Swap!

There is a new successor to Tetris, Swap. It has instant classic written all over it as it is easy to play and maddeningly addictive. The best description I can come up with is that it is a combination of Connect Four from the 70s and Othello.

permalink Ω 30 September 2003, Helsinki

Is pumpkineer a word?

Alan Burlison has clearly bored of his old toy Solaris 10 and found himself a new one, Paint Shop Pro 8. In his copious spare time when he's not getting the Solaris 10 kernel ready or playing his drum in a samba band [ the biggest in the group he tells me but, well, boys do tend to fancy everything they have as 'the biggest' :) ] he has been keeping himself quite busy honing his rather good skill with PSP.

He first had a go with the Perl 6 Essentials book parody which I now have 2 t-shirts emblazoned with. Now he has done a rather nice spoof of Jarkko as the dark lord of 5.8.1 which was taken, in part, from a series of halloween photos I took a few years ago when I went all Martha Stewart on the pumpkins and made Jarkko pose with them. I made a composite photo just to see how much work Alan must have had to do to get this right. Not resting on his laurels he also made Perl Pumpking in a Nutshell which could deserve to be an actual book, though I suspect the wisdom required for this job cannot be merely learned from an ORA book.

I feel so unworthy of my copy of photoshop now. :) On the upside, Jarkko finally released 5.8.1 and, after more than 3 years of mistress perl, maybe he'll decide to obsess on something else for a change....

permalink Ω 26 September 2003, Helsinki

More weird words and dimwits

Word freaks might be happy to know that there is a new word-a-day mailing list from the author of the new More Weird and Wonderful Words: Erin's Weird Word of the Day list.

Also, Erin is the editor of my favourite journal Verbatim. Apparently the author of The Dimwit's Dictionary is looking for words for a new edition. I may be forced to nominate "Going forward..." and "Action item" though I suspect they may have been on the top of the author's own list. :) The call for submissions is:

Calling All Dimwits! Author collecting lame language for new edition of The Dimwit's Dictionary.

Do you wince when you read clichés, moribund metaphors, needless redundancies and other examples of poor writing? Then dictionary author Robert Hartwell Fiske wants to hear from you!

Fiske, author of The Dimwit's Dictionary: 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases and Alternatives to Them, is collecting more dimwitticisms for the next edition of The Dimwit's Dictionary. He needs all the infantile phrases, inescapable pairs, overworked words, popular prescriptions, torpid terms, and withered words he can find (see http://www.marionstreetpress.com for definitions of dimwitticisms).

Look and listen for dimwitticisms in newspapers, direct mail pieces, books, TV broadcasts, radio shows . . . just about anywhere English is written or spoken. Write down the dimwitticism, together with information about where you found it (publication name, date), and mail it to: Dimwit's Contest, Marion Street Press, Inc., P.O. Box 2249, Oak Park, Il 60303. Or submit it through the publisher's website, http://www.marionstreetpress.com/Dimwitscontest.html. The contest ends Jan. 1, 2004.

The individual submitting the largest number of prime quality dimwitticisms (as judged by Robert Hartwell Fiske) will receive a $250 BookSense gift certificate (redeemable at over 1,000 independent bookstores). First runner-up will receive a $100 gift certificate, and second runner-up will receive a $50 gift certificate. Each individual submitting a dimwitticism will receive an official I Love Dimwits bumper sticker.

permalink Ω 25 September 2003, Helsinki

Ye Olde Townes

Fiskars

Last Thursday, I went along on a short day trip with the American Women's Club to the Village of Fiskars which is about an hour drive southwest of Helsinki. Fiskars is a beautiful old industrial village that has been nicely preserved by converting it into an artisans community and tourist attraction. You may have heard of Fiskars due to their fine Fiskars Oy scissors, cutlery, knives and other fine metalwork. They have a very well done history titled Fiskars 1649 [pdf] that covers 350 years of Finnish industrial history and a walk through the various buildings in town. The Onoma Gallery and the Fiskars Museum [suomi or svenska only] also have informative websites.

