not *that* long) for the security check.

This last trip (early afternoon Friday) we actually managed to join the queue just outside the zig-zag area and were through in no time, but now the security people had introduced the zig-zag system too and that queue now took almost as long.

The (English) guy in front of me asked what he should do - he had a boarding time that was ten minutes from then and knew full well he'd never make it even through security in that time. So I asked the Finnair guy on the Information desk (there were three people there) if he would escort him through the queue and got the reply "it's nothing to do with me, guv!" (or equivalent), so I told the guy just to ignore the zig-zags and just siddle through direct to the check-in and if anyone said anything just point at your boarding card.

He did and as I expected no-one in the queue seemed to bother about the legitimacy of this one guy outflanking them. This is very Finnish. You can get away with a lot if you just give the impression that you have the right to do what you are doing. It takes quite a lot before a Finn will complain. Finns also tend the follow the rules (in this case the zig-zag ropes) automatically. A (to me) nice story is that another time I had just made it to the check-in desk for another airline which is in the furthest-off terminal when the computers gave up after a power cut that had affected only that part of the building. After 15 mins of hanging around we were all told to go to the main hall and check in there. The entire queue turned and very very slowly started walking to the main hall in a major traffic jam and we were now at the back. So I pushed the the trolley out of the building; half-ran with it outside; went back in at the next door; and was now ahead of everyone that had turned around and used the inside route. *Nobody* else (all Finns so it might maybe have been a charter flight) used that route - everyone like sheep trundled along.

Anyway the conclusions for travelling via Vantaa.

- arrive early

- expect there to be a long queue but don't panic (too much) because it will move quite fast (until it's coffee time)

- expect a similar queue for the security check (and be aware that they will want you to take your portable out of its case - they won't however want to to switch it on), but be aware that an official air (and a reason, just in case I'm in the queue) will allow you to outflank it.

Oh yes and why was I reminded of Vantaa when there was the article about portables in laptop bags. Simple: all three people in front of me in the security queue last time had ThinkPads; all in laptop bags.

My theory is that they wanted better PCs and therefore were not carrying them in scruffy rucksacks as the writer of the PCPro article suggested - or maybe they'd been to Vantaa before and knew they'd be forced to take the portable out of their bag anyway making the idea of a disguised bag a bit pointless.

I had a large mug of coffee in the restaurant/coffee house at the golf club today. It cost me 1 Euro. Just over a week ago I had a coffee in Budapest. *It* cost me the equivalent of 2 Euros and as it was waiter served there was 10% on top of that. Now this is perhaps not a fair comparison because the coffee place in Budapest was a newly renovated nicely styled place, but although it was quite close to the centre it wasn't in the true centre of Budapest and was slightly off the tourist areas and mostly frequented by locals. Anyway to be fair let's compare instead to a coffee I had earlier in the week I spent in Budapest in a little mostly stand-up place in the market at Moskva Tér (which is miles away from the centre) where the coffee cost something like 1 Euro 40 cents for a very small cup.

What's really interesting about this comparison is that Hungarian incomes are less than Finnish ones (even after tax!) and yet they are paying more even in price comparison terms even before you bring in any weighting for levels of income. Food in restaurants (comparing similar levels of restaurants) was probably half the Finnish price level.

So that was odd.

Even odder however was comparing the price levels of CDs. I went to Budapest with the intention of buying the CD versions of most of the LPs I had bought there in the early 70's even though I still had the LPs and in fact had made .mp3 copies of some of them. The first shop I was in had three packs of Omega, one of which contained all the three LPs I had of Omega, two of which I had intended buying again as CDs. Three packs are cheaper than buying single CDs aren't they; and old CDs are always at mid-price (or even lower mid-price) aren't they ? Not in Hungary they aren't. They wanted 40 Euros for a three pack of three short CDs from 1969, 70 and 71. So I thought I was in a pricey shop and mentioned this where we were staying. That's a cheap shop they said ! and so it seemed because wherever I went the cheapest CDs (apart the the usual complete rubbish that the entire world seems to try to get rid of for a few Euros) cost ca 14 Euros with prices up to ca 18 Euros. Most of the early 70 recordings were it is true at the 14 Euro level rather than the 18 Euro level but still. Compare this with Finland where mid-price CDs (of which there is a vast selection not excluding really good recordings by really good artists) typically are at the 8 Euro level and occasionally at 6 or so. (and again note the different in wage levels ...)

So that was very odd. CD shops selling rubbish at the usual sort of low price and selling all the rest of their CDs at full-price prices.

The other odd thing was that DVDs *were* available in Budapest at consistently cheap prices (even if there too of course there were normal prices for the very latest hits).

