Wherever I Lay My Chèche, That's My Home

Hmm...?

2009-07-06T13:46:00.002+02:00

Apparently,

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week,” “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.”

...isn't that exactly what they are doing with the nuclear issue in the first place ? I may be trained in politics but I'll never understand the way these people think....

Health And Safety (Part 2)

2009-07-02T12:23:00.003+02:00

We play football with the office every Wednesday and yesterday was no exception. I have just found out that with a particularly vicious shot last night I put my boss into hospital by breaking his wrist and he's going to be off work for 3 weeks. Now THAT is a great way to finish your career with the company.

I hence propose that, as a dangerous sport, football should be banned.

Health And Safety

2009-07-02T11:38:00.003+02:00

I'm back ! There's been loads of work, graduation and that rare Finnish commodity, sunshine to enjoy. Now I'm back and I'm going to whine about something again. So please draw up your seats. I've actually been pondering this one for a while - every time I read a story about how "Health and Safety regulations" have been invoked to prevent people from doing something, I get irritated/amused. Hopefully by presenting many examples of this kind of stuff, it can make enough of an effect that this kind of horror in our society will be reduced.

In a recent example from Exeter, (United Kingdom), goggles were banned from school swimming lessons on health and safety grounds. Apparently, if you remove the goggles in an incorrect way can lead to "severe injury".

In another recent laughable example from Peterborough, (United Kingdom), a bunch of OAPs were banned from drinking coffee in case some of it fell out of the mug and burnt children. Accidents do happen I'm sure but I also believe that these people, all of then aged above 50 (and regular drinkers of hot beverages), know how to handle a coffee mug. And if a kid is stupid enough to run around and knock a cup of coffee all over themselves, well - that'll teach them not to run around in a library won't it ?

Old people of course are not only targeted for their disgusting coffee-drinking habits - A group of pensioners in Norwich (United Kingdom) were banned from getting take-away fish and chips due to the fear that the food would go cold and hence cause food poisoning. Thankfully common sense has prevailed in this case at least and the ban has been dropped. The fact that it was even thought about in the first place, though, is pretty sad.

The irony award goes a school in Saffron Walden (United Kingdom) which banned sunscreen under health a safety regulations under the pretense that some of the kids might be allergic to it. Surely sunscreen is a health and safety tool, is it not ? If they develop melanoma in 15 years that's OK - but we're talking about getting a rash from a skin reaction !! Perish the thought !!!

Even more dangerous than applying sunscreen, of course, is taking photographs. A Scottish tourist attraction has in fact banned the taking of photographs completely. Here I quote - "Rosslyn Chapel is to prevent visitors taking any photographs inside the building for fear they will injure themselves." Logical, isn't it ?

From the above it would seem that being out and about is an extremely dangerous pastime - visiting tourist attractions, going to school, meeting up with friends for coffee and lunch are all events which could ruin our lives and cripple us forever. Thankfully we're still safe in our own homes, right ?

WRONG !

A residential block in Stoke-on-Trent (United Kingdom) recently outlawed doormats due to health and safety regulations - in the case of fire, they argued, people would trip over their doormats and this would presumably cause them to die a horrible death. Potted plants were not spared from the legislation and have also been banned. Surely it would make more sense to ban ovens, radiators, frying pans and electricity, the causes of fire in the first place ?

If you have managed to escape from your apartment without lethally falling over, be careful of what is waiting to trip you up outside - last Christmas in Wimborne, Dorset (United Kingdom), the Christmas choir was banned for health and safety reasons due to fears that, in the event of a power cut (seriously) someone could fall over in the dark and injure themselves.

Christmas cheer was also on display in Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex (United Kingdom) when a Christmas tree was banned for health and safety regulations after the volunteers who put it up failed to provide a 20-tonne concrete foundation to prevent the thing from falling down. And current regulations allow us to wander around in forests where trees have only natural foundations and fall over violently whenever a storm appears ?! Sheer madness ! What are they thinking !

And finally, just to show that people remember that Christmas is, above all, for the children, a shopping centre in Hemel Hempstead (.....United Kingdom) let the kids in on the act too when they banned a troupe of Brownies from singing Christmas Carols for health and safety reasons after it was discovered that a group of singing young girls would block fire escapes.

I remember when I was a kid being told that we have things a lot softer than our parents generation did. Comparing my life as a kid to what there is today though, we lived in a war zone ! We fell over playing football and got blood on our knees, we ran around without being told to stop, and we could even wear goggles to the swimming pool without being lectured about how dangerous they were ! One of the reasons I'd like to live to be an old man (despite the fact that I wouldn't be allowed to drink coffee or eat take-away) is that I want to see what would actually be allowed any more in 2050. I know I have a bunch of small cousins who are more cautious than I have ever been about anything and I feel sorry for them. Maybe I should go and give them a good beating, show them the daring and freespirited living of the 20th century that the world used to enjoy....

Rant over (to be continued)

Drawing the Curtains on my Academic Life

2009-05-15T13:33:00.001+02:00

On Monday I handed in my thesis which (one crappy little paper aside) draws my life as a student to an end. Not that I've really noticed given that I've been working full time for several years, but there we go. The thesis was a classic example of what being a student is. I've known that I had to do it since the autumn of 2005. I started writing it late in 2007. I handed it in three and a half years after starting it, having written practically the whole thing in the final week. At the outset, the plan was simple - I had to take part in seminars, make three presentations on my paper, and then write the thing and hand it in. Then, the following happened.

Late April 2009 : Realise that the final deadline is May 11th. Ask boss for a week off due to impending panic

3rd May : Sit down and start writing until I pass out

4th-9th May : Repeat

10th May : Get up late in order to be able to write all night and then hand the paper in on the next day before the 11am deadline. Go to the shop for some Energy Drink and go to the library

11th May :

4.30am : Realise the sun is coming up and speed up.
8.00am : I try to register to drop off the paper. I am refused by the system.
8.30am : M leaves for work, having spent the last half hour wandering around nervously due to previous event.
9.30am : I have finished and leave to the library to print the paper.
10.15am : Arrive at the library and print my paper off while looking at what else I have to do
10.17am : Realise my registration is being refused because I haven't sent a part of my thesis for a language check. This takes one month. Crap.
10.18am : I remember that I have to write a 400 word abstract and rattle one out. It's pretty terrible but at this stage, quality counts for nothing
10:25am : I'm still in a queue for the printer
10:30am : My work starts printing !
10:31am : My work stops printing, the printer is out of paper. My efforts to restock it are in vain
10:35am : I find the right place to put the paper and we're off again.
10:37am : The printer stops working. NOT NOW !!!!
10:40am : The printer, encouraged by some gentle prodding, whirs back into life. Heart begins beating again
10:45am : I'm all printed and run to the faculty
10:47am : Arrival at the faculty. I hand in my paper while explaining that I mysteriously haven't been able to register for a reason I cannot understand ! I'm taken to another office where I smile profusely and explain that I didn't know the rules and that in any case, English is one of my mother tongues and I doubt very much that I would fail a language test and please please please can we ignore this rule for once.
10:48am : The rule is ignored. My status is fixed and I can now go and register
10:49am : The computer I try to switch on doesn't work
10:51am : I can't find the link for the registration screen
10:52am : I'm done !!!! I go outside and smoke profusely, and then quit smoking (again).
10:53am : I head off to work slightly delirious, picking up a bottle of Coke on the way.

Once again, the student has caused unnecessary suffering to himself and all around him. He now faces a painful month or 2 waiting to see if his paper has been judged abysmal by all concerned and kinda hoping that it hasn't. His fate is in the hands of the (lovely) professors of Helsinki University. He'll get very drunk if(/when) he passes.

I ♥ S.Y. (R.I.A.)

2009-05-15T13:08:00.000+02:00

My first trip to the extended axis of evil only lasted for three days but I already want to go back. The little wander took me from Lebanon where I'd had a look around Beirut and Baalbek to Hamah where I spent two nights and Damascus where I ran around like a headless and awestruck chicken trying to

1) see as many things as possible
2) eat as many chawarmas as possible
3) buy as many presents to keep M happy as possible
4) continually reassure my mother that I was still alive

The first task was easy - Damascus is crawling with sights, sounds and history. The entire old town of a UNESCO world heritage site and it's the kind of place I could walk around for hours and hours (both because it's beautiful and because it's a labyrinth that even with my incredible directional skills could confuse me). As it turns out, I was with a Canadian guy I had met in Hamah who was a bit cautious about going into darker and quieter areas with more confusing looking streets which was probably a good thing. If I'd been wandering around alone I'd probably still be there asking for directions to the Airport. If you want a description of each of the sites in order then grab your Lonely Planet because I can't be bothered (and don't want to turn this blog into a travel guide by) explaining each and every one of them. It's the kind of place where traces of history are so omnipresent that for example remaining columns of a Roman temple are used as the entrance to the souq, and wandering among the little store around the sides and back of the Umayyad Mosque you could be forgiven for wondering if you'd stumbled onto the set of an Aladdin movie. The narrow streets covered in creepers take you past small junk shops and the smell of spices and roasted meat fill the air. People, even in Damascus, are curious, friendly, generous, open, kind, (and so forth) and you'll occasionally get stopped in the street by some character who wants to welcome you to Syria and ensure that you're having a nice time. A smile gets a smile back, a few mispronounced words of Arabic gets an enormous roar of laughter and a big handshake. Most refreshingly, you don't get the feeling that people are after your money or have any hidden agenda - they're being nice to you because they are nice people. Some of them want to practise their English or their French and some of them are curious about outsiders and bombard you with questions about what life is like in your country. Despite Syria being very interesting in so many other ways, the people are certainly a part of what makes it special. It's the kind of place where you can ask someone for directions to your hotel and five minutes later you have an appointment with a new friend in a cafe around the corner.

