Barcelona bound
The trip monitor on screens in planes these days must have been designed to placate the kid who pesters their parents with, "Are we there yet?", every couple of minutes. Sure, it's cool to see where you are, how fast you are going and how cold it is outside, but to have to watch it for an hour makes even the most patient person a bit antsy. I have hope that someday they'll just knock you out before take-off and wake you up before landing instead making you sit awake in a tiny, cramped space while going through the motions of trying to sleep, eat and read for far too many hours without going postal. Maybe Star Trek teleportation will come along and make air travel obsolete. Well, I can hope.
I'm heading to Barcelona for the week to help cheer up a fellow expat as she wants to visit La Sagrada Familia before she flies back to the US. She's young and I didn't want her to go alone and it has been a long while since I've had the opportunity to travel on a whim. So, I'll be back next week with pictures of one of the few warm spots in the EU at the moment.
26 Jan 2004 at 0:15, Helsinki
A year later
Yesterday, we celebrated the anniversary of our arriving here one year ago and today I remembered why I don't get drunk very often...the day after. :)
When we left Boston last year, both Iceland and Helsinki were warmer at the time even though friends and family were joking about how cold it would be in Finland. I was filled with both relief of getting everything done in time and anxiety for relocating to the great mostly unknown. It has been an interesting year with something new nearly every day. Relocating from Denver to Milwaukee isn't like expatriating to a place where everything including the language is utterly different than anything you're used to. It's a radical change even when you know what to expect. I had prepared myself for most of the issues that face expats though it was still a year of difficult times and difficult language classes. I remain optimistic about learning the language, but I think it will take a bit longer than I had originally anticipated.
I rode with Jarkko's father, HB and the bags from the airport in a borrowed van while Jarkko and his mother took a cab. I hadn't seen the apartment prior to our arrival and when Erkki turns to me as we were climbing the stairs and says, "It was a bit of a compromise." I braced myself for the worst-case scenario and the apartment was a lot better than I had feared after he said that. The wind howled and whistled through the bedroom window that night and I started to wonder why I couldn't have married someone from the British Virgin Islands or Fiji. :) We spent the next six months renovating the apartment and taking Finnish language classes so I didn't really have a lot of time to ponder the depths of the insanity of moving to Finland until midsummer and by then I found that I had grown quite fond of this small corner of the Nordic lands.
I don't really have any words of wisdom or insight on being an expat because I have seen that nearly everyone has a different experience. Adjusting to Finland has been difficult at times and easy at other times, but it hasn't been dull. You can prepare yourself for the larger obstacles, such as the language barrier, but the little things like not finding peanut butter where you expect to find it in the grocery are what will send you into bouts of petty despair. The dark, foggy days of November sneak up on you when you aren't looking, too. It has been a year of challenge and adjustment but I am curious to see how long it will be before Finland becomes as familiar and comfortable as home. I hope it isn't terribly soon as I'm still enjoying the newness of everything which people don't get the opportunity to enjoy very often in life, especially now that world is becoming a smaller, more familiar landscape all the time.
Film ain't dead yet
A photo taken on New Year's Eve which we spent at a friend's house with several other couples and their children who didn't stop moving all evening. It was one of the very first shots taken with the Leica and a really old roll of C-41 process B&W film I happened to have around. I'm impressed that I captured her smirk in spite of the low light, her dervishness and my rusty manual camera reflexes. The picture would have been totally different had I taken it with a digital camera and I'm not entirely certain it would have been a presentable photo.
Recently, Kodak announced that it plans to discontinue a number of products including their line of APS film cameras which, if you believe a lot of the chicken little reports around the net, means the end of film photography as we have known it for the past century. Well, aside from the bias that people in the insular world of the internet tend to place on everything from Dean to the blog revolution, film is not doomed or otherwise obsolete even if all the kids who wouldn't part with their digital cameras say it is. The market Kodak is getting out of is one that has gone digital but there are plenty of film fanatics, film cameras and film processing labs out there to keep film in business for many more years.