Whereas in Finland prices for DVDs tend to hover around the 6-8 Euro mark *when they are on offer* - i.e. the typical 5.95 and 7.95, they only very occasionally and for very poor stock (which in my terms means fairly awful films provided only with one language track and Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian sub-titles) go down a bit more than that (hitting 3 Euros as the present rock-bottom "one day only" specials),  in Hungary there was everywhere a vast selection of legal, full feature DVDs with Hungarian dubbing (synchronization) and sub-titles in addition to the original language and very often with other languages too at **990 ** forints (which is just less than 4 Euros) and these were good films too whereas the 3-6 Euro ones in Finland tend to be fairly bad ones. So I bought a couple here and a couple there and ended up with quite a few and all at 4 Euros each except the 4 I finally found that were Hungarian films (so genuinely done in Hungarian rather than being only Hungarian-dubbed ones) where I had to pay 1190 forints (just less than 5) which seemed over-priced !! (Those by the way were in the shop my friend had told me was not expensive when I had mentioned the 40 Euro price of that 3-CD set - well he doesn't get out much as places even in up-market shopping centres had rows of DVDs at 990 whereas the same ones in that "cheap" shop were all 1190.)

Anyway the point of all this comparing prices is to say that you can't take anything for granted. I took for granted two things. Firstly that prices in Hungary would be less than in Finland - in most cases true but not for coffee places and not for Cds; secondly that every European country has rubbish; budget; mid-price and full-price CDs (and reduced price offers on certain ones) - in this case completely not true in the case of Budapest (and I checked in all the places selling DVDs at 990; in every case their CDs cost 3 1/2 to 5 times more).

So, be careful out there - don't make assumptions.

(I'm also completely baffled by the fact that DVDs (that need dubbing into Hungarian and the addition of the Hungarian sub-titles and even if they are already available because the film has earlier been on distribution in Hungary [not true - as far as I remember films dubbed into Hungarian don't have Hungarian sub-titles in the cinema] still need the Hungarian DVD menus to be added) are cheap whereas CDs that need no additional work for the Hungarian market are very expensive. Why indeed do people buy them ? The extremely good DVD of a concert by Koncz Zsuzsa featuring all the tracks from one of her recent CDs plus five other songs cost 990/1190 (usual/that "cheap" shop)  whereas the CD itself cost 4000 and the DVD performances are just as good if not better than those of the studio CD. Madness. [No prizes for guessing which one I have!])

 

P.S. I made the assumption that as if I post on 29th of May a posting has been marked as being on the 30th, the way round this was to mark this posting (made on the 3rd of June) as the 2nd of June and it would be then marked as the 3rd of June. As you can see from the date, that didn't work !

It may seem to readers that it's a long way from Finland to Hungary 1956 but I do actually have a way to connect the two.

Unlike Hungary, Finland was never occupied by Russia after the second world war and was never a member of the Warsaw Pact but Finland still had to be careful in its relationships with the rest of the world for a long time because a) Russia was still a threat that was just over the border and b) until 1956 Russia had a base (Porkala) within 50 kms of Helsinki.

Even so when I was in Helsinki in the Summer of 1968, working for the second year in succession as an AIESEC practicant, one of the things I remember even today was after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian (and other Warsaw Pact countries') troops, there was a large demonstration in the centre of Helsinki (with its focal point if I remember correctly the same location  - Market Square - that was used last Friday to celebrate the victory of the Finnish Heavy Rock band "Lordi" in the Eurovision Song Contest) with a large poster saying

1953 Berlin

1956 Budapest

1968 Prague

?      Helsinki

It was a large but by and large non-aggressive demonstration but to avoid any major problems Finnish police (and perhaps other security forces) had set up a large cordon several kilometers around the location of the Russian Embassy. I know because I, like many others, tried to get to it via various routes all of which were blocked off a long way before you got anywhere near the Russian Embassy.

Anyway Budapest 1956 was on that banner and when I was recently in Budapest for the first time in 30 years I got hold of an early copy of a book about the Hungarian Revolution (which started in October 1956 and so the 50th Aniversary is coming up) written by a Brit (Bob Dent) who has lived in Budapest since the mid 1980's and who also speaks Hungarian and so could read documents not only in English but also in Hungarian while preparing the book.

The launch for the book is on the 31st of May so I'm jumping the gun by a couple of days but I've been reading the book (Budapest 1956 Locations of Drama - published by Europa) and it's a really interesting read for two main reasons.

The first is that the style is entertaining. There's a freshness about the book that perhaps comes out most in the fact that it's not dogmatic. It won't for instance say 4,000 attended a meeting but instead will say something like different sources give figures between 2000 and 8000 for the meeting. (Added later: This is actually a rather banal example. A better one is perhaps this one from a later chapter which mentions that some sources say that Pal Meletér (Defence Minister in the Nagy government) was planning a military coup and also that when taken prisoner at the Russian airbase on Csepel island outside Budapest (where he had gone for a second meeting to discuss Russian troop *withdrawal*) he had or had not made a statement and if made what this statement according to one source contained.)