The second point would have been easy if I hadn't insisted on taking the largest size every time. Seriously, the chawarmas are great - and I should know, they're the only thing I ate in 6 days. The thing about travelling by yourself is that you don't want to go sit in a restaurant for 2 hours. I didn't manage to work out if it was because I'd get bored, or because I only had 6 days and wanted to make the most of them, or if I was just too concerned about my self image to wander alone into a restaurant and look like a loser just sitting there, munching my dinner and watching Arabic soaps on the omnipresent excessive loud TV, pretending to have any idea what the hell was going on. Result : I ate lots of chawarmas. For breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I don't regret that for a second.

The third point I think I succeeded in and, as every man knows, it's the most important factor in a journey.

The fourth was always going to be a tall order though - when I first told my parents that I was going to Beirut they asked if the flights to Baghdad were all full up. I'd never been to the Middle East before, Lebanese friends cancelled their trips at the last minute, and I arrived at 3.30am. The immigration officer asked me if this was my first trip to Lebanon, to which I answered that it was. "Well then..." he looked straight at me. "Good luck !" And with that I was waved through. I had never been worried about going to Lebanon - in my mind it was the kind of place where trouble could happen if you ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time but it was cool in general. It was certainly cool. Definitely. My hotel window didn't close properly so I could hear everything going on outside and these fearmongers from back home started getting to me. Every loud noise outside sent my eyes springing open and looking out for signs of trouble outside. I was staying just down the road from where Rafik Hariri was assassinated and for a moment a creeping doubt came into my mind as to how safe Lebanon really was. I quickly chased it out with rational thinking - no trouble had happened here for ages. As it was, Beirut was fine - signs of war are everywhere and the city is still roughly divided between Christians and Muslims, and people are not quite as open and chatty as they have been with me in other Arab countries. It's definitely as safe as it has been for many decades though. Still, that didn't stop me feeling the son's duty to sent my mother a text message every half hour to tell her I was still living and in possession of all four limbs. She is concerned for my safety whenever I go to the toilet so I understood that she would be slightly concerned about me here as well.

Conclusion - go to Syria and go to Lebanon before the tourists invade them. Then you'll be sorry.

I Really Don't Care

2009-05-03T04:50:00.004+02:00

It's been ages, I know. And I really can't be arsed to do anything about that now. Therefore I will give some kind of summary. Since my last post I have..

1) realised that I work too much
2) been to Lebanon
3) been to Syria
N.B. Lebanon was cool, Syria was super-super-cool
4) got slightly drunk (just now)

I really want to write a long, rambling piece full of praise for Syria next time I'm sat as the computer and NOT just about to conk out. Watch this space and thank you for your patience. I'm off to bed.

EDIT : I wasn't slightly drunk, I was rather more than that.

Being organised

2009-04-04T12:13:00.002+02:00

It's not all it's cracked up to be. I myself find that being completely disorganised and useless can be immensely frustrating but it gives you a lot to look back on. A few years back, for instance, I was going back home from university for the weekend and, knowing that British Rail was likely to let me down, I took the train before the one I should have. Turns out I should probably have left a few days earlier just to make sure I got to the airport on time. I missed the flight and, being an impulsive kind of guy, I just did the first thing that came into my head. That was to call my sister and ask what she thought I should do (error number 1) - she called the parents, reported that they said I should get a Eurostar (which apparently was completely false) and so I went down to London (error number 2), took the Circle Line in the wrong direction (error number 3), got my pocket picked and lost my phone (error number 4) and eventually arrived at Waterloo station at around midnight which was obviously far too late for the Eurostar (error number 5). Without these, I wouldn't be able to recount the story of that night I spent sleeping on a newspaper in a train station in London. It's a bit annoying at the time but I wouldn't change it for the world.

The latest incident came in Kaunas last weekend. The plan was simple :

1) Walk from the football stadium to the hostel
2) Sleep
3) Get up at 6.30
4) Go to the coach station
5) Get a bus to Riga and wander around there
6) Get on the plane and fly home.

1) and 2) were excuted flawlessly but then we were brutally taken down by that hideous tradition of putting the clocks forward 1 hour. Hence we innocently woke up at 7.30, missed the bus and had to take a 70€ taxi ride to Panevezys on the Vilnius-Riga highway and hope to get a bus from there. As it turned out, all went swimmingly and we got on the plane without any problems (bar spending too long over a beer and having to be called personally over the loudspeaker system and then taking a bus out to the plane when everyone else was already seated). This reminded me of that time back in 2004 when I tried to get onto a plane headed for my first African trip and lost my passport, boarding pass and yellow fever certificate, all within the space of about half an hour. The advantage with this kind of history is that when shit does happen, you're entirely prepared for it and very rarely let panic cloud your judgement, and I got all of them back from various places.

Once again, I've let horrendous time management get the better of me and I have the majority of my thesis to write in about 5 weekends before it's due to be handed in on May 11th. Consequently, I'm sat here in all serenity writing this. There are, admittedly, small voices in my head saying "maybe you should stop blogging and actually get on with it ?" but my level of experience speaks for itself - I did get back home for that weekend (albeit 17 hours late), I did get on that plane to Africa, and I did get back from Kaunas in perfect time. And this is why I am sure that, some way or another, I'll get my thesis completed on time too.

Yesterday I decided that, with my little expedition to the Middle East on Wednesday, maybe I should get a backpack after my last one sadly expired in January. So after a 20 minute shopping spree I emerged with a new travel buddy - it's black, it's big, and it cost me 135€. All I need to do now is get onto the plane...

For Sale to Highest Bidder : The Soul of Riga

2009-03-31T15:09:00.002+02:00

I witnessed a rape on Sunday - not a physical rape by a person on another, but a slow, gradual rape, where the soul of a city has slowly been eroded and is disappearing at quite a pace. I first visited Riga in 2004 when the old city was still quaint, quiet, with a scattering of bars with a local feel about them. It was all in all a Latvian experience. The people we shared the hostel with were mostly passing through on longer trips. Sure, they were interested in going out for a beer or 3 when they were there but the main point of being in Riga for them was to see the city/rest of Latvia. There were a few hostels in town and a few more being set up and you could tell from this that the tourist flow was increasing. It still felt a bit like a corner of Europe which retains its identity, where people took pride in their Old Town and where you could discover things at your own pace. Since then, seemingly, the invasion has started. The occupying force is mostly British booze-tourists and their vehicle of invasion is the cheap Ryanair flight from London Stansted.

I was in Riga again on Sunday for a few hours on my way to the airport from Lithuania and was pretty shocked at what I saw - the amount of tourists cruising the streets were more reminiscent of the crowds on the day cruises from Tallinn than what I saw in 2004. Every bar I walked past in the Old Town had abandoned the feel I got 5 years ago in favour of an English style psuedo-modern look, the barstaff said hello in English rather than Latvian and the windows were adorned with Sky Sports stickers. Yes ! you, tourist, can come to Latvia and take advantage of the cheaper beers without even feeling like you've changed country ! I eventually found a bar without a Sky Sports sticker in the window and walked in, expecting to find an oasis in the unLatvian desert, only to be greeted in English by a bargirl under a big screen showing England playing against Slovakia.

My Latvian friend told me that people there are tired of the "staggers" getting trashed and representing their own proudly by doing things such as pissing on Latvia's independence monument but, she asked, what can we do about it ? The answer is not much, I suppose, and especially in an economic climate like this, the bars are doing the sensible thing by cashing in on the invasion - my beer in 2009 cost nearly 5 times more than it did in 2004.

It's a difficult situation I guess - tourism is an enormous money-spinner and in the same way that you can't blame a homeless man striking up a superficial friendship with a millionaire, central Riga's bar owners can either welcome to booze cruisers or sink into the abyss of bankruptcy as the drinkers head elsewhere. Latvia has the unfortunate situation of being close enough to London (and I don't want to be overly harsh on the Brits - boozers do come from other places, although the main culprits come from the UK), accessible with cheap flights, sell beer cheaply, and be populated by a large proportion of attractive women, which proves to be a good magnet for tourist money but a deadly cocktail when it comes to preserving the soul of any place. All in all it means that I'm less likely to go for a weekend in Riga when I have a few days off but, given that I don't spend a week's wages on beer during that time, I suppose I am less missed than others would be.