I succumbed to the siren call of a digital camera about 3 years ago and, while I think digital has helped me to become a better photographer, I don't know that it has produced better photos than a film camera. I recently read Why digital cameras = better photographers which is a nicely done article on what makes digital attractive but, judging by a lot of the digital photos I've seen around the net in comparison to the film photos, I don't know that this is entirely true. Digital has produced a lot more photographers and photos so that the odds of there being more and better pictures is greater than before. I often wonder how many great photographers there would have been in the 1920s and 1930s had there been as many film cameras in the hands of people as there are now. A digital SLR gives you enough exposure feedback to get a feel for what the camera is doing which you can then take back to your film camera, but most digital cameras are completely automatic. People are taking more pictures and enjoying their cameras more so digital is a boon for getting more people interested in photography. However, this is not the death knell for film. Not yet anyway.
I'm getting back into film partly due to many of the inspiring photoblogs I've found at Photoblogs.org in which many of them have pictures taken on film that appeal to me far more than many of the digital photos I've seen or taken myself. Both formats have their strengths and weaknesses for me and, I suspect, they are similar for others. As they say, there is no accounting for taste, but I compared two photos of the same scene from the trip to Madeira and find that the digital photo, while a decent photo, treats the light completely differently than the film photo which has a warmth to it. I found this with a number of shots I took for this very purpose of comparing the character of the mediums.
Digital
weaknesses
- DSLR is big, bulky, and heavy. Intimidates people at times.
- Trouble focusing in low-light.
- Batteries; aside from needing charging, they don't live long in cold conditions.
- It can crash at unexpected times without warning.
- Shutter lag.
- Lower light sensitivity.
- Archival concerns with digital format.
- Lots of equipment needed just to view and print pictures at home.
- An almost clinical perfection.
strengths
- Instant gratification.
- Instant feedback.
- Easier to share photos with wired friends.
Film
weaknesses
- Film can be expensive.
- Processing can be expensive.
- No instant gratification or feedback.
strengths
- Small and light cameras.
- Fun.
- More creative.
- A Challenge.
- Film has the capacity to surprise in ways that digital never will.
- No batteries necessary.
- No shutter lag.
- Fewer buttons and gadgets.
- No CPU to crash at unexpected times.
The Elph is a fun little digital camera that I can take in my pocket anywhere and use for photographic post-it notes or fun candids to share. The 10D may gather some dust for a while since the Leica and the Lomo are a lot easier to carry around and they seem to capture more interesting images as perfection doesn't leave a lot of room for creative imperfection.
Dracula's supermarket
Every place has some variety of local weird food in the grocery and in St. Louis you could get a whole dressed raccoon in the right part of town. Only recently did I notice these jars of frozen blood sitting next to slices of frozen rudolph in the local market. I eat black bread and love blood pudding but for some reason that I can't explain, seeing blood in the grocery was a bit disturbing.
Pictures from Madeira
Two photo albums from a week in Madeira: Part 1 and Part 2. Pictures with "madle-" in the name were taken with the Leica, "madlo-" were taken with the Lomo and anything else was taken with the Elph. Since the Leica was new and I hadn't had any pictures developed with it before heading for Madeira, I am impressed with just how good the photos are as it has been a while since I've used a fully manual camera. The Lomo pictures are a bit freaky as expected. A tip for photographers travelling to Madeira is to take plenty of film with you as all they appear to sell on the island is Fuji consumer grade film which made a difference in my pictures when compared to the Kodak and better Fuji colour film I had brought with me. A polarizing filter is essential for the landscapes during the daytime, too. I didn't have one for the Leica so there aren't many pictures of scenery.
Madeira is an island which lies approximately 660km west of Morocco in the Atlantic and is part of Portugal. The word Madeira itself means wooded since it was full of trees when it was discovered. Nowadays, however, it is covered with hotels and tourists. It also has the most moderate climate in the world with very little difference in temperature all year. The airport has one of the shortest runways used by commercial jets which was recently doubled in length by extending it on stilts to 2,781 metres. Jarkko wisely informed me of this fun factoid only after we landed.
Funchal is the main city on Madeira. I was disappointed that no tourist brochures proclaimed, "We put the FUN in FUNCHAL!", but I suppose that's too corny even for the usually silly tourist slogans that abound everywhere. We stayed in a hotel very near downtown which had a casino next to it that looked like the headquarters for Spectre. I suppose we should have gone inside the casino and had a look around but casinos usually only manage to fill me with the urge to run to the nearest exit with all the flashing lights and noise. This may be the result of all those years of late nights spent in dance clubs. It was a lovely hotel with a fine pool in the 1970s concrete school of architecture. Madeira would be absolutely nowhere without concrete since the local volcanic basalt is too hard and difficult to quarry for building stones. The sidewalks are beautiful mosaics with white limestone and black basalt chips arranged in geometric patterns. These do tend to get a bit slippery in the rain though.
