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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Starting the car in the morning for instance ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now those mis-interpreted statistics ..

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

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

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

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