The second is that it deals with the places where various events took place rather than dealing with events in a purely chronological order. Because of this it also is able to talk about the same place today (sometimes with recently taken photographs alongside the historic 1956 photographs) and whether the place or person is remembered in any way on or near the site. Only a person who has lived in Budapest throughout the changes that occured since 1989 would be able for instance to mention the discussions connected with the building of a new shopping centre on the same spot where a simple memorial to 1956 had been put up earlier (discussions that were solved by leaving the memorial in front of the shopping centre entrance and indeed adding a metal sculpture in the form of a flag to it to make it stand out).

So far I have two major problems.

One is that the book is so good that it's a pity that as things stand the English language edition (there is also a translated Hungarian edition) will only be available in Hungary as the Hungarian publisher seems to lack contacts outside Hungary because as far as I am aware this is the first book they have published in English. That's a great pity especially considering the potential market among people of Hungarian descent in the UK, Australia and especially the US.

Correction: The author has now written to me saying that somebody from the US had contacted him after reading this blog item (!). Although at the time I wrote it, the above paragraph was true, there is now a distributor for outside Hungary. He sent me the details which are below

Distributed outside Hungary by AK Distribution

PO Box 12766, Edinburgh EH8 9YE, UK

tel: (44-131) 555 5165; fax: (44-131) 555 5215

ak@akedin.demon.co.uk

www.akuk.com

 

The second is that there is a map of Budapest in 1956 with places marked with numbers. Each location (where the 1956 events took place) is also in the body of the book marked with a number. *But* the numbers don't match. They do match for the first three locations/book sections which meant that it took me to book section 8 (still in Buda) to realise the map locations didn't match the book chapters (8 on the map was in Pest). Whereas in the page after the map there is a matching list of the locations used in the map, I can imagine that a lot of readers like me will be expecting the map numbers to match the book sections' numbers. As it is people will have to look at the location in the book section heading; look at the matching list (page after map) to see if the location is there; and then look at the map (if it is). All a bit messy and a great pity given the high quality of the prose section of the book.

Bringing this back to Finland again ...  The book mentions at one point that Radio Free Europe (RFE) was at one point encouraging revolutionaries to hold out giving the (false) impression that help from the US was on its way. As part of this hold-out encouragement they gave instructions in how to make Molotov cocktails.

It was only recently that I read (elsewhere) that Molotov Cocktails had been invented by the Finns in the Winter War !

P.S. The other link between Finland and Hungary is of course the common membership in the Finno-Ugric language group (and the two largest single languages in the opposite ends of this group). Thus Hungarians are regarded as kinsfolk to a certain extent and for instance the Formula One Hungarian Grand Prix is regarded as Finland's home Grand Prix with always a substantial number of Finnish supporters there (much more than at any other Grand Prix).

Interestingly there is also a sort of fraternity between Hungarians and Poles because they once shared the same monarch(s?). So (going back to the book) one of the major early demonstrations that led to the Hungarian Revolution was a pro-Poland march (there is a photo in the book with two placards visible with words in Hungarian saying 'support the Poles" and a larger placard of the Polish Eagle) which took demonstrators to a statue in Buda of a Polish General who had supported the Hungarians in their 1848 Revolution against the Hapsburgs.

P.P.S. So far I've come across a couple of interesting before/after photographs in the book. The first one is a square near Moskva Tér that I mention earlier when talking about the monument in front of a modern shopping centre. There the 1956/present day comparison is a bit difficult to see because the photographs are taken from (it appears) somewhat different distances (I presume because the present-day photographer would have been standing in the middle of a busy road) and at a minutely different angle, so it's very difficult to see that the building on the left of the photo is the same in both cases (with that modern shopping centre replacing the buildings on the right). The other before/after photographs are of the Hungarian Radio building that was taken over by the rebels and (to my mind, amazingly) still IS used by Hungarian Radio. The modern photograph is taken from almost exactly (if not exactly - it's hard to tell) the same spot and it's an uncanny likeness with the same key balcony in place (where several short but important speeches took place) and with the only visible differences being the (typical) complete clean-up of the building (by 1970 when I lived in Budapest almost all the buildings' facades were covered with 25 years of grime); the replacement of the Magyár Rádio sign with a more modern and wider version; and the replacement of small overhead window panes at the back of the balcony with fewer larger ones.