Exam

2009-03-12T15:29:00.002+01:00

After 4 weeks and 3 days - I'm back ! You haven't missed anything - stuff is exactly as it was. The world is still rotating, I'm still working the same jobs, there's still snow on the ground, Finns still like beer, and the kitchen in our flat is still half covered in trash.

Saturday, however, heralds a bit of a change in my routine. Normally on Saturdays I like to perfect the art of slobbing, mainly because it's the only day of the week where I don't go to work (except for last week when I did). It's great because you can get up late and you also don't have that Sunday feeling where you know it's the last time you'll be getting up late until the next weekend, which results in you getting up a bit earlier because you want to make the most of the day, and then being utterly unfulfilled because you end up doing boring crap like food shopping, or going to do the laundry.

The change will be that I'll have to drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn to go and have my second pop at the last university exam I'll ever have to do. Before then (and it's Thursday afternoon now) I'll have to read 4 books, plus do all of the things that people do when they're studying for an exam and they don't want to read the books. We've all done it - checking your emails once every millisecond, smoking more than you should, reading news stories so irrelevant and uninteresting that you'd never read them otherwise, smoking and checking your email again, wondering who you could send a constructive text message to, failing, sending a pointless one to someone anyway and then sitting watching your phone waiting for a response, which usually never comes. I failed the last crack I had at this exam because I was overenthusiastic - I stayed up on the Monday night until 3am reading this mind-numbing theoretical rubbish which is in most cases just an overly complicated ego boost for the author (after all, why write things in regular language when you can write it in a way that no one can understand and realise how clever you are in the process ?). This led to me being a complete wreck for the rest of the week, not being able to take anything in and making an absolute hash of the exam when it came around. This time, I just can't focus on anything. I've smoked, checked my emails, watched the Simpsons, read about last night's football, eaten an entire bunch of bananas because it allowed me to take the skins to the trash and even checked the use-by dates on food in the fridge to see what should be eaten tonight. And I NEVER do that.

As it is now, the exam is 40 hours away and I have another 3 books to read. And as you can tell from the fact that this post is full of long sentences and inane twitter, I'm just using it as yet another "something to do" while my books just sit idly on the table, waiting for me to fall asleep on them when I finally manage to peel the covers back and see what bland speculation lies within. I don't get drunk very regularly at all these days but the day I graduate, I've promised myself that I will. And once Sunday comes around I'll liberate my brain, observe the world again and who knows, maybe even have something to write about.

180 days until the grand departure.

Finland : I Like

2009-02-09T12:56:00.001+01:00

Regular readers may have noticed my slight penchant for dishing out some stick to Finland for various reasons (for further information, see most of my posts) although I'd like to put that on the back burner in order to let rip with some gushing praise.

Last weekend witnessed a delightful long-weekend visit from my mother and, rather than staying here in Helsinki in the slush and greyness, we dragged her out to Koli National Park in Eastern Finland. It's a wilderness with lakes and forests (much like the rest of the country in fact) so it's hard to see why this particular area of lakes and trees was set out for national park status. There are wolves and lynxes and bears hanging around there although we didn't get to see any. Given that bears have a tendency of hibernating in pits around this time of year, I'd venture a guess that this was probably a good thing. Wandering around in show-shoes was fun, as was watching the absurd fashion sense of the Russian tourists who were wondering around in the forest with glaring fluorescent tracksuits and enormous designer label handbags. The countryside is definitely Finland's best feature in my opinion, and in Koli there are rare appearances from hills which you can climb up and enjoy the spectacular view across (guess what ?) lakes and trees. All of this covered in snow in a scene you would struggle to find anywhere else. The only problem with a Finnish winter is that it gets light rather late and gets dark very early, meaning that you don't really have much time to admire this natural beauty. But once the sun goes down, you can return to the cabin in the forest, listen to the sound of absolute silence, cover your ears from the -30 degree temperatures and wander off to check if the sauna has heated enough yet for people to go in. On the way back to the cabin you can see more stars than in most places on the planet and, once you've got back in, stick some sausages on a stick and grill them in the fire which is nearly always lit.

It's not the kind of life I'd like to live permanently I suppose, but it's a great break. I suppose you can see the difference in that doing nothing in Helsinki is boring, but doing nothing out in the forest is great.

Report of Glorious Travel !

2009-01-16T13:54:00.003+01:00

I've had Transnistria on my "places to visit" list for a long time now. As with most places on my "places to visit" list, it's not really as mass-tourism destination. It's a state unrecognised by any other in the world; it's poor, openly corrupt, and is far away from anywhere else that anyone would want to visit; since declaring independence from Moldova in 1991 it has been sitting and waiting for the resurrection of the USSR; and it's not easy to get to. This fabulous combination meant that I wanted to go and visit. Earlier this month, I got the chance. Armed with an InterRail ticket, very little money and a coat that was completely unsuitable for the winter temperatures of the Eastern Balkans, I headed with M from our temporary base in Chişinău, Moldova, to the city's cold and chaotic central bus terminal. It seems that Moldova doesn't really like tourists visiting Transnistria : "Are you going to Ukraine ?" is asked at the border - this means transiting through Transnistria - and there is no Moldovan border post between the territory and Moldova proper. This means that if you enter Moldova through Transnistria, you are entering without an entry stamp and therefore illegally. However, from Chişinău there are minibuses every 10 or 15 minutes to the capital, Tiraspol.

We were directed from one ticket desk to another, told off for smoking near the kiosk (unexpected in a country where people breathe more cigarette smoke than oxygen) and then directed to another ticket desk where we picked up our tickets to Tiraspol for 2€ each and hopped onto a minibus. On arrival at the "border", we were greeted by a bear in a Russian style hat, who gave us a Russian-style greeting by snatching our passports and the immigration form we'd filled in without a word and then directing us towards a building a bit further down. There, the occupants of about 5 buses and minibuses crammed themselves into a room the size of a small car to try and get their papers stamped and enter legally into Transnistria. One guy from our minibus took us under his wing - he was from Tiraspol but his parents had lived just near Brussels and he also had a Belgian passport. He spoke a bit of English and explained to the official that we were only there for the day, to avoid us paying anything. "No one knows the point of this registration" he said. "Unless it's an exercise in improving relations between neighbours !". Moldova and Transnistria fought a war between 1991 and 1994 and relations aren't exactly warm. Neither was the weather that day and, having eventually got ourselves to the front of the queue with liberal use of elbows and stubbornness, we got back to the minibus and our new-found friend showed us the sights through the window. Before long, the minibus was stopped for a bribe-extraction exercise. The driver got back in and muttered something in Russian before driving off again. Our friend smiled and translated "he called him an animal who eats from the asphalt. With foreign license plates you can't escape the traffic police here". Apparently it is quite a common occurrence as I saw 3 other Moldovan-plated cars getting the same treatment during the 10 minutes we were stopped. We bounced our way through the potholed streets of Tiraspol, got off at the end and our friend drew us a map in subzero temperatures and explained the sites to us before wishing us a pleasant stay in "the open air museum of Communism" ! We wandered off down Lenin Street as per his instructions and at the third intersection (the first two were Karl Marx street and Karl Liebknecht street) we turned into 25th October street. The date of an important event in Transnistria ? Maybe its independence date ? Nope - the official day of the Bolshevik Revolution.

More signs of the orientation of this pseudo-state come from the flag - which is the old flag of the Moldavian SSR, complete with hammer and sickle - and the coins, which also bear the old emblem of the glorious Soviet worker. The walk to the centre is periodically interrupted with giant slogans singing the praises of the city or of fellow unrecognised states - one has the flags of Transnistria, Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia with the slogan IN UNITY IS OUR STRENGTH ! and over the road is the Abkhaz embassy. The main square is impressive - large, concrete, empty. It's the only city left in the world with a statue of Lenin on its main square. There's a Soviet tank as a memorial of the war against Moldova, complete with a cemetery and a memorial to the unknown soldier. As we arrived the Orthodox Christmas celebrations were just unfolding but sadly, because it was a holiday, the minibuses back to Chişinău were stopping early. Not to be deterred, we stopped off at the (supposedly) state-run supermarket on the way (the same company also runs most petrol stations, owns the biggest hotels in the country, the biggest football team and the national printing company) and bought some of Transnistria's famous [sic.] "Kvint" cognac. It was only 4 hours in one of the world's last fortresses of Communism (albeit with some fabulous splashes of capitalist thrown in for good measure) and enough to get a taste, but it's still on my "places to visit" list, just to have a better look.

Here we go again..

2009-01-07T10:28:00.000+01:00

I got back home last night at 1.30, promptly gave up smoking again and settled back into the hamster wheel.

What was great about the trip was that it wasn't in Western Europe where some semblance of human warmth was still on display. It came from Alina and her mother who taught us (or tried to teach us) Moldovan on the way to Chisinau, and the warm welcome in the hostel/apartment we stayed in. It came from the guy who took us under his wing at the Transnistrian immigration post, showed us the sights of Bendery and and drew us a map of Tiraspol in sub-zero temperatures before disappearing off to see his family. It also came from the two old ladies on the Iasi-Timisoara night train who fed us like kings with homemade sausages and bacon, and insisted on always talking to us in Romanian and smiling at us despite our confused looks. It came from Georgiana who turned those noises into words we could understand and taught us us how to eat roasted pumpkin seeds. It came from those who smiled at the fact we were tourists in Moldova but couldn't really understand why. It came from the big difference I noticed in Vienna, Dusseldorf and Helsinki, all of which seemed completely sterile and lifeless by comparison to what I had seen over the last week and a half. So thanks to all of you...