The first thing I noticed after we settled into the hotel was the sound of the birds; big, squawking tropical birds filling the air along with little birds singing before sunset. Stray dogs are everywhere as well, but they are obviously fed by the locals as they appear to be well fed and healthy doggies living the good life. Surprisingly, I saw very few stray cats. Exotic flowers such as the bird of paradise grow like weeds all around the city and plants that would normally be tiny, wan, and pitiful things on your windowsill are gargantuan in this sub-tropical paradise. Christmas lights were everywhere and on everything that could be made to hold lights. I don't know if Funchal has the most Christmas lights of any city in the world, but it certainly looked as though it did. It takes Madeirans several months to hang all the lights around the city in trees, on bridges, on light posts, on statues and everywhere else. Funchal is also one of the cleanest cities I've ever been in which may be due to litter bins placed along the streets every 20 metres or an army of people sweeping the streets late into the night. I didn't see so much as a cigarette butt on the streets of Funchal. The streets are filled with lots of older tourists from the UK and the Nordic countries which made us feel too young for Madeira but too old for Ibiza.
Madeira is a very hilly island which the travel books and brochures really don't emphasize enough. If you walk anywhere it is likely that you'll be walking uphill or downhill with some degree of difficulty. Funchal is mostly flat unless you want to walk north of the city to one of the botanical gardens which is a bit of a challenge. We walked to the Botanical Garden which took about an hour and was, in some places, about a 45% grade. The weather is cool enough to make this a pleasant ascent in spite of the exertion. The Botanical Garden suffers from not being terribly well maintained so the reward at the top of the hill isn't equal to the walk but it still had lovely views of the city below. The cable car trip to the Monte Palace Tropical Garden is far easier than walking up the mountain and the garden itself is spectacularly odd and beautiful. I would have spent another day there given the chance. Jarkko somehow convinced me that taking a toboggan ride down the hill was a good idea and it was strangely thrilling in spite of my terror of careening down a mountain on a contraption with no brakes and whizzing around cars. It's a fun thing to do...once. :)
Unless you are a UK tourist looking for excellent curry or chips and egg while on holiday, the food on Madeira is sublime. The grilled swordfish I ordered one evening was nothing short of the best I've ever had. The local limpets fried and coated in garlic butter were fabulous as well. We were told to try the scabbard fish, Espada, with bananas as Madeira is the only place other than Thailand where you can taste this dish. The fish is delicious but it is best tried before you see the very ugly raw, whole fish in the market. It is caught at a surprisingly deep 800m and dies and turns black from decompression on its way to the surface. Giant round gelatinous eyes and vicious teeth also don't do much for the appearance of the scabbard fish. I don't like bananas very much but the local variety is smaller, sweeter and fresher than the ones in the supermarket and I loved a desert of bananas and creme caramel a waiter surprised me with one evening. One restaurant we took a special liking to was Arsénios in the Zona Velha which featured Fado singers, a stray named Bimbo and a chef with flair who knew his way around the grill. Portuguese wines were a special feature. We tried a green wine that is made from green [ not ripe ] grapes which makes the wine a bit tart and it has a lower alcohol content. There were carts all along the seaside that sold local foods like churros and chestnuts at all hours of the day and night. The chestnut cart generated quite a bit of smoke at times but it didn't appear to deter people from wading through the smoke for a bag. The chestnuts are soft, meaty and slightly sweet but should be enjoyed with a beverage close at hand since they will make you thirsty. Surprisingly, the local Madeira wine isn't pushed as much as I had expected. Madeira is a very sweet wine that is best suited to drinking after a meal with dessert. We tried all the varieties from dry to full sweet and I found the full sweet to be much more flavourful than the dry in spite of my dislike of sweet wines. The sunshine was nice in Madeira but the food was nothing short of fabulous.
