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.