It wasn't all beauty and sunshine and relaxation - the temperatures weren't exactly high apart from a beautiful sunny day in Mostar, and the early, early mornings dragging ourselves and our bags off night trains into dark and wet cities were tough, but it was all worth it. Travelling isn't really travelling in my mind unless there is some aspect of suffering to it as well. Without lugging my stuff uphill at 6am in Belgrade with no feeling in my hands or toes and mucus streaming down my face, there is no way I would have enjoyed my cheese burek for breakfast quite as much. If we hadn't travelling for 48 hours straight we wouldn't have got to see Moldova and Transnistria, which were pretty cool. Without any of this, I wouldn't have had the sense of achievement from the trip. I don't like touching down at the airport and getting a taxi to the beach. I like to earn what I get. There'll be more gushing praise and merciless bashing soon - I've got another 3 months straight here before my little adventure to the Middle East so I'd better get back into the swing of office life...

New Proposal : Make Mondays Part of the Weekend

2008-12-15T18:34:00.003+01:00

Why is it that things always happen on Mondays ? It's not just that things appear worse because it's Monday - more bad stuff actually happens on Monday. It's 24 hours long, just like every other day of the week, yet more crap seems to be thrown at you on this particular day. I went to bed at midnight after being shattered all day and was suddenly hit by a bout of insomnia which lasted until 4am. At 7am I woke up, tired and confused and, in a moment of weakness, broke my cigarette fast. It wasn't anything special actually so I don't really want any more, which I suppose was a good result. But I have been kicking myself half the day in case this becomes the "just one" which breaks the whole effort. Seems I've got away with it though. Secondly, got to work to be instructed that this was to be a hellish week with far too much to do. Given that I've got a train to Turku to begin the long trek home on Friday afternoon and have to escape from work early for that, it means I'll have even less time to work on what I have to do. This wouldn't be a problem if I could stay later at work to finish this off, but I also have to complete a statistics course project on SPSS. For those of you who haven't become acquainted with SPSS, it's a horribly pointless piece of software which is being lumped on poor unsuspecting students in a worldwide conspiracy to make us think that we're far more stupid than we actually are. I went through an emotional rollercoaster over 6 weeks to try to complete this course with a modicum of understanding for the complexities of this programme - how it works, what those numbers are supposed to mean, what the point of it all is - and after much psychological torture I finally emerged unscathed with one task left - complete a term paper by Friday in order to get course credits. I did nearly half of it last week. Today, I came to the library to continue it and noticed that for some reason the version I was using no longer has a valid license on the school computers. There's a newer version and it doesn't understand my saved work. In weeks gone by I would have stepped outside and furiously puffed on a cigarette while muttering under my breath. These days I'm limited to muttering under my breath and I have to say, while it's much better for my health, it doesn't feel quite as satisfying.

Hence I am proposing making Monday the last day of the weekend, which will leave us an extra 8 hours to deal with all the crap that gets thrown at us.

An Alternative Method

2008-12-10T11:09:00.002+01:00

A while back I claimed that "Today I'm taking my first step in quitting smoking". That was October 30th and, once again, it amounted to not much as I tried to slow down, cut down one day at a time, eliminate the post-metro fag or the out-of-work fag without much success. In any case, if I didn't have it one day I just had it half an hour later when I got back home. I also realised that I would spend about as much money between now and September as I did on my flights to Lebanon and Syria. The result of this was that, by my own twisted logic, if I quit smoking now, the holiday to the Middle East would be my reward, and it would be free !

For this and other reasons, I went cold turkey two days ago. I've been clean for 38 hours now and, although I've had some close calls, it's been relatively plain sailing. The funny thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of mind games going on that I'm playing with myself. As I'm walking down the street and not smoking I find myself thinking that I can always have a cigar instead and that won't count. Or trying to work out if it's possible to have a cigarette every x days or weeks without being considered "a smoker". Last night, I tried to reason with myself in order to justify having one on the balcony. It just takes a moment of clarity to realise this and tell myself to shut up and keep pushing forward with this but in the heat of the moment I don't really realise that this is what's going on and I'm hoping I don't slip up. I still have nothing against them and would have no problem having one from time to time but my main priority here is to be free of them, to be able to look at a cigarette the same way I look at a beer - as something that's nice to have from time to time but which will cause me absolutely no grief if I don't have it. I'm not there yet but I've got into the swing and I think I've got over the first difficult wave. I'm anticipating one or two more and then, as I claimed on October 30th, I would be smoke-free by the new year !

I haven't noticed any differences yet but, like the mind games my subconscious is playing with me to justify sneaking one in, I'm playing games with it too. When I walk, I breathe in heavily and tell myself my lungs are filling up more than they used to. I run up the escalator coming out of the metro and tell myself I feel better that I would have last week. I make myself look down on people smoking, telling myself they are going to be stuck as slaves to the Marlboro corporation. All the while, I'd quite fancy one myself but with some intense concentration it's possible and I'm quite honestly surprised that it hasn't been more difficult.

Again, watch this space !

Impulse Purchase

2008-12-05T21:50:00.003+01:00

I'm not usually an impulse purchase fan. It seems to me to be the epitome of "shop for the hell of it". Given that I'm an enormous hypocrite, of course, I tend to do it quite a bit myself. Usually, though, it's been limited to chocolate bars while queueing for the shop check-out and the like.

Today though, I impulse purchased a holiday. M's going on a girly trip to Paris and, given that I'm not a girly, I'm barred from the trip. In a fit of jealous rage and in order to not be sitting around bored all weekend, I decided to go see some friends in Poland at the same time. Flights weren't easy to hunt down when I looked at them yesterday (meaning that they were very easy to hunt down, but not for cheap) so I extended my horizons slightly. Half an hour later I was drooling over a cheap deal to the Middle East. Today I asked my boss for some days off around the Easter weekend and tonight I whipped out M's Visa card and bought it. It's come so quickly that it hasn't really sunk in ! So on the 8th of April I'm hopping on a plane to Beirut. 6 days later, my return will be taking off from Damascus. It seems I'm going alone and I really don't know what to find there. It's the first time I'll have really travelled by myself (aside from little overland A-to-B trips in Europe) and my first time in the Middle East (or indeed any part of Asia) so it'll be an interesting trip - both in terms of discovering a new part of the world and maybe discovering myself a little.

Very cool. I'm very happy. And excited. And, most of all, I'm wondering how to break this news to my mother.

Jingle Bells

2008-11-25T12:29:00.000+01:00

Over recent weeks I've seen an increase in emails from my mother arriving to my inbox - they deal with various issues but one running theme is a request for information regarding what M and I want for Christmas. I usually respond with a half-baked answer, attempting to give some kind of direction without giving away that I really have no idea and can't help her on this.

So, Christmas is coming. Everyone has an opinion on it, and I'm no exception. Whereas most people militantly hate or love Christmas though, I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm really not bothered about it at all. The only reason I ever liked it as a kid was the presents - once they were out of the way the day lost its gloss completely, especially if the presents sucked. I have no religious or spiritual reason to celebrate Christmas. The presents are still cool though, and it's one of the few times the family gets together (especially with mine being pretty far flung - my parents in France, my sister in Belgium and me up here). That, however, is potentially explosive and tends to give Christmas get-togethers a slightly predictable tune.

Everyone turns up to my parents house with a role to play and, I would imagine, this is the same all over. Mothers who haven't seen their kids for a while will be overjoyed to see them and will attempt to impose an "everyone must be happy at this happy time" regime which, while it is commendable, is usually in vain because an argument will break out at some point. When she sees that her quest has failed (yet again) she will become disappointed and withdrawn.

Sisters, on the other hand, will come to the Christmas gathering with the aim of imposing their will on all present. This stamping of authority extends to all Christmas-specific issues - the size of the tree to be purchased, the decoration of said tree, the order in which presents are to be dished out, the amount of, and regularity with which, doting love must be lavished on the dog, the amount of attention they should get. With a total of 7 people and 2 dogs this Christmas, that will involve a lot more dictatorial behaviour. Given that I am enthusiastic neither about Christmas trees nor dogs, nor indeed following orders on such trivial matters as how presents should be handed out, I usually lose patience and tell her to leave everyone alone to do as they wish. This prompts an explosion of rage and lamentations full of self-pity about why she bothers trying to make this fun in the first place. Mothers (who have seen this argument and reacted negatively as described above) and sisters (who are seething with anger and need to stamp authority on someone having failed to do so with their brothers) then have a blazing argument with each other. Fathers then step in to calm things down and usually make it worse. As a result, he starts to read his newspaper while everyone else sits around being quiet.