My 10D is in the shop getting repaired since it suffers from the same problems a large percentage of 10D owners are complaining about, broken AF and random crashing, so I only had my little 2MP Elph along to take pictures. The Mill and the Granary are constructed of slag bricks which lends a volcanic texture to the buildings. The stream that runs through the town is flanked with all sorts of local arts and sculpture. We were a bit on the off-season since Winter is approaching but we did get to see an iron smith and a glassmaker working in their shops. Fiskars is a beautiful slice of Finnish history which the town has done a remarkable job in restoring while making it commercially viable instead of leaving it to ruin as such small towns so often are once much of the industry moves on.

A Day Trip to Tallinn

On Saturday, Jarkko and I travelled with a visiting colleague from Boston to Tallinn, Estonia which is a short 1.5 hour ferry trip away from Helsinki. Estonia is to Helsinki what border towns in the US are to Canada, cheap shopping along with cheap smokes and booze. We only wandered around the Old Town of Tallinn, a Medieval town complete with walls and fortifications from the 1200s. Much of the town has remained largely intact and is on the UNESCO preservation list. The language they speak is Estonian which is related, if not closely, to Finnish and it's a bit disorienting to see things that at first seem Finnish only to find that they're really Estonian.

One thing in Old Town is the number of churches and everywhere you look there is a spire. Many of them are centuries old and have accreted a wide range of architectural styles in additions over time which is sometimes curious in the question of taste and suitability.

tallinn.info and tourism.tallinn.ee have some lovely photos and more information on the history of the city.

permalink Ω 23 September 2003, Helsinki

Brilliant Illustration

An ad for a documentary about Michael Jackson that you'd likely never see in the US. It's fashioned after the Fazer Lakrits logo but inverted. A perverted, clownish anti-Al Jolson. The girl at the bottom is saying, "I don't need plastic surgery because I am already me."

permalink Ω 21 September 2003, Helsinki

Banned Books Week

It's banned books week this week and to celebrate I'm reading Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World, the story of Michael Servetus a heretic in his own time who wrote one of the most vigorously banned books in history.

permalink Ω 21 September 2003, Helsinki

Vallitettavan Ruoan Galleria

A few weeks ago I received an email from Arabella David mentioning that she enjoyed the photos of the Hietalahden Kirpputori I have on-line and somewhere along the way she mentioned she had found a bunch of vintage Finnish recipe cards at the kirpputori which were all the rage in the 70s. I remember collecting the Betty Crocker recipe cards in the 70s too and now I wish I would have saved them. Recipe books and cards are a real treasure for historians and a subject of books like Eat My Words. I was hoping she would scan them and put them online and she has! The cards are utterly fascinating and terrifying at the same time: Vallitettavan Ruoan Galleria, the Finnish Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Erkki...Jarkko tells me Eila has a stash of these that I'd love to look at and maybe even scan in for a not-quite-so-fancy Finnish version of the Gallery of Regrettable Food :)

permalink Ω 17 September 2003, Helsinki

Jesus is my homeboy

permalink Ω 17 September 2003, Helsinki

The Door

The World's Pretty Much Only Religious Satire Magazine has two really interesting bits in the latest issue:Truth is Stranger Than Fiction a pictorial parade of unlikely but real churchy ephemera and Rootin' Out Religion in a Redneck Nation, an interview with Michael Graham that shares many of my own sentiments about the US which fueled my decision to leave the US and never return.

permalink Ω 17 September 2003, Helsinki

Ticketstub nostalgia

In the past week I found both tickets from a trip to Chichén Itzá on 18 December 2002. One ticket was in the bottom of a desk drawer and one was tucked inside a book of essays I chose at random from the shelf since I hadn't finished reading it. The fact that both tickets survived a trans-continental move and they turned up within several days of the other prompted me to remember the Stories about Ticketstubs website and write a little story about the trip behind them.