P.P.P.S. I'm nearing the end (not there yet, I'm enjoying this to much to rush) so I had a look at the extensive list of book and article references (what, 10 pages ?) and the equally extensive index. (Note: when I was in Budapest I was told that most Hungarian books don't have indexes and that often if you want one you have to pay extra - not this one!) As I found the beginning of the book references, I couldn't help noticing the ending of the book, so I was curious and read the page or so before too. The ending was "why didn't Time have that on their cover?" and was a reference to a Russian soldier carrying an old woman to a house at the side of the road. The whole story was that there was a curfew but this old woman had ignored it and had spend all day distributing bread from a cart despite bullets flying around. Then towards evening she collapsed. A Russian soldier got off his tank and went over to the woman and picked her up. A Russian officer started shouting at him. The soldier replied briefly in a serious voice and continued carrying the old woman to the side of the road; knocked on a door; handed over the woman to the person who opened and then went back to his tank. Now my sympathies are well and truly with the revolutionary forces but I like the fact that the book is even-handed and gives praise where praise is due no matter on which side of the struggle the people were. (Not that the Russians get that much praise :) )

P.P.P.P.S I had to correct a date in the text above (the Polish General Bem helped the Hungarians in 1848 not 1948!) and so I can add a bit of trivia. The author of the book mentioned heavily in this text is Bob Dent. Before going to Budapest I'd bought the Blue Guide to Hungary by the same Bob Dent, so Amazon recently sent me an e-mail saying in effect that they are recommending a book on the Hungarian Revolution to people who had earlier bought the Blue Guide. So I thought they were recommending me this book by the same author. That would have been logical, but, no, they were offering me a book on the Hungarian Revolution by someone else. How odd. I bet it's not as good as this one!

I've been away for a week and so I had to read through a week's papers (because I was too lazy (and too late) to go to the net to turn off delivery for a week).

There were a couple of curious pieces that also curiously were linked (although that wasn't the intention).

First there was a piece on the winner of the award for the year's ski centre in Finland. People living in the Alps will no doubt be amused that this ski centre has "two lifts and a height difference of 48 meters".

The ski centre is in fact located in Kauniainen (Swedish name Grankulla) that is a small local authority that is completely surrounded by Espoo (which is the area directly to the West of Helsinki and which is usually stated to be the second largest "town" in Finland although in fact it is more a set of small areas with middle-class housing). Kauniainen by comparison is a generally slightly wealthy area with the lowest local tax rates in Finland that used to be a mainly Swedish-speaking area although nowadays the percentage of Swedish speakers is somewhat less than 50% as wealthy Finns move in in order to pay the lowest taxes they can find and still be a short distance from both Helsinki and the sea.

The second piece was a Profile of the new boss of IBM Finland who is clearly a Swedish-speaking Finn and who lives in Grankulla (as he would no doubt call it) and it's mentioned that he likes slalom skiing and was earlier an active member of the club that runs that slope that won the award in the first piece.

What was curious here was that the paper when doing a profile always asks which book the subject of the profile is reading and this Swedish-speaking Finn was reading a book by the Swede Henning Mankell *in Finnish*.

This is of course complete madness. The book was written in Swedish; is easily obtainable here; and the IBM guy is Swedish-speaking, so why on earth read it in a Finnish translation. In my experience it is *always* preferable to read a book in the original language (if your knowledge of that language is good enough) and I've especially noticed this with modern Swedish books which often assume a good knowledge of life in Sweden and where the feel of the books are different and deeper in the original Swedish language text.

The IBM guy had just returned from a posting in Sweden so why make a point in a Swedish-language newspaper of saying you are reading the book in Finnish. It makes no sense at all - unless of course he wanted an entry in the Finnish equivalent of Private Eye's "Pseud's Corner".

I've always liked travelling by tram - certainly compared to travelling by bus in places where there are either no bus lanes or where they are not policed well enough so that you can still get stuck.

(Note to lurkers: Yes, I have been in Lisbon where some of the trams have to stop (and ring their bell frantically) because someone has parked his car partly on the tram track and gone into the café for a coffee.)

Helsinki already has a well-established network of trams, which when I was first in Helsinki in the summer of 1967 still had a driver and a ticket-issuer but now for a long time only have a driver who sells occasional tickets to people who haven't bought them in advance (slightly cheaper) or who haven't an electronic transport pass (with money or time on it), in addition to both local (Helsinki only); regional (Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo, Kauniainen); or long distance buses most of which make at least some stops in Helsinki itself (as do the regional buses but much more so) while on their way to and from the remoter locations.

Anyway the point of this article is that Helsinki will be building two new lines both of which will pass through a new housing area which will be built in what used to be the Western Harbour area and mainly on the land previously used for containers (The container business has been (is being?) moved to a new harbour at a location to the east of Helsinki much further away from the centre) before travelling on to other areas of Helsinki that aren't as well served as they ought to be with tram links.

I'm happy about this because some of the ships that go to Tallinn will still go from the Western harbour area and these will now have a feeder line from what is the moment the end metro station and more importantly for me is also near to a stop for the regional Espoo buses on their way into the centre of Helsinki.

This makes those trips to Tallinn much easier than they are at the moment because all of them (and especially the Western harbour ferries) usually require a long walk to get to if you are not prepared to wait (and plan into the journey time) for less frequent forms of transport.

