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)