As the day wears on, everyone will lighten up, food will be cooked and chatter will swirl around once more. This Christmas peace will last until after the dinner when someone will invariably suggest playing a game. Here, the old rivalries rear their heads again. In my family the tradition game has been Trivial Pursuit - teams can get together, have a laugh, everyone has fun. Apart from the sister of the family, that is, for she despises (or at least pretends to despise) Trivial Pursuit. Having studied politics for many years I can see her approach tactics quite well. The dictator wishes to impose his dictates on the population but, of course, cannot do it alone. Therefore, the dictator backs him/herself up with military force. Given the lack of a frightening figure in the family, the dictator must revert to some kind of non-ruling moral authority. This is Mamie - our grandmother. The dictator's choice of game will be rejected by the population (mother and brother) while the moral authority will be cajoled into giving her blessing. The international community (father) then falls asleep. This is when the mother and the brother end up playing Trivial Pursuit anyway, the sister storms off in another fit of rage, boyfriends and girlfriends sit looking slightly awkward, and the curtain comes down on yet another family Christmas.

I'm usually an optimist of sorts but when it comes to Christmas, things are far too inevitable to have any illusions about what's going to happen next month. This is why Christmas is something I'm not particularly bothered about.

Parting of ways

2008-11-17T17:22:00.003+01:00

I'll be focusing all of my Africa-trip-related writing on me new blog - so bookmark THIS !

I will continue to dish out abuse to George W. Bush, Finland and various other (un)deserving targets right here. Don't go away !

299 days...

2008-11-14T18:44:00.002+01:00

We've finally done it. On September 8th, M and I will be boarding a plane, one-way tickets in hand, heading to Tunisia. We'll head east, turn right when we hit Cairo and follow the Nile down through Sudan to Ethiopia. From there we'll bum around various parts of Africa with a delightfully vague plan. The plan before then is to save as much money as humanly possible.

There are several things, I've noticed, that will take a lot of getting used to after all this time in Finland. My trips to Africa before haven't been fraught with all of these enormous culture shocks, but I've been in Helsinki for much longer now. And I can imagine that the following will be the most bizarre.

- The way the people look. They'll be black. Black, with black hair. Black, curly hair. There are a few Somalis living in Helsinki but still, the overwhelming majority of people are blonde, blue eyed and pasty-skinned. In fact if they didn't like wearing black clothes so much, they would be completely camouflaged once the snow came.

- The way the people act. I once again waited for the elevator coming back home after work tonight and as I was standing there a girl came in through the door, started coming towards the elevator and (shock horror !) I was there waiting for it. Rather than share an elevator with a stranger she turned, walked the length of the corridor and went up the stairs. This is quite a common occurrence here. Finns (at least when they are sober, which some of the time they are) have an inviolatable personal space the size of a small house. Africans have never heard of personal space.

- Communication skills. Being spoken to by complete strangers is something I've generally been used to and had no problem with, but it will still come as a bit of a shock now. How will I deal with this ?

- The temperature. What else is there to say ? An African winter is the same temperature as a Finnish summer. I love the heat though and, although I scored only the second sunburn of my life last summer here in Helsinki, I'm still filled with optimism.

In 299 days, we'll be there. Until then, life will be cold, dark, wet and mostly quite silent. At least I'll have a lot of space to reflect on this while I'm in the elevator.

A Close Shave

2008-11-13T10:42:00.001+01:00

Whoa. Even if we as non-Americans don't have a vote in their elections, we keep an eye on what happens there, and rightly so. The Americans have an unrivalled capacity to send large military forces anywhere in the world, bomb the crap out of just about anywhere they would want to, and kill with impunity around the planet. If they got wind of my office here producing something more suspicious than mobile phone games, they could flatten it without any notice and explain it away without much trouble (much like the Al-Shifa Factory bombing). If they didn't like the way the plane I'm taking this winter was flying, they could shoot it down without much of a care (like the shooting down of the Iran Air flight by the USS Vincennes). If Osama bin Laden was hiding out in the forests of Karelia and the army couldn't find him (and let's face it, anyone could get lost in those forests) they could invade leading to the deaths of millions and it would be described as collateral damage. Worst of all, I'd have to go buy a new shaver so as to not leave so much as a hint of a beard. Not that I have much of one now, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Disastrous economic management has led to a global slowdown in a way far more disastrous than would be engendered by disastrous economic management in, say, Tajikistan or Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

They invade at will, carry out covert operations at will and aside from being responsible for the death of millions of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan and many others, they have been responsible for and tried to be responsible for the deaths of heads of state and government - Saddam Hussein and Patrice Lumumba were successfully disposed of, Fidel Castro was not, nor was Moammar Qadhafi (although his daughter was). They have overthrown the popularly elected Mohamed Mossadeq, Salvador Allende, the Sandinista movement and many others, replacing them with the pro-American choice and plunging those respective countries into chaos and discontentment. The first force to unify and impose law and order in Mogadishu in 18 years was expelled with American backing just because this force was composed of moderate Islamists. Mogadishu is once again lawless, being pounded to rubble and run by warlords. The bombing of Belgrade in the late 1990s, with the latest precision technology, succeeding in killing 3 Chinese journalists in the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, 15 people on a passenger train which was actually shot at twice (and described by Wesley Clark as an "uncanny incident" - can you imagine this happening if roles were reversed ?), hundreds of people in Kosovar refugee convoys and, in another "unfortunate" incident, a passenger bus near Pristina. The ambulance coming to pick up the wounded was itself, naturally, also bombed. The list goes on.

This exploration is far from exhaustive and, quite probably, what is available and known is far from exhaustive. As a consequence, us non-Americans naturally have a right to have an interest in who is elected to the White House. We have a right to be extremely concerned when a McCain-Palin double act comes remotely close to accessing the power to do all of this. I've been looking back on things and wondering what was bugging me about Sarah Palin. It wasn't her Bushesque stupidity and mindblowing inability to construct a sentence, because while I found it very concerning that such a person should be in such a position of power I also find it quite amusing. I've come to think it's the complete transparency with which these people in the US get away with it. Let's not forget that Sarah Palin is already Governor of Alaska, she's not a nobody. She's got big ambitions, she's considering running for President again in 2012. I'll demonstrate what I mean with this by now famous video . I think the most striking thing here is the fact that there is complicity with all of us. She knows she's talking crap, Katie Couric knows she's talking crap, we know she's talking crap. However the whole circus just continues unabated. I've seen plenty of videos like this but no one in the American media ever seems to stand up to politicians and say hey, Buster, that's a bunch of crap. I've seen them blatantly lying on TV without being called to account for it, when it could so easily have been done. If there are any Americans who can explain why this is, please leave me a message ! George Bush, it seems, is a man who has perfected this "we all know I'm talking shit but let's just pretend it's true" approach to stuff. Palin is a remarkable student and McCain has shown he's no pushover in the subject either. I'm not sure what it is about the Republicans in general, but I feel that it has something to do with my piece on the word "evil" from earlier on. Democrats persuade Americans to vote for them based on the real issues - Republicans persuade Americans to vote for them in the same way that they'd persuade a small kid to give them their lollipops. I just don't believe a word they say, even if it's more likely to be true. Nicolas Sarkozy, for all his faults, will tell someone in the streets to fuck off if he fancies it. The proof is that he already has. We can trust a guy like that to some extent.

So the result was quite a rare event - US voters have actually selected the more intelligent, less confrontational candidate of the two. I'm not going to cheer just yet, but let's give the new guy a chance. He's already said that he's ready to talk to Iran, Syria and so forth. This is something that we just wouldn't imagine hearing from the monkey currently in charge. It might restore a bit of trust and goodwill in the world and we might be able to get back towards working together rather than hating each other. Besides, if I was American, I'd much rather have Michelle Obama as a First Lady than Cindy McCain...

Declaration of Intent

2008-10-30T11:47:00.000+01:00

Today I'm taking my first step in quitting smoking. I've said this half-heartedly many times before (including once ceremonially throwing the last cigarette and my lighter into the trash) and none of those efforts lasted very long so this time I'm declaring it to the world. I don't spend all that much money on it (about 20€ a month - about what I get in tips on a good night, or the same as 4 pints of beer) and it doesn't consume my life. On a heavy day I might get through 10 or 12, and it never stops me from doing anything. I never feel the urge to sneak out of the cinema half way to have one. I can get on a long bus ride and not go crazy while I'm inside it. It's just a habit which I don't really need and, while it's not killing me (at least not yet), I remember I used to live quiet happily before I started when I was 21. M has skin problems which she thinks are linked to it so she's trying to slow down too. The final contributing factor is that I forgot my lighter at home this morning and I'm taking that as a sign. I'm not going cold turkey right away and it'll be a gradual process but I want to be smoke free (or at least reduced) by the end of the year.