Unfortunately all is not rosy as the golden days of day trips to Tallinn for 8-12 Euros have gone seemingly for ever and now we were already up to at least twenty even before the same newspaper that had the tram article reported that the ferry companies were introducing a fuel surcharge on the route of 10 Euros and upwards for the return journey.

This year, as in every summer, pairs of young people (usually male/female) dressed in colourful shirts will be on the streets of Helsinki and other cities equipped with free maps and other tourist information.

This is probably one of the most sought after summer jobs and is often filled by students near the end of their school education (rather than University students).

In Germany, according to information in a free Economist newsletter on Berlin, they are taking a different tack for the soccer world championship. There, they will be employing pairs of tourist guides but in the German case these will be unemployed people who will be working for 1.50 Euros an hour on top of their normal unemployment benefits.

The thing that struck me was that the guides will be people who can speak between 2 and 6 languages.

Only in Germany, I suspect, could someone who speaks 6 languages be out of work.

[Thinks: I speak six languages (at least to get by) and yet that won't keep me in a job if there is a turndown in the computer market. Strike the previous sentence! I do however know where my future lies - where's the next World Cup?]

On a final note England doesn't seem to have got this idea of free tourist information to boost tourism. I was in Chester recently and went into a "Tourist Information" office - official sign and all - and all it seemed to be was a shop selling maps; books; and bus trips. So I decided to go to the very official main tourist office only to find that it was in a back street away from everything; was a very small cramped room and while they had some free tourist brochures the only map they had that wasn't in an advertising glossy (and was thus an overview map only) *cost* £1. Well a pound isn't much for a map but this wasn't much of a map and even in Tourist areas like Tenerife, the capital city Sanata Cruz and its neighbur La Laguna have little tourist booths just where you are likely to walk past them that have no problems in both giving you such a map for nothing and marking useful places on it.

A couple of years ago in an attempt to get Finns to spend less (usually unproductive) time in improving their houses themselves and thus perhaps give more people a job, Finland introduced a "work on the house" deduction from taxes which means that you can claim money back from tax if you employ a registered company to clean your house; make repairs to your house or otherwise improve it through their work.

One aim was naturally to avoid using "this guy I know" to do it who would do it without bothering to declare the money he got from you and could then often do it for slightly less (without a receipt) than a company would. I suspect however that in self-reliant Finland a lot of the work was being done  by the house (of flat) owners themselve (certainly except in rare cases, cleaning was).

We fairly immediately discovered some of the snags.

We had once (before this law change) employed a company to do a major clean-up of our house and they arrived with all the specialised equipment they needed; were obviously experts at what they did and did an amazing amount of work in the day they spent.

Since the law change we've employed two companies to do a similar day's work. The first year two young girls turned up with a bucket. The second year one young girl turned up with a bucket (as one was sick). My wife said that they were willing enough (and certainly more willing than me) but that in effect all they did was something she could have done in the same time (in fact that second year she had to work alongside that single girl in order to get the work done at all in the time).

Needless to say prices hadn't gone down and so we were paying more than before for less qualified people; no specialised equipment and less work done in the time and all only because we would now save money because of the tax deduction.

This year our tax deductions for this were so high (as we also had the infamous bathroom repair I wrote about earlier) that I had so put some of the money on my tax papers (as well as them going on my wife's as in previously years) and there I discovered that those tax deductions weren't so great as the government had made out when selling the idea.

- There's a maximum deduction.

- You can only claim for work done not for wood used (our terrace); equipment replaced (that bathroom) or even washing liquid (if they'd brought any).

- You can only claim 60% of the money you've paid out (for *work* done as above)

Or in other words assuming that your marginal rate of tax is 50% which is a reasonable estimate for most people, then you are only saving 30% on the *work part* of the repaiir/cleaning work you have had done.

In fact it's probably less because I am fairly certain the tax deduction only came into play after deducting the first X Euros of such expenses (as what in the car insurance business would be self-risk).

If that all wasn't bad enough, it was reported in yesterday's paper that some people who had employed a company with an official permit to do work were not being granted their household deductions because the company wasn't *also* registered on a second list of companies allowed to do household deduction work. The reply to the paper from the tax authorities about this (and nobody seems to have been told about the need for this second registration) was "we're sorry for the people involved but we can't make an exception for any of them". (What else!).

Helsinki's airport used to be in a suburb of Helsinki but many years ago a new airport was built far to the north in the next local government area (Vantaa) and they've kept building extensions to it since.

(The latest plans reported last week being for a new multi-story car park (in addition to the three already there P1, P2, P3 and P5 - yes, you can count, P1 and P2 are in the same building) where at the moment the slightly cheaper outdoor parking P4 is (there's also the much cheaper open air remote car pack with a free bus shuttle - I haven't a clue where that is!)) and a new airport Hilton Hotel right next (and thus much closer than all the existing "airport" hotels which are several kms away) to the planned new major extension to the non-EU terminal (which I was in last week because the UK didn't sign up for EU freedom of movement [Schengen] and so flights there don't go from the EU terminal which is only for countries who did sign up.)