Since Finland is not known for its sunny, warm winters, one of the conditions of moving to Helsinki with my husband was that we take a holiday each Winter to somewhere with sunshine. We moved in January and took a trip to Cancún in December as there would be little time to travel after arriving in Helsinki and we would be far less likely to travel to Cancún from Europe. Both of us had always wanted to see the legendary Mayan ruins so it was a perfect complement to the warm sun objective.

When you arrive in Cancún there are 100 or so grifters who try to hustle you to buy various trips to the surrounding attractions but we had already scheduled 6 days of doing nothing at the beach and a 1-day trip to Chichén Itzá. The trip takes several hours by bus with a few stops along the way to help the local economy. One such stop was in the middle of the jungle to visit a typical modern home of the local Yucatan people. I found this brief excursion to be exceedingly strange and uncomfortable since we were just a bunch total strangers walking around an elderly couple's home. There were stray dogs lying in the middle of the dirt road and small children peering around trees to catch a glimpse of today's busload of people.

The pictures of Chichén Itzá in textbooks don't prepare you for the vast scale of the city. The Pyramid of Kukulcán has 365 narrow steps up to the top but neither of us decided to make the climb in spite of the fact that the museum would not be allowing people to climb it after 1 January 2003. We wandered around for the afternoon after our guide had finished the tour in awe of how a civilisation so clearly advanced could suddenly abandon a city and disappear into the jungle. I managed to take a few pictures to remember the enjoyable, sunny holiday in the midst of the whirlwind of moving 3500 miles to the frozen land of Finland.

I'm not really sure why, but I think the ticketstub stories are really interesting. Perhaps it is because it's something different and unique which is a rarity on the net these days. It's sure to attract the affection of those who always seem to find themselves saving small bits of paper and recalling the who, what, where, when and why when finding them stuffed in a book or at the bottom of a drawer.

permalink Ω 15 September 2003, Helsinki

Get your Game On

The Taideomuseo Tennispalatsi has a new exhibit opening on Thursday, Game On: The History, Culture and Future of Video Games., which covers the past 40 years of video game culture. I've never quite outgrown my arcade phase and still think of ZaXXon rather wistfully whenever I play one of the far more elaborate new games of today.

There are a number of books that try to cash in on the nostalgia of the kids who grew up in the 70s with the advent of arcade games but the only one worth reading is The First Quarter: A 25-year History of Video Games.

permalink Ω 15 September 2003, Helsinki

New Fall Books and Music

There are so many new books and CDs coming up in the next month or so that I have to make a list. In spite of the mass of useless new books on just about every variation of government corruption and analyses on terrorism, there are a seeming ton of interesting new fiction and non-fiction titles. I'll be forced to choose between whisky and books in my luggage returning from London. Note to self: Take a big empty suitcase to London.

Books

• Basic Photography ~ Michael Langford
• Beer: the Story of the Pint: The History of Britain's Most Popular Drink ~ Martyn Cornell
• Cobweb ~ Stephen Bury
• Complete Care for your Aging Dog
• The Cryptographer ~ Tobias Hill
• Dog is My Co-Pilot ~ Editors of Bark
• Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care ~ John McWhorter (1 Nov)
• English as a Global Language ~ David Crystal
• Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House ~ Franklin Toker (30 Sept)
• Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK ~ Idler Magazine
• High-rise (1970s A Series) ~ J.G. Ballard
• Hitler's Scientists: Science, War and the Devil's Pact ~ John Cornwell
• I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking ~ Alton Brown
• The Kitchen Detective: A Culinary Sleuth Solves Common Cooking Mysteries With 125 Foolproof Recipes ~ Christopher Kimball
• The Language Report ~ Susie Dent (9 Nov)
• Library: An Unquiet History ~ Matthew Battles
• Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation ~ Dan Kennedy
• Lost Recipes ~ Marion Cunningham (14 Oct)
• Lucky Girls: Stories ~ Nell Freudenberger
• The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the "Oxford English Dictionary" ~ Simon Winchester (Oct)
• Millenium People ~ J.G. Ballard
• Monstrous Regiment ~ Terry Pratchett (1 Oct)
• The Music of the Primes ~ Marcus du Sautoy
• Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia ~ Orlando Figes
• The Political Animal ~ Jeremy Paxman
• Quicksilver ~ Neal Stephenson (2 Oct)
• Raw Spirit ~ Iain Banks (6 Nov)
• Restaurant Favorites at Home (The Best Recipe) ~ Cook's Illustrated
• A Rhyming History of Britain ~ James Muirden
• Rough Guide to Pregnancy and Birth ~ Kaz Cooke
• Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic ~ Tom Holland
• Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany ~ Ben Schott
• A Series of Unfortunate Events #10: The Slippery Slope ~ Lemony Snicket (1 Oct)
• Shite's Unoriginal Miscellany ~ A. Parody
• Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design ~ Henry Petroski (16 Sept)
• Story of Photography ~ Michael Langford
• Tarts with Tops on: How to Make the Perfect Pie ~ Tamasin Day-Lewis
• A Venetian Affair: A True Story of Impossible Love in the Eighteenth Century ~ Andrea di Robilant (3 Nov)
• Waxwings ~ Jonathan Raban
• Who Sleeps with Katz ~ Todd McEwen
• The Wolves in the Walls ~ Neil Gaiman