The problem being that I'm not completely hooked on them and if I can get rid of the habit smokes (e.g. the "getting off the metro" cigarette, the "getting out of work" cigarette and the "waiting for the tram/bus and 10 minutes with nothing to do" cigarette) then I do enjoy having one from time to time. However I've decided to launch this challenge and we'll see how it goes. The main problems I have identified will be that

1) I've just bought a packet of tobacco so I'll probably be getting through that

2) These post-metro, post-work and pre-bus/tram cigs have become such a habit that I sometimes find myself lighting up without even thinking about it

3) The trip to the Balkans will be an enormous test of resolve given that, over there, people probably breathe larger quantities of cigarette smoke than they do of oxygen

4) There really isn't all that much else to do here.

The smoking ban probably helps although since everyone goes outside now you have to machete your way through a cloud of smoke to actually get into any bars. And then there is, of course, the with-beer cigarette which will be a tough one to give up. On the positive side :

1) It'll soon be so cold here that holding a cigarette with oversized gloves will be quite difficult

2) There will be absolutely no motivation to go and smoke on the balcony in -30 degrees

3) My fingers will be too cold to roll them

One little bone I have to pick with the smoking ban though, although it helps me in my task - why do they have to apply it everywhere ? Some places just HAVE to be smoky atmospheres. The bar I used to go to on Friday nights at school was what it was partly because the inside was so misty, and a few days ago I went to a pool hall which felt quite frankly sterile without any cigarette smoke. Even before I started, I recognised the contribution of smoke to the atmosphere of a pool hall and things just aren't the same without it.

Watch this space.

Talvi tulee

2008-10-24T13:45:00.001+02:00

If I haven't written much recently that is because (as usual) nothing much has happened. Helsinki had degenerated into a closer-to-winter state. It's darker every day when I leave for work, and it's darker every day when I leave to go home. If it wasn't for fag breaks I'd never see full daylight. Yesterday was M's birthday so we went to Manhattan Steak House (I mention the name in case anyone was thinking of going there to have spare ribs - don't bother). I went to the States 10 years ago but if there's one thing that stands out in my mind there it's that, if you go to a restaurant, they make sure that you'll roll out rather than walking. The Americans haven't got absolutely everything right in life but feeding people is certainly something they do very well, and Europe could do well to follow suit. It might even get me eating out a bit more.

This weekend saw the delights of Finland combine to screw things up somewhat. I'd got M a skydive for her birthday, which was promptly cancelled because of crap weather. The restaurant was quite an experience - on the walk there I'd decided that I wasn't expecting much conversation from the others and when I got there and saw I was up the end of the table this suspicion was strengthened. M's friends, I'm assured, have nothing against me and I do like to integrate into the culture I'm in and accept that things are how they are. However when only one of the 7 says hello to me and the same is the only one who says goodbye at the end of it and that only 2 others actually say a word to me at all, I'm struggling to keep myself from thinking that I could have evaporated at some point during the meal and no one would have noticed or really been bothered. There are some things that I'm going to miss when I leave Finland but the social scene and the weather are not among them.

Winter brings with it the threat of illness, of course, and this is something that Finns are very well prepared for. I don't think I've ever come across any nation of people who have so many drugs in their closets or know so much about what every single medicine does - it's a wonder there are any doctors at all in Finland when everyone knows exactly what kind of medical complaint they have, and probably have the cure at home somewhere. When I arrived here, I realised that I had a bad reaction to mosquitos and I was actually given a choice of two antihistamines and asked which one I preferred. People ritually take painkillers whenever they wake up hungover here, of strengths which no one else would even consider touching. When I had mononucleosis, I took 400mg pills to handle the infection and the huge angina that came with it. People swallow 800mg here after too much beer the night before. I'm actually scared of sneezing on the streets here in case I spark of a stampede of people running to offer me part of the first aid kits which they lump around with them in case of a major medical emergency - coughing, having an itch, being splashed by a passing car and so on. With my ex (who I was with for a year and a half or so) I had about 5 MAJOR cancer scares ! It must be horrible to live in a way where you're constantly on death's doorstep but, just like the weather and the difficulties experienced with communication, the Finns have adapted. This combined with their dramatic intake of coffee makes me wonder what the people in this country would be like without any medicines/stimulants (lactose-free of course)/vitamin supplements or anything. I'd imagine they'd all be dead or, alternatively, normal.

Autumn thoughts

2008-10-07T11:07:00.003+02:00

Autumn has arrived in Helsinki. This is usually characterised by one of many things.

Firstly, the leaves all turn various shades of brown, which is admittedly quite nice and I would probably enjoy it if it didn't signal the imminent arrival of 6 months of freezing my butt off. The Finns have a word, "ruska", which means the brown colour that leaves take on in the autumn. The Finns are well known for being close to nature and, even if it's being lost now as people are staying in the city to pursue activities such as working and going to the pub, there are still many times of year where Helsinki empties out completely and is strangely quiet as everyone disappears off to their cabins in the forest. While I've been here I've done many nature-related things that I haven't done anywhere else - going out looking for flying squirrels, cross-country skiing in the woods, shooting fish with harpoons, and a few weeks back a work trip was organised to a national park to go hiking around the forest in this newly found brown colour. In a bid to discover if the Finns just are close enough to nature to have a word that means "the brown colour that leaves take on in the autumn", I went onto Wikipedia to see what it translates as - the only other languages with one word for this seemed to be Afrikaans (Herfskleure) and Japanese (紅葉). Visually, it's quite a nice time of year. The immense amount of leaves on the ground, though, cause havoc to the half-asleep early morning commuter such as myself due to another factor of this season.

That second factor is the wind, which for some reason arrives in enormous amounts around this time of year. Many Finns in fact have taken holidays to the Caribbean given that they find the lashings of Hurricane Ike et al. quite peaceful compared to the battering they would get walking down a street in Helsinki. Heavy winds plus lots of leaves results in you getting assaulted by various pieces of foliage on your way to work especially if you work in a tree-filled area like I do. Although it's annoying (and let's face it, what isn't at that time of morning ?), it's quite good for waking you up. Another positive aspect of the wind coming at high speeds at this time of year is as a result of the average Finn starting to don headgear due to the dropping temperatures. It's not cold enough for the heavy duty woolly hats of winter but the citizen of Helsinki still likes to protect his head from the cooler air and the baseball cap appears to be the item of choice at the moment. This, of course, leads to crowds of young men running around desperately chasing caps which the wind is carrying off, which is clearly quite amusing. I've noticed that the "wind blowing cap off head routine" usually follows a very rigid pattern.

1) Cap blows off from head
2) Ex-cap wearer notices this but for some reason pats his head anyway, just to verify that it is, in fact, gone
3) Ex-cap wearer looks startled
4) Ex-cap wearer turns around many more times than is necessary in a desperate attempt to locate the cap before it has been blown half way to Turku
5) Ex-cap wearer runs towards the cap and tries to pick it up just as it is blown away by another gust of wind
6) Repeat ad nauseam
7) Ex-cap wearer eventually gets pissed off and jumps onto the cap, having to then brush it off but being thankful to be reunited with it nonetheless.

It's one of those things that shouldn't really be very interesting but it breaks the monotony of everyday life and I'll generally stop to have a good look.

It's probably the fact of finding this entertaining (as well as realising that all I do is work, wash up, do laundry, cook, eat and sit around waiting for something to happen) which make me wonder how people can survive as office monkeys for 40 years before retiring to a beach somewhere to soak up the rays before they die. It's nice to have a couple of jobs and get some money coming in but it's not very fulfilling is it ? More fulfilling than watching Big Brother or Pop Idol, admittedly, but still not immensely so. For once, I'm not going to blame Finland for this - I'd imagine workers the world over have the same syndrome but I suppose most people are also content enough with it to stay in the hamster wheel. M and I are off to the Balkans in December so hopefully I can rekindle the excitement in life a little. Until then, I'll keep working, washing up, eating and watching peoples' caps blow off.

In another bid to spice up life a little, I've recently discovered the Darwin Awards website, which honours people who died in quite frankly ridiculous ways. It's worth a little look, if only to feel slightly better about yourself after reading about the Chinese woman who died after climbing into a volcano to get better pictures, the Italian who perished while trying to protect his car by placing himself between it and an express train, the Polish man who tried to prove his manliness by removing his head with a chainsaw, or the German who allowed himself to be shot dead by his own dog. It's riveting stuff and can be found at www.darwinawards.com/darwin.

Have a good autumn !

2-week-interval input

2008-09-22T21:07:00.002+02:00

It's been 2 weeks. I haven't really got anything to say. I've been working 6 days a week, sleeping 1 day a week, and I'm now writing my thesis in any spare time in between these other priorities. I've not noticed any new comical quirks about the Finns, and having been buried in American foreign politics here at the library all evening I'm not very much inclined to write about that either.

However, here are my two rather uninteresting news items from the past couple of weeks.

M and I are planning to go to Bosnia for the new year, which effectively means that we'll plan it, be on the verge of buying tickets and then something will come up to scupper the plans. We'll then probably end up in a crappy bar in Helsinki drinking crappy beer while listening to crappy music and paying far too much money for the pleasure.

