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

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).

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

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.