Music

• Elvis Costello - North
• Waltz for Koop: Alternative Takes
• Kraftwerk - Tour De France Soundtracks
• Sting - Sacred Love
• The Complete Adventures of the Style Council

DVD

• The Office Series 2 [2002]
• Prime Suspect
• Red Dwarf - Series 1
• Red Dwarf - Series 2

permalink Ω 13 September 2003, Helsinki

The perfect PAA

I've tried everything from a filofax to a Palm Pilot to iCal to keep organized. However, the problem with them is that the analog filofax is too big to carry around and the palm pilot or the laptop just take too long to boot to jot a quick note down and likely aren't going to be carried to a pub or the movies, etc. Moleskine notebooks were reintroduced a few years ago and now they have pocket weekly notebooks, the perfect PAA [pocket analog assistant]. A far superior and more practical technology under $20.

permalink Ω 12 September 2003, Helsinki

Pekka was here

Postcard, Map of Finland, urine on snow, artist unknown 2003 ~ Juha Myllymäki ©.

permalink Ω 10 September 2003, Helsinki

Supisuomea

YLE has a new 12-part series, Supisuomea, airing this Fall on YLE1 @ 12:05 from 7.9 thru 23.11 or on YLE Teema @ 16:00 & 19:00 from 8.9 thru 24.11. There is a book, Supisuomea and CD from Finn Lectura to accompany the series as well. The web site for the course looks very polished and has some neat exercises in spoken Finnish, but I'm mostly happy that they have reruns during the day on Wednesdays so I can watch them and speak the exercises without Jarkko around to laugh at me. :) On the upside of things, it doesn't seem like I've forgotten everything I learned in Suomi 1&2 last winter which is good since I start Suomi 3 next week.

permalink Ω 10 September 2003, Helsinki

Festival Frenzy

The 16th Annual Helsinki Film Festival, 18.9 thru 28.9, has a great selection of films this year and the 18th Annual Helsinki ComicCon, 27.9 & 28.9, will feature Neil Gaiman! It's a pity every month can't be like September :)

permalink Ω 9 September 2003, Helsinki

Dystopian bookshelf

After a long dry summer of not much fiction to interest me my nightstand has piled up with a number of titles which all seem to be in the dystopian satire genre. Perhaps it's due to the current state of the world or that publishers are just on a dystopia kick but I'm not complaining.

I just finished reading Stephenson's Interface in preparation for Quicksilver coming at the end of September. Interface is a fun, quick read since it is Stephenson in his pre-Pynchon phase, which means it's less than 1000 pages and doesn't require you to keep a dictionary or an encyclopaedia handy. It's somewhat plausible fiction which may someday even be regarded as prescient.

I haven't seen any reviews or mention of J.G. Ballard's new book, Millenium People, but from the blurb on Amazon it promises to be another terrific story. A middle-class revolt is my kind of dystopian satire.