The main annoyance is that this remoteness in effect gives you the choice of two evils. You either pay exhorbitant prices to park your car there or you get a taxi. Just to make this choice even more difficult they also charge much more for the first few days rather than for (say) days in weeks 2 and 3 so if you are away for only a few days you still don't save much compared to the taxi fare there and back.

In effect you end up with the following calculation - will my car start after n days in the parking garage (will it even be there is another question, but so far that's not been my major worry). Now in summer that's not a major problem for a week or so, but in winter even those parking houses (unheated as they are) can get very cold and it's not unknown for cars to refuse to start after their owners have been in the warm South (or East) for a couple of weeks.

It would therefore be very nice if there were alternatives to both these costly options but the official airport bus is pricey too and in my case you need to get to it first (30 mins + two lots of walking); the one normal bus that goes from the city centre to the airport takes for ever to get there and just as you think you have made it decides to take a long detour via all the office complexes and service areas that are close but not close enough to the airport passenger terminals. There's also a bus from Espoo where I live but as far as I can remember it goes only at times suitable to get workers to and from those service areas and not during the day at all. Finally, you can get a suburban train; get off at some lonely station and hope there's a bus from there any hour soon that will take you to the airport.

None of these are likely to appeal much to anyone and so for years they have been talking about a train extension running under the airport (which, for some reason I don't really understand except for ease of operation, needs to be in a loop thus making it twice as long and twice as costly to fund so it's not been decided yet) and for bringing the metro to the airport as well.

This latter option was in the papers this week. It would require a completely new metro line from the present newly built major centre for metro; local and regional buses and the paper reckons that if they start now it'll be ready in 20 years time.

I don't think I can wait that long (and I somehow doubt that it'll be ready in 2026 anyway).

This was first "broadcast" in the other blog in February 2005. It's still valid so here it is again - hopefully for a wider audience than the SharePoint people who used to frequent my old blog (which was mainly that).

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In the nineties there were quite a few large "mergers" (really one company took over the other, but we're nice up here) between fair sized Swedish and Finnish companies.

While people outside Northern Europe may see Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Finns as all the same (which they consistently do in reporting on the nationalities of football players in English clubs  [2006 addition: where they often just say the first Nordic nationality that comes to mind]) in fact there are a lot of differences between them.

So when these mergers happened there was an awareness of these differences perhaps for the first time. So much so that Finnish TVs educational unit made a series of half-hour episodes on those differences using a mass on on camera interviews mostly with people involved in a couple of those large mergers - Nordbanken (Sweden) and Merita (Finland) now Nordea (a large commercial bank) and Tieto (Finland) and Enator (Sweden) now TietoEnator (the largest Nordic IT company).

I didn't see it then but looking for something to fill my new DVD hard disk recorder (!) I saw that there was a night repeat of all six episodes in one night and set the recorder going.

I've now watched it and most of it wasn't a surprise (I've worked in Sweden several years; had a Swedish wife for longer [my present wife is Finnish] and speak Swedish) but still interesting for that. [The program had Swedish subtitles for the Finnish speakers and Finnish subtitles for the Swedish speakers but I consciously read neither]

The main conclusion was that the Swedes discuss a lot before making any decision whereas the Finns make a decision and the staff carry it out.

That's the black and white version of course but on average it's true enough. In Sweden everybody is supposed to give their opinion on anything before there's eventually a summing-up and a decision which is usually put out in the form of a recommendation rather than an order. Swedes understand that this is the same thing but no other nationality faced with a Swedish "recommendation" has any idea that it is anything but a suggestion.

The Swedes are often compared to the Japanese who also have a long discussion process before coming to a decision but in fact whereas in Japan (I'm told) everyone there then loyally supports the decision even if they are against it, in Sweden people seem to just ignore decisions if they were against it during the discussion period.

The program also made clear another similarity between Swedes and Japanese, namely a desire not to offend leading to never saying right out that they objected to something the other side was saying but phrasing a No in nice-sounding words and (according to other Swedes in the programs) saying No instead in body language (that only other Swedes understood). The Finns (like the people from Hamburg in Germany to the occasional horror of people from further south of that country) say right out if they object to something. No confusion there !

This goes for the results of meetings. A Finn will often go away from a meeting with Swedes thinking that everything has been agreed only for the next meeting to start again almost as if the previous meeting hadn't taken place. It's those Swedes again saying in words that they are happy with the decision but in body language saying they aren't or alternatively they were taking up their "right" to bring up new points even after a decision supposedly (and clearly in the Finns minds) has been reached.

Another thing that struck me in these mergers was that the Swedes in both cases seemed to take it for granted that the working language in meetings would be Swedish rather than the usual Nordic compromise when Finns or Danes are involved of English.