Cultural event of the week in Helsinki at the moment is "Love and Anarchy" a film festival which throws up some quite interesting movies and a good change from the usual Hollywood flags-and-tears and happy ending stuff that is normally shoved down our throats. I think the last time I went to the cinema was last year during this same festival, and yesterday I went to watch an Israel movie called "Lemon Tree", starring a bunch of actors with Hebrew names, none of which I can remember right now. It's quite impressive that someone has managed to make a full leangth feature movie about a plot of lemon trees, but there you go. They managed it. And if you can find it somewhere, it's worth watching.

Thank you, and see you next time.

Evil : An Analysis

2008-09-08T20:36:00.003+02:00

If there's one word I've grown tired of hearing recently, it's the word "evil". Every story about US relations with countries which don't agree with its point of view on how the world should run will feature the word "evil" at some point. It seems to have recently replaced "terrorism" as the main word to be bandied around. I don't think it's the frequency of its use as such that gets to me, but rather the feeling I have of it being a word that's more suited to playgrounds in schools and sci-fi movies which is used cheaply to get into voters' minds to instil fear and therefore support for the "evil" designs of the Bush administration on the world in general. A sort of easy linguistic propaganda, if you will. The "Axis of Evil" speech, for instance, put the word into the public conscience and suddenly, Iran, Iraq and North Korea were metamorphosed from troublesome states into cackling bad guys from horror movies.

Bush's declaration of war on terrorism after September 11th included a passage pledging that America's "responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." A bold statement indeed. Whereas this may seem a noble quest to those who really wish to believe it, what does it actually mean ? The declaration of war against evil came after three days of floundering desperately for a target for American civil rage. No one knew who really did it, and a response was needed. In order to launch a response, an enemy was needed. This new enemy was evil. The problem with evil is that it is such a vague concept, but this problem seems to be part of the solution for the Bush administration. If he was to declare war against Osama bin Laden, he would have had to come up with an entirely new war to invade Iraq. If he wanted to declare war against Islamic fundamentalism, that would put him in a difficult situation relative to Cuba, for example. Evil is a fabulous catch-all concept which can be applied to just about anything.

Bush's stand on evil is that it is "real, and it must be opposed". His views on Osama bin Laden are few and decisive - "The only thing I know certain about him is that he's evil. And I don't know what to believe about him, except that he wants to hurt Americans." Very clear. This would suggest that the definition of evil is wanting to hurt Americans. Unless such a line is some kind of political marketing gimmick. Besides, doesn't the death penalty, which Bush heartily endorsed as governor of Texas, hurt Americans ? Moreover, "I think there is one universal law, and that's terrorism is evil, and all of us must work to reject evil. Murder is evil, and we must reject murder." A more general assessment - killing people is evil. Once again, the millions killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were only "collateral damage" and therefore the acts in themselves were not evil. But wait - there's an explanation ! "None of us would ever wish the evil that has been done to our country, yet we have learned that out of evil can come great good." Aha. There's the explanation then.

"We don't share the point of view that evil is religious. We don't appreciate the fact that somebody has tried to hijack a religion in order to justify terror activities." It's great isn't it ? This is the same man who, not long after, claimed that "'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did." Terror is of course, much like evil, defined by the speaker. The majority of Iraqis may have been living in terror for several years but, well, it would appear that that's rather irrelevant. "The evil one who hides [Osama himself] thinks in ways that we can't possibly think in America -- so destructive, such a low regard for human life". I could go on and on.

But onto other things. The Republican running for senator in Illinois in 2004, Alan Keyes considered that terrorism and abortion were the "same evil". So we're now fighting a war against abortion as well ?

One thing that I've found vaguely amusing is that both of the Presidential candidates have been asked for their definitions of evil. Obama gave a general response including Darfur, American city streets, abusive parents, the fact that the act of confronting evil sometimes entails evil in itself, which could have been an oblique reference to the Iraq fiasco, once again. McCain gave a bold, Bushesque answer - Radical Islam, terrorists in Iraq, al-Qaeda, bin Laden (who McCain will apparently "follow to the gates of hell" in order to bring him to justice). Whereas Bush would probably agree with McCain's analysis, Obama's is probably closer to what Bush would himself want to say - a vague, indefinable concept which leaves the moral door open for attack just about anyone or anything.

But please Mr. Bush, for my sanity, can we just drop the word "evil" and actually point out what we're aiming at here ? It would make life a lot easier for the both of us. Thanks.

Life IS Hard

2008-09-08T19:22:00.003+02:00

On Friday, something interesting happened in Helsinki ! Around Töölönlahti, one of many lakes dotted around the city (which is not much of a city at all outside the centre, more of a collection of suburbs dotted around with forests, parks and lakes, which would be very pleasant if the architecture wasn't so reminiscent of the Soviet era) a massive crowd gathered for the all-Finland firework display contest. In it, five teams competed to launch massive amounts of money into the air in a show of noise and light that was impressive to even the most cynical viewer. London's firework display to announce the arrival of 2008, for instance, cost £1,3million. That half hour of light and noise in one city (and it can be safely assumed that the major cities of most of the world's countries have at least 2 large-scale displays a year - for new year and for the national day) cost the same as a year of anti-retroviral drugs for over 6000 people. Multiply this by the amount of countries in the world and the amount of cities in those countries which would have fireworks displays and you start to get an idea of how much money is fired into the air which could be put to slightly better use - third world debt relief, AIDS and malaria treatment and so on. It's unfair to pin the blame squarely on fireworks though, and the profligacy of authorities the world over can be pointed at. But I digress.

As in most cases of something happening in this city, the majority of the city swooped on the park, vodka and beer bottles in hands. Those looking upwards could see fireworks, and those looking in any other direction could see kids getting drunk not actually looking at the fireworks. I remember being drunk in my final years of school during fireworks displays and even though I was slightly underage by a year or two like these wasters, I didn't turn my eyes away from the pyrotechnics. This is when, aged 25, I lament the youth of today and how they don't appreciate anything. Actually this may have something to do with (and prepare yourself for another psychoanalysis of the Finnish population here) the state of things I came to realise quite early here.

Alcohol abuse by kids around here is explained away by M as a reflection that it's "difficult growing up in Finland". I've never grown up here so I can't really comment from an objective point of view. It does seem like quite a bold statement though. On first view, the Finns are a tough, resilient bunch - they live in a country whose climate is fairly harsh, to say the least, have come through 40 years of forced friendship with the Soviet Union and a large economic depression in the 1990s. They are, on the whole, people who like to live at one with nature. The majority can sort themselves out very well in terms of survival skills out in the elements and all men above the age of 18 go on between 6 and 12 months of what seems to be a quite rigorous stint of military service. However, for some reason, the national sport here is complaining about absolutely everything that doesn't work perfectly. Something that the average resident of a relatively dysfunctional country like Belgium would shrug off with an "ah well, shit happens" is treated as a large (and possibly distressing) inconvenience here. It is a country where social security throws money at absolutely everyone. I get 480€ a month of absolutely free money just for being a student here - kids start getting this in high school and just about anyone is eligible for free money of some sort - including the large population of alcoholics and those who just can't be bothered to work (one man I shared a hospital room with claimed to have not done any work for 15 years because he didn't like working - he had been supported by the state every step of the way. They were also paying entirely for his operation whereas I had to shell out for mine). I have never been perplexed at peoples' distress as much as I have here where people have a tendency to have a total nervous breakdown over something very trivial. Consequently, I'd hazard a guess that if kids growing up in this situation don't have entertainment and money right on their doorsteps, they'll just go and drink and smoke with other kids. Where they get the money to buy cider and cigarettes, I would imagine, is quite obvious. Life is hard indeed - I'm sure the children of Angola and Afghanistan are thanking their lucky stars that they were born in their respective social paradises !

This situation of excessive teenage angst leads to a bifurcation of the population of Helsinki, for example - half of it will hit the bottle, live on the number 6 and 8 trams and get battered every day on cheap vodka, berating passers-by and falling asleep in bus stops by mid-morning. Others will kick the habit, get jobs, and complain about how things don't run quite as well as they should. Before I moved over here, my ex described Finland as a country where "when a bus is 2 minutes late, the president hears about it". I laughed at the notion then but I'm getting more and more convinced of the reality of it.

How To Halve Your I.Q. In 1 Hour

2008-08-27T20:54:00.005+02:00

This afternoon I wrote about George Bush Jr., meaning that my blogging today couldn't sink to a lower level of intellect, right ?

WRONG !!!!

As I was eating my rice and various other things tonight, the Finnish version of Big Brother started on TV. I don't think there is anything in popular culture (including R 'n B music and even celebrity gossip magazines) that makes my jaw drop at the sheer idiocy and pointlessness of it all. I think the difference between Big Brother and the celebrity gossip magazines (because after all, they are both forms of escape from normal life to live someone else's life vicariously for people with no imagination to do anything else) is that, while people will religiously buy their gossip magazines every month and read them from cover to cover, that's all they do. It's quite sad, granted, but there's a limit to it. I have found the following interesting facts on the readership of Hello! magazine which, I would imagine, is typically representative of this type of magazine.

Hello! readers are 71% more likely than the average female to choose a car mainly on looks.

Only 4% of Hello! readers buy tomatoes, as of February 2003.

