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.