Swedes by and large seem to assume that Finns speak Swedish (we've had people arriving at seminars here from Sweden intending to speak Swedish and being shouted down when they try) and yet it seemed that even when they found out that this wasn't true (at least as far as *fluent* Swedish goes) they still carried on holding the joint meetings in Swedish (and seemed to have - from the interviews - the feeling that they were being kind by speaking Swedish rather slower than usual!)

It was also interesting to hear that a Swedish leader is regarded as one of a group when at work whereas in Finland there is a stricter hierarchy (which I continue to ignore - I've worked in Sweden too long!), yet in the evening when people were out in their free time there were no differences in "rank" between the Finnish boss and his people but still a distance between the Swedish boss and his "group members". Curious.

Finally, the final program was a bit different from the other programs in the series because it was about the etiquette of formal meals in Sweden and in particular how to drink snaps and say skål. Sweden is supposed to be an easy going, egalitarian country and yet they have these really sterile official dinners based on 18th Century (?) dinners among the nobility.

Now this I have experienced. When I worked in Sweden (for SKF) we had some foreign visitors from other SKF European companies and the people in the group were all invited to an evening at SKF's official "guest house" most of which was spent sitting at a large dining table with uniformed waitresses and a very, very organised set of things to do at every stage - including a vast series of organised snaps drinking and snaps songs singing. My main memory of that evening is that I had missed out (on purpose) on several snaps rounds and wanted a second glass of red wine instead. My empty glass was ignored every time the waitress came past and when I finally asked, she was in semi-shock and said that the official time for the second glass of wine wasn't until XXXX and so I'd have to wait till then. In Finland the wine bottles would be open on the table for anyone to grab ...

There was a lot more of course, but I'd better leave out the bit about the Swedes in the programs sounding often condescending and the Finns being more thoughtful in their replies in case I ever want a job in Sweden again.

Sometimes it's useful to move from one blog system to another.

I've just visited my parents in England and rather than write a new piece about the things that struck me that were vastly different to Finland, all I have to do is re-cycle last year's piece.

The only difference is that we left from a different terminal where there was only a rather terrible standard W.H.Smith with more concentration on sweets and magazines than on books. This was the British Airways terminal (although we were flying Finnair, they have a code sharing agreement with BA) and was definately down market compared to the terminal for foreign airlines we used (SAS) last year.

But, apart from that, the same things apply as last year, so here's that piece again.  (This year's potboilers [luckily bought earlier when I saw them] were Colossus, decline of the US empire; Natasha's Dance - a Cultural History of Russia; and a book on Napoleon's 1812 advance on (and retreat from) Moscow)

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You can tell you've been away a long time when you start noticing odd things about the place of your birth.

I suppose one thing I always have noticed is that nothing much seems to change between one visit and the next. Certainly where my parents live there is no innovative architecture in use when new buildings are put up, just more and more of the same boring old stuff and old red bricks.

Even if you might not like some of the new Finnish architecture at first, it IS often new and different and does tend to grow on you and these days usually fits in to the location.  (There is one glaring exception which is the Alvar Aalto designed Enso (now StoraEnso) headquarters on the sea front at Helsinki harbour which single-handedly destroys the view as you arrive by ship. I don't think even a famous architect would get away with that kind of thing these days).

The other thing I noticed on a recent visit was the constant "Buy One get one Free" and the like everywhere. Not, you understand, that I didn't take advantage when I wanted to buy one of those things anyway, but still.

However the couple of examples I'll mention now really did make me wonder if the world had gone mad.

I bought a copy of a particular daily newspaper because my wife wanted the free DVD it contained (of a film of Alice In Wonderland). When I went to pay for it, I was asked if I'd like a free Mars bar with it. I looked at him .... "We've had an offer all week that if you buy this paper you get a free Mars bar". OK. Why not. (Value - More than half the cost of the paper which remember I bought only because my wife thought the DVD was worth more than the newspaper cost.).

[2006 Note: Now it was buy a magazine and get a (large) block of chocolate for half-price]

Mind you next day was even crazier. I was in another branch of the same chain and bought a magazine. "Would you like to buy an Independent (another daily newspaper) and save 40p (70 cents)?" Suspicious as always I asked how much the Independent cost. "No, sorry I wasn't clear. If you buy an Independent (cost 60p/1:05) you get one pound off the cost of your magazine".

So I ended up with a magazine (full price minus 40p/70c) and a free Independent newspaper. If I'd left without the newspaper the magazine would have cost me more.

Typical I suppose for that part of the country, I then asked if there was anything stopping me dumping the newspaper once I'd left the shop. "I don't care, you can use it to line your budgie cage if you want". At which point the woman in the queue behind me - who'd obviously been following this conversation - said "now you'll have to go and buy a budgie".

I suppose I should really finish there, but once at the airport for the flight back I wanted to buy the new Donna Leon book.