And I'm currently reading Max Barry's Jennifer Government, another dystopian satire where much of the world is now owned and run by American corporations. The United States Federation Economic Blocs are filled with people whose last names are the name of the corporation they work for, e.g. Hack Nike, Violet ExxonMobile, Jennifer Government. It is described as "Catch-22 by way of The Matrix" which is a bit lofty but it's a terrific bit of satire. Apparently it is already going to be made into a movie.

Perhaps I should spend more time with Paul Brian's post-apocalypic fiction bibliography to find more dystopia while I'm on a roll. :)

permalink Ω 9 September 2003, Helsinki

Naisen Kanssa

Finland has some funny local comics, like Viivi ja Wagner, but there are two which appear on the back page of NYT, the weeky magazine of the Helsingin Sanomat, I find particularly odd and amusing.

Naisen Kanssa [ Living with the woman ] ~ Think Zippy the Pinhead meets Hi&Lois. It's a very stylised comic rich in texture and complete with a mad scientist who narrates the instructions on living with the woman. It's a manual for the modern emasculated man. There is a book, Naisen Kanssa, as well as a Naisen Kanssa workbook for guys who really need to study harder. :)

Kung-Fu Poliisit [ Kung-Fu Police ] ~ It's Shaft meets Police Academy. Kung-Fu Poliisit is funny but odd since blaxploitation humour really isn't something you'd expect to find in Finland.

permalink Ω 8 September 2003, Helsinki

Abandoned Phonebooth

There was a time before Nokia in Finland and the phonebooths were a bright green colour. Unfortunately, the 1970s brought plexiglass and aluminum to the phonebooths, so this green relic is a pretty unusual sight.

permalink Ω 8 September 2003, Helsinki

Finnish PIE

Somewhere in my wanderings around the web the other night I came across a Finnish woman's blog [ in English ] that is very interesting and has some lovely photos. PIE

permalink Ω 6 September 2003, Helsinki

Hello India

For those people who are very upset to see tech support call centers in the US being moved to India I have the following rant.

I have photoshop 7 for the Mac. I've had every version of it for the Mac since it was introduced. Legal copies even. I buy software from Adobe fairly often since I like their products for the Mac. Today, I decided to purchase the RAW format plug-in for Photoshop to make manipulating RAW format files from my digital camera a lot easier by not having to deal with the software Canon supplies to import the photos. I visit the on-line store and order it. Seems simple, no? No.

First there was the hassle of just getting the download manager to work since you apparently need IE to download the application which will then download your product. Of course, I was using Omniweb which did download the file, but I then had to figure out that I had to decompress it since IE does that for you. After that, it installed the DLM and started to download only it stopped after the first megabyte. I tried a few more times to restart the download only to get a message informing me that it couldn't connect to the server. Fine, maybe they were having technical problems with their download servers since this SoBig virus has caused a lot of problems lately. I send an email to support and go out to walk the dog. Hours later, still the same problem and no response from tech support.

Finally, I decide to give the 1.888 number a try since it's the only number they have to offer on the website. It works but it informs me that outside the US the call is on my own dime. Fine. The woman on the other end of the phone proceeds to be the most unhelpful person I've ever had to deal with in phone tech support who basically told me to go fuck myself and call my ISP since she didn't know if the application had problems downloading outside the US but, clearly, this wasn't her problem. They already had my money so I guess getting the product was my own damn problem. When I asked what I was supposed to ask my ISP, whose connection for everything else at the time appeared fully functional, she just told me that she didn't know but to call my ISP. When I asked to speak with someone who might know the answer to my problem she told me that it wasn't possible. When I asked to speak to her supervisor that wasn't an option either.

I wrote the following rant to Adobe support stopping just short of saying that I'm not surprised their jobs are getting exported to India where at least rude assholes are not as expensive to come by.