The geography of the island is beautiful and varied. The mountains rise dramatically into a treeless plateau which is a striking contrast to the eucalyptus forest and agricultural terraces you pass on the way up. The roads are narrow and winding with steep vertical drops. It isn't a paradise for those afraid of heights. :) One of the more popular attractions for tourists are the levada walks; a levada is one of the many channels built to collect and carry the water from the top of the island to lower parts of the island where it is used for agriculture. There are also a number of tours around the island that are safer than hiring a car yourself and driving around the crazy roads. I glimpsed death more than a few times on the 2 tours we took around the island. A snag with the tours is that all of the tour offices are fronts for time share scams and they seem to prey on people from the UK and the Nordic region in particular. If you get caught by one of these grifters just say that you're German since they don't appear to be recruited for these 'opportunities'. Book your tours ahead of time or find a reputable tour operator before you leave. Also, avoid the bridge from the hotel zone into Funchal as I dubbed it 'grifters bridge' where they assail you on every pass. If you want to spend your holiday in the same place for the next 29 years, just buy a house there as it's cheaper and it builds equity.
Overall, Madeira is a lovely place to visit for a relaxing and sunny holiday with plenty of good food and drink to enjoy. We had a good time but if we go back sometime, I think I'd like to stay in a small hotel outside of Funchal and try more of the levada hikes and other trips around the island.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs
From the how-did-I-miss-this-book department is an utterly fabulous treat, ella minnow pea: A novel without letters. Considering all the linguists I know and how efficient Amazon is at pushing books in my direction, I am at a loss to explain how or why we all managed to escape reading this book and immediately buying a copy for everyone we know. I got lucky when the editor of the English edition of the local paper suggested I go and get a copy from Akateeminen.
The story is in a similar vein to Thurber's The Wonderful O as it is a lipogram told around the familiar pangram 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. It is one of the most brilliantly clever books I've read in years as it combines cunning linguistics with political allegory in a epistolary novel. Language lovers must get this book. I need to go find a hardback copy so it can find a proper place next to my old, but dignified, copy of The Wonderful O. :)
Stump respects
I've been wading through and scanning the pictures from Madeira and found a few of the stump of Old Man Willow who was blown down a few weeks ago. I've put them up in a small Old Man Willow gallery.
Stencils of Mischief
One of the people behind all the colourful and creative stencil art around town noticed a few of the pictures I had taken and pointed out the new Stencils of Mischief website showcasing the "graffiti with aerosoul" :)
Helsinki has hundreds of adorable but sad looking concrete turtles which are often deployed as moorings for pedestrian signage which could really benefit from a bunch of creative people armed with paint giving them new personality. It would be a fun project to get all these stencil people together and put them on a large installation piece of repainting all of the Helsinki concrete turtles in a similar fashion as the NYC cow art exhibit except that the turtles are permanent.
Less is More
American marketing and commercialism is a well-oiled machine that produces the world's best consumers. George Carlin has a bit in one of his more recent works where he talks about choice and how grocery stores may have 80 different kinds of mustard to choose from but the US still only has a 2-party political system. The perfect storm of consumerism meets meaningless choice leaving the shopper distracted in an infinite loop while more important things, such as a totally corrupt government, pass without notice.
When I showed Jarkko's mother around the giant grocery store I used to shop in back in Boston, the first question she asked was how I found the time to navigate all the aisles and choose which products I wanted. It was an astute observation, one I didn't have an explanation for other than I had grown accustomed to the ever increasing size of the US grocery stores for a decade or two. The market was small when compared to some of the larger ones with book stores, video rental, liquor stores, dry cleaning and other services included under the same roof as the groceries; shrines to the meaningless choice culminating in the final, "paper or plastic?". Shopping often left me so drained that asking me which kind of bag I wanted evoked only a blank stare or my asking the clerk to choose for me.
One of the things I like most about Finland is that the groceries are small and while there may not be 80 or even 8 kinds of mustard to choose from, I am not constantly taxed to ponder the differences between 5 brands of French Dijon vs. 4 brands of Dijonnaise. I've been known to stare at the wall of yogurt but aside from that I am happy to have enough variety without a deluge of mostly similar products to pick from on the usual shopping trip. If I want something weird or unusual I can always walk over to Stockmanns and wander aimlessly for an hour. If I want Cheez-its and M&Ms and ginger Altoids, I have family send me care packages and savour every morsel which is a welcome change from having anything and everything available at all times. Less choice is liberating.
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz is a new book that explores the problem of how so many choices we are forced to make every day can leave us far less happy than what the Citizen Consumer mantra promises. The Wal*Mart shoppers of America won't read this book nor will they stop buying all the stuff they can fit into their carts, but I am finding some of the studies on the consumer society being published in the past few years to be a chance to understand how I, and the rest of the US, was molded into a Citizen Consumer and perhaps even hope for slowing down the mad embrace of unbridled want all over the globe.