[2006 Note: it grieved me that my wife had this year to pay full price for the latest Donna Leon]

One bookshop had "Buy one; pay half-price for the second" whereas the other had "Two for Three".

Now here's where arithmetic comes in... As the Donna Leon book (a small paperback) was likely to be cheaper than any other book(s) I bought, I should have bought it from the first bookshop and got 50% of the price of the second more expensive book. As it was, I bought it from the second bookshop along with two other (more expensive) books (and thus got the Donna Leon book - as the cheapest - free).

A question for readers. Why ?

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Answer:

Because you can't buy what they don't have. The Donna Leon book was included in the poster advertising the 1 plus 1/2 offer but it was sold out.

In the second story I grabbed the last copy.

Popular book that.

Anyway once that's finished (or grabbed by my wife as it's actually hers ...) I'll be moving on to lighter stuff than crime in Venice. Gulag by Anne Applebaum and Stalin - The Court of the Red Tsar - by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Potboilers.

Twice a year all Finnish drivers have to change their tyres (US: tires). For four months of the year (and optionally for the months of November and April) you have to have winter tyres on your car - which usually means tyres with spikes on them to cut through the snow to the ice below.

Even outside these months you are allowed to drive with snow tyres if there is a risk of ice, so as we even in Southern Finland have still been experiencing minus degrees in the morning, most people have been putting off the change just in case.

Well I'm going on holiday for a few days and leaving the car at the airport so I decided over the weekend that I'd change my tyres on Monday just in case it was really hot when I got back (and the police might be wondering why I was still driving with winter tyres). So I packed the summer tyres in the car on Sunday and left promptly on Monday to go to the tyre place where you don't have to pre-book.

Last time I was (at the same time of the day) behind one car in the queue for two fitting places and I was in and out in about 20 minutes.

This time however both the main Helsinki newspapers had - it turned out - informed their readers in prominent locations in the paper that now was the time to change your tyres.

Just like when they review (in a Saturday edition) some garden centre or similar that has been around for years and suddenly crowds descend on it, this meant that suddenly the entire population decided to change their tyres. Or at least it seemed so.

All I know is that instead of one car and twenty minutes tops, this time it was something like 12 cars and something over 2 hours.

Mind you, today is probably going to be worse. Most people would have read that article when they were at work and a long way from their summer tyres.

(First posted in September 2005. The nightmare is now, thankfully, over and we had a working bathroom back in the six weeks promised. The underfloor heating [the only difference to what we had before] turns out to be a disappointment as - in order for it to not cost a fortune - it has to be turned down so much you hardly know it's on.)

(This is a re-post from the other blog from 28th August 2005. It's the only other post I've ever made about religion so don't worry that this is going to be the major theme of this blog. It's just that it was rather long and I don't want to waste the time I spent writing it. I didn't hunt it out; I was looking for book reviews for my SharePoint blog when I came across it)

 

It's just been Easter and I've been for the first time to a church service at a place that otherwise seems to be a training centre for bible studies. It just happens to be down the road. It was curious because despite the church service being held in just a fairly large room with overflow in a balcony, they still had the full complement of four (!) priests and an organ/piano player on hand. (One priest to do the service and the other three to aid with communion which as virtually everyone went up would have otherwise lasted for about 40 minutes).

Anyway that reminded me that a piece about religion in Finland was perhaps overdue.

Most people belong either to the Lutheran Church or the Orthodox church with the majority of them in the Lutheran Church as the (Russian) Orthodox church is mainly to the East of the country - i.e. in territory that either once was in Russia (pre 1700s) or bordered on Russia - although there is an impressive Orthodox cathedral in Helsinki. There are both Finnish-speaking Lutheran parishes and Swedish-speaking Lutheran parishes in bilingual areas - I don't know if there is any major different in the church services apart from the language though. (I doubt it).

Finns pay church taxes of ca 1% of brutto salary but can opt out of this at the cost of a few things such as maybe having problems getting married in a church and sometimes having to pay for a burial plot. Many younger people opt out these days (presumably a while after getting married in some cases).

Foreigners on the other hand do not pay church taxes but can opt *in* - I never have. Most probably don't.

In addition, there is a synagogue in Helsinki. The Jewish community arrived in Finland first towards the end of the 19th Century as until then as far as I can remember there were restrictions on their movements within the Russian Empire.

More recently there have been a certain number of Moslems who have immigrated to Finland (and some Finns have converted - usually women) and there is at least one mosque in Finland (probably more).

Then of course there are small numbers of Methodists; Baptists; Jehovah's Witnesses and the like.

However we should not forget a strange sect that is centred around an area in Western Finland (sorry but the name escapes me for the moment) all of whom have masses of children (and I mean 10 or more per family). For some reason they tend to drive very large cars or vans!

OK. That's enough about that. I might later post something about the design of churches (or I might not)