For the person on the phone who blew me off telling me that the 'servers were fine on your end' and that I'd need to call my ISP for no apparent reason and who wouldn't let me talk to someone who might know the answer to my question I have the following answer:

For expats who have an account on your US server with a US billing address and a US credit card who want to order software for download YOUR SOFTWARE DOWNLOAD MANAGER WILL NOT WORK OUTSIDE THE US. My internet connection works just fine, but sending the DLM to a friend of mine in the US worked without a problem. So the next time someone who has already given you $100 bucks and calls you wondering why the software says that it can't reach the server, instead of giving them the HAND by telling them to call their ISP, you might do them a favour and tell them they're screwed outside the US for downloading.

Thanks for the most joyless online purchase I have ever had the displeasure of making. I won't be buying anything from Adobe online ever again.

So, I look forward to tech support from India as the few times I have had to deal with Amazon.com's tech support based in India they were friendly, knowlegeable and responsive. Then again, it really doesn't take much to follow this kind of service and seem terrific by comparison. I rarely did tech support over the phone since you couldn't pay me enough and I know I'm not patient enough or friendly enough. Maybe working in a burger joint, like the rest of silicon valley, would do much of the tech support industry in the US some good.

Update: To add insult to injury, the plug-in doesn't even work with my 10D in spite of the fact that they do, in fact, list it as a supported camera. There is a workaround though which involves using a hex editor to replace the D60 string with 10D in the binary. Wow, I get to pay $100 and hack the software too? Nice. Again, likely the last purchase I'll ever make for Adobe products.

permalink Ω 6 September 2003, Helsinki

Kaivopuisto Chess

permalink Ω 4 September 2003, Helsinki

My Hel' Life

The KLM in-flight magazine recently had a blurb about a new book by Sean Condon, My 'Dam Life: Three Years in Holland, about his expat experience. I bought a copy since, well, I'm an expat and thought it would be entertaining to read someone elses' far more interesting adventures in expatriotism than my own.

The book is entertaining if you're an expat or are familiar with Amsterdam. However, he really stretches the material he has to make into a book length tale. It likely would have been much better with a ruthless editor cutting it down into a feature length magazine article. He has a good story, but it bogs down in 250 pages when he spends more time on self-deprecation and less on the larger experience as a whole.

He does, however, nail a few parts of the expat condition terribly well. In particular, the part of trying to fit in without being exposed as a poseur by skating on the just-enough-to-be-dangerous knowledge of the local language.

The barman, a guy around sixty with a face like a wry and maudlin dog, greets me witha nod, which I return before aksing in fractured Dutch for a koffie verkeerd, which translates as coffee the wrong way, deemed wrong because it has melk (milk) in it. After I order a cognac, the barman spurtles another sentence at me, and thinking that he is asking if I want anything else, and pretending to be Dutch but unusually short in stature, I say Nee, dank u wel, (No thanks) and shake my head, feeling semi-bilingual and semi-proud over this brief transaction.

I'm sorry, the barman says, but I asked what sort of cognac you'd prefer ~ Courvoisier, Rémy or Martell? He speaks English perfectly.

Ummm...Rémy Martin, I reply, not leaning too heavily on the French accent. He nods, not patronisingly or anything, just a run-of-the-mill barman's nod. But I need to regain some dignity fast, so I change my coffee order to an espresso and I think I see him smile.

I've had this happen so often in Helsinki that I couldn't help but smile and laugh at someone else going through the same humiliation of being discovered as a fraud. HB is a conversation magnet and people will often stop and spew words at me, usually in the morning before I've had a sufficient amount of coffee, which I have no hope of grasping. I have trouble understanding English before my second cup of coffe, much less a turbo colloquial version of a language that isn't even in the same family as English. I've developed a few techniques for saving face in this kind of situation:

1. Smile and nod if you don't hear a "-ko" on the end of the first word which indicates a question.
2. If there is a "-ko" on the end of the first word, listen for "aika", "paino", etc., which signal questions which you have answers for in Finnish.
3. Keep petting the dog and hope they'll walk on, even if they think you're a little odd.
4. Say nothing and let them think you're mute.
5. If all else fails, admit your finnish isn't so good, hide behind your sunglasses and look at your watch as though you're now running late.