Sometimes a banana...
A lovely colourized poster of Dr. Freud promoting a DJ show of an appropriate name. I love seeing these bright bits jump out at me in the dark, grey days of winter.
Heading South
When we decided to move to Finland one of the agreed upon features was that each year, budget permitting, we would take a Winter holiday somewhere the sun makes more of an appearance than glow occasionally on the horizon on the rare day that it's not cloudy. People always ask about the cold but the cold isn't the hard part of living in Scandinavia in the Winter, it's the darkness. November was a really hard month as the darkness really settles into your brain.
It's that time of year to go on holiday and I'm looking forward to reacting like a Sleestack to the evil, unfamiliar daystar and getting to know the cocktail boy poolside for a luxurious 7 days in Madeira. I'm going to also enjoy 7 days of internet-free living while hiking and taking pictures. It may be hard getting on the plane for the return trip. :)
Fun with Lomo
A gallery of my first Lomo pictures
I bought a Lomo LC-A camera in the beginning of December and got the prints from my first two rolls I shot with it today. What a fun little camera that makes such groovy pictures! Sadly, due to the cold weather or my fumbling, half of the 2nd roll didn't get printed since the film got a wee bit mangled when I was rewinding it. I had to go huddle in the dark of the loo, open the camera up and rewind it carefully with the backdoor hanging open which left a few bits of film confetti on the floor. There were some good shots in the chewed up film from what I can tell from the negatives. The luddite joys of a film camera. :)
The pictures were scanned and sized for the web, nothing more. The colours are crazy without any help from photoshop. The sushi picture is my favourite as we were just having dinner at the yo-sushi-esque place in town on a rather slow Sunday night and I thought I'd take a few pictures just for grins. There's a retro hyperrealism/surrealism that I really find attractive. The neon and the Christmas lights are amazing considering that the film was 100ISO and I didn't use a tripod. Still, these photos taken with a cheapo Russian camera are in some ways far better than the ones I took with the 10D at 1/15th the price. I hope it isn't just beginners luck with the Lomo and that I get even better at taking freaky fun photos.
Helsinki Dog Parks
Dog park activists in the US would salivate over the number of dog parks in Helsinki. When I was looking for papers on the import of HB last December, I saw a list of parks, but with little other information about them, at least not in English. It has been a long year and I've had to figure out much on my own. In August, I decided that as a project I would go around to all the dog parks in downtown, photograph and take notes on them, and put the information together in a sort of dog park guide. I also had Jarkko do the rough translation of the dog owner guide Helsinki has available but not in English. I scanned the illustrated pages in and polished the English up a bit. The guide is small, but contains a bit of useful information for dog owners.
Both of these are available in .pdf format and, if you live in Helsinki or are planning on moving here with a dog, I'd really like feedback as well as any other information you might like to see added. The dog park guide is still being fussed over so comments are very welcome. The email address is in the document. I also put some of the unused pictures up in a photo gallery which some may enjoy.
Old Man Willow
On Monday we had a storm with gale force winds in Helsinki which were strong enough to knock out power lines, nearly knock HB and I to the ground, and, rather tragically, blow over a several hundred year old willow tree. I loved this tree as I remember the first time I saw it. When I visited Helsinki for the first time with Jarkko, the willow was next to the bus station and where the buses would drop off passengers. The road went around rather than through and over the old tree which I took as a sign of a civilised city that understood that 'progress' should have limits. Clearly, the Finns had read The Lorax or thought of the Ents before killing such an old tree to make way for human hustle and bustle.
The Helsingin Sanomat had an archive photo from sometime in 1908 which shows the tree in its younger days. Even then it was in the center of city life. Helsinki Public Works is asking people to contribute stories they have about the tree which I think is a pretty cool idea. Judging by the number of people swarming around the stump and photographing it they should receive quite a few fond remembrances of this stately old willow tree.
The city is going to leave the stump alone until Spring to give the tree the chance to sprout if it decides to fight for its life. I hope they put a fence around it soon though as people were climbing on it and taking knives to hack off a wooden memento which certainly won't do much for the tree's chances of survival. I suspect that it was partly weakened by all the contruction and blasting for the new bus station just behind it, too. :( Here's hoping that it comes back to life with the warm weather.
