Less hyperbole. More vomit.

« A more honest and satirical postcard featured in Nyt this week. »

Postcards tend to portray their subjects in the most appealing light and circumstances with sunshine, flowers, smiling people, beautiful scenery and gorgeous architecture. This is intrinsic to the medium and one of the reasons I particularly enjoy collecting them since they say a lot in a small amount of space primarily by what they don't say. In the latest issue of Nyt Magazine, the weekly magazine of the Helsingin Sanomat that I love so much that I save them in a pile in the office, they ran a feature with some not-so-typical postcards of Helsinki which border on satire, but I think the author was hitting only the easy targets rather than some of the more serious and rarely discussed issues that aren't in the tourism and expat brochures.

We moved here during a rather cold January and within a few days I saw a drunk guy stumbling down the middle of the street while I was out walking HB late one night. I used to be a bartender and you can just tell by looking at someone in that state that they're not just on a one night bender. HB and I just stood there for a while and watched the guy vomit, pee and then stagger over to the sidewalk and grab on to a light pole for support. Had I known any Finnish at the time, I'd have yelled to him, "Hey, don't lick the pole!"

By now I'm pretty immune to the sidewalk decorations and the occasional drunks who want to chat me up. Given the choice between drive-by shootings and drunks blowing chunks on the sidewalk, I'll live with the drunks and chunks. What I want to know is why bartenders don't refuse selling beers to obviously drunk people. In the US, you'll get fined or arrested for selling drinks to someone who is visibly intoxicated and you can reserve the right to refuse service to anyone you think has had enough. I couldn't even buy a round of drinks for friends in Boston without having them all come to the bar with me so the bartender could check everyone out. The drunks in downtown Helsinki are pretty harmless and if public intoxication is the worst thing anyone can say about Finns or their culture, well, they probably aren't paying attention. :) I'd bet that refusing service to folks who have clearly had more Lapin Kulta than they really need would cut down on the more obvious examples of public intoxication, but I don't know what the legal side of bartending is like here as, perhaps, that's already a law only rarely enforced. However, I doubt that I will ever get used to watching Finns working on their 3rd beer at 8am on the boats to Talinn.

On the upside, Nyt mentions a collection of old club flyers from Helsinki archived online which is pretty interesting to wade through. It'd be more interesting if the archivist sorted them by year so that you could view them in chronological order and really see the progression of design and style.