Sure, most Helsinkians speak English reasonably well, but when you're an expat in a country where only 1% of the country's residents aren't Finnish, you want to try to fit-in which means you have to start by faking it and enduring the humiliation when you get busted.

The resident grumpy old cur [GOC] in our apartment house [ it's a law somewhere that says every apartment house must have a meddlesome old fart ] grumbled at me, when I was walking HB through the entryway, about a few strands of dog hair on the hallway rug. We had just moved in so I just smiled and nodded and escaped with the dog as quickly as possible. A few months later, I was out having a smoke when she descended upon me screaming in ferocious Finnish. I looked around me wondering who it was she was yelling at. It was strange as I came to realise it was me she was yelling at since I could no longer hear her and only noticed her bright, bright red painted lips moving at warp speed. When she paused to breathe after 5 minutes of ranting, we had an enchanting conversation [ edited for brevity :) ]:

• <Me> Er, I'm sorry. I'm new here and I don't speak much Finnish yet. Do you speak English?
• <GOC> WHAT?! YOU DON'T SPEEK FEENEESH?!
• <Me> Well...no, not yet. I'm sorry. There are 2 billion English speakers and only 5 million Finnish speakers on the planet mostly because you have to move here to learn Finnish.
• <GOC> WHAT?! YOU COME TO LEEVE HERE AND DON'T SPEEK FEENEESH?!
• [ at which point she looks at me like I've just taken a crap on the sidewalk and started eating it. ]
• <Me> Errr....
• <GOC> YOU MUST NOT SMOKE HERE OR IN THE BUILDING AND YOU HAVE BEEN LEAVING YOUR BUTTS ALL OVER HERE. IT IS FORBIDDEN! [ which she repeats about 20 times since, I guess, not speaking Finnish makes me deaf and stupid ] IS YOUR HUSBAND FEENEESH? I CAN EXPLAIN THIS TO HIM. HE WILL UNDERSTAND.
• <Me> Errr, What? What are you talking about? I, uh, don't smoke in the house and, well, I don't leave my butts on the entryway stairs.
• [ It slowly dawns on me that she has decided to dump on me for every smoker who ever bothered her in life, but especially someone[s] who has taken to smoking in the building and stamping out the butts on the entry stairs. Again, not me. ]
• <GOC> LIAR! I DON'T BELIEVE YOU! IT IS FORBIDDEN! A FEENEESH WOMAN WOULD KNOW THIS!
• [ again repeated 10 or more times at a pitch only dead Finnish husbands and dogs could wholly sympathize with. ]
• <Me> Uhhh.
• [ I was trapped for about 30 minutes while trying to say as little as possible waiting for a moment I could escape before she removed what few shreds of dignity remained. The irony of the story is that it was not, in fact, forbidden to smoke in or around our building. She nearly had me convinced I'd be facing a firing squad shortly. ]

I see her every now and then which invokes a pavlovian response of fear and flight. She says hello, smiles and speaks to me in Finnish which makes me wonder if she has some kind of evil twin living in the apartment with her since this clearly can't be the same woman who reamed me a new one for being a dirty smoking outsider who doesn't speak Finnish. I have a nasty neighbour and Condon deals with the residence police in Holland. It all evens out in the end I suppose.

When you're new to being an expat, you feel exposed and vulnerable if you're completely out of your element. You've gone from being one of "us" to being one of "them" in one short 12-hour flight. Every experience seems new but slowly you realise that it's a well beaten path with oft told tales just like yours. Condon does a reasonable job making the mundane stories funny and entertaining without being boring...like mine. :)

permalink Ω 4 September 2003, Helsinki

coolest new stamps ever :)

The Finnish Posti will be issuing glow-in-the-dark lighthouse stamps on 10 September. They are, apparently, not the World's first such stamps but they are the first lighthouse stamps that glow! :)

permalink Ω 2 September 2003, Helsinki

Sofiankatu Picasso

permalink Ω 2 September 2003, Helsinki