Hello! readers are also 64% more likely to vote for an electoral candidate based on his or her hairstyle rather than policies

I've found them unreferenced on Wikipedia and as such I'm not sure if these facts are actually true or not, but it's quite funny anyway and I'd say it's quite representative even if it is satyrical. There's a song by French singer Jean-Jacques Goldman which describes the desperation of the life of a woman who lives her life through the celebrities in these magazines.

Big Brother, however, is a different affair entirely. It is the ultimate in mental escapism yet, unlike watching travel programmes or documentaries, offers absolutely no interest of any sort, as far as I can see. Psychology PhD students aside, who seriously takes anything useful from Big Brother ? And what's more, it's not one nation's stupidity - from its inception in Holland in 1999, it has spread to nearly 70 countries (that's seventy countries where people sit on their sofas, watching other people sitting on sofas) as diverse as Montenegro (where it's called Veliki Brat), the Philippines (Pinoy Big Brother), Nigeria, Somalia and the Middle East (where it's known as Al-Rais), Albania and Colombia (where, predictably, it's called Gran Hermano). Not content with watching the "most interesting" parts on TV, some (and I know someone who does this) even pay money to access the cameras 24/7 via the internet !! It's quite amazing to my mind that people should pay money to sit on the internet at 2am in order to watch people they don't know sleeping. There are many things I don't like or I can see are brainless - hard rock, teen movies, Greek party islands - which I would never enjoy myself, but can see in a way how other people enjoy it. Watching Big Brother's 24/7 camera is something I just cannot understand.

From what I saw of the Finnish episode it's similar to shows I've had the misfortune of allowing my eyes to see in other countries - people sit around discussing brainless topics before doing some idiotic task, occasionally having a nervous breakdown and occasionally having sex (probably on the orders of the networks after even the most die hard airhead fan is considering switching off). At the end of this, someone wins a large amount of money and becomes an instant celebrity for having done precisely nothing of use.

Now, "people are stupid" is a line that I do like to repeat from time to time and (even though it's a massive generalisation) I do feel that there is some kind of pattern - the human population as a whole (or rather the "developed" Western population, living in places where life is so outstandingly boring that we sink to immense depths to "entertain" ourselves) comprises largely of sheep who follow trends and fashions for no other reason than "others are doing it". This leads me to one of the small problems I've been thinking about for a while. Namely the following :

Why is it that I, as someone who reads the news every morning, can access information on Jane Goody's personal life far more easily than I can on the war in Darfur, the development of cures against AIDS or the looming environmental threats which are poised to start destroying us all ?

Two facts are obvious to anyone who reads the news on any regular website - people read more about irrelevant celebrities' lives than they do about the battle against AIDS, and there are more frequent stories about irrelevant celebrities' lives than there are about the battle against AIDS. One of these two facts has engendered the other, although I'm not sure which. In either case, it's quite sad that life has reduced people to this. As I write this another reality show has just begun and I've realised that if I write everything I feel about the overly-emotional made-for-TV-spectacle tear-jerking reality shows I would probably overload the blogger.com servers. So with this in mind, it's probably about time to stop. I'm off to read a book.

"Iraq fair game, Georgia certainly not", say politicians

2008-08-27T17:50:00.005+02:00

As a student of Political Science, I often get comments such as "ah, politicians are all rotten anyway" or "it's just a big pile of corruption" and "I don't trust politics". People then look at me expecting me to defend myself. Often, I disappoint them by pointing out that politicians are even more rotten than they think.

A lot has been made of Russia's invasion of Georgia recently. For some it's shocking. For some it's a scary return to the days of the Cold War. For me, it's quite funny - a stage where "the West" can once again show how wonderfully hypocritical it is with some quite brilliant soundbites. Firstly, presidential hopefully John McCain showed that he has the credentials to become a great leader of the free world in following in Bush II's footsteps by claiming something ridiculous.

George Bush II, always keep to make his mark on international events, pointed out that "Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic and security structures of the 21st century. Now Russia is putting its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions." The fact that the majority of Ossetians are Russian citizens and were being targeted by the Georgian army seems to be rather irrelevant here - the US was protecting American civilians by attacking Iraq, which was incidentally barely able to threaten its neighbours. Just because a bunch of people with Russian passports were being charged on by the Georgian army doesn't mean Russia was actually acting legitimately defending them. Far from it, apparently - this kind of thing is just not allowed !

"In the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations !" claimed John McCain to back up this accusation. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out whether Iraq and Afghanistan were considered nations by the US or not, but in any case this seems to be a rather bizarre claim to make. A suggestion that Russia be barred from the G8 while its army is still in Georgia was also floated. Interestingly, McCain has stated that if he becomes president, he will aim for American troops to remain in Iraq until 2013.

Condoleezza Rice, not wanting to miss out on the action, came up with this little pearl : "This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbours, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed !". Indeed, this is 2008 - it is not 2001 or 2003 either. Admittedly, the US did not invade neighbours, occupy their capitals, overthrow their governments and get away with it in 2001 and 2003 - it did actually make the effort to get the troops out to Asia in order to do all of these things. Which, I suppose, makes it acceptable.

Eventually, someone stopped playing the game. Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to various places in recent times, decided to say "hey ! we're not being hypocritical, we're just being selective in who people are allowed to invade !". "The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe -- those days are gone !" he said, skillfully avoiding the Iraqi/Afghan question. Unfortunately, in a slight oversight, he forgot to mention McCain and Rice's specific comments on timing, and therefore the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 would fall foul of this statement. If I was being really pedantic, I could say that, Georgia lying south of the main peaks of the Caucasus, it's technically in Asia itself. But I digress.

In addition to its military action in Georgia, Russia has done something even more disgusting - it has recognised the independence of South Ossetia AND Abkhazia !

The US has positioned itself as a champion of international law and in this arena the UN Charter gives the organisation's purpose as one "to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples". Self determination of peoples would mean that Ossetians would get their own state, as would the Abkhaz, both of which speak their own language and have their own cultures and customs. Russian intention to recognise two regions that have been in conflict but are clearly within the internationally recognised borders of Georgia... is regrettable" claims Condoleezza Rice.

Where the Americans tread, of course, the British will surely follow. Foreign Secretary David Milliband claimed that the crisis provided a "rude awakening" and that Russia's "unilateral attempt to redraw the map marks a moment of real significance". Also, "We fully support Georgia's independence and territorial integrity, which cannot be changed by decree from Moscow." Would this be the same Britain and America who dismantled Serbia and pushed Kosovo into independence on the basis of national self-determination ? What a strange world this is.

DISCLAIMER : I would also like to explain this before anyone thinks "Oh here we go, someone who wants to slate Britain and the US for everything". I don't see any particularly easy solution for this situation, nor do I think Russia's aggression can be condoned. Nor do I think that the US and Britain are the only ones involved in blowing the trumpet of Western double-edged morality either - many others have recognised Kosovo which was declared as an independent state completely against international law and are jumping onto the anti-Russian bandwagon as well. I'm just presenting a certain side of things which crop up again and again in any crisis situation relevant to the West across the globe.

Can we leave the Chinese alone for a bit ?

2008-08-08T23:07:00.005+02:00

Seriously - they've organised the Olympics, they're putting a show on for the rest of the world. Politics is politics, sport is sport. If we didn't give the task of organising big games to countries without a poor human rights record, the Olympics, World Cup and European championships of just about everything would simply alternate between Finland and Sweden, the two most innocent and incorruptible nations in the world. We've all got blood on our hands, let's face it. So what's the big deal with the Chinese ? Why is everyone saying we should boycott watching the games ? Why were heads of state threatening to not go to Beijing ? I've heard it's because China is currently illegally occupying Tibet. I've heard that athletes themselves are signing petitions ordering the Chinese to move out of Tibet, give it an independent state and to behave themselves properly with regard to human rights. I've heard they also want the Chinese to withdraw their investments in Sudan because of the Darfur situation. This is, quite honestly speaking, ridiculous.

There hasn't been a boycott of the Olympics since 1984 when the Soviets and much of the Eastern Bloc boycotted the Games in the US after a similar action by the West during the Moscow games in 1980. Since then the games have been held in South Korea, Spain, the USA, Australia, and Athens. I don't recall widespread criticism of the Games being awarded to the United States for its support of right wing death squads in Latin America, nor do I recall Australia being singled out for its treatment of Aborigines and refugees from war zones. Similarly, the London Games of 2012 don't seem to be criticised for British action over the world. Are the athletes going to sign a "Free Iraq and Afghanistan" petition in 4 years ? Or how about a "Stop investing in Nigeria because of its human rights record" petition ? Assuming that Paris had been awarded the 2012 Games, would we have stood on our pedestals and started criticising France's support of countless African dictators ? How about an "Apologise for propping up Jean-Bedel Bokassa/Mobutu Sese Seko/Hissène Habré/Idriss Déby" petition ? Or maybe France should be forced to apologise for Napoleon's invasion of Russia before it is awarded any global celebration of sport again ?

Sportsmen are not politicians, let's not treat them as such. China isn't a shining light of human rights, but nor are most countries. Just because they're going to be richer than us in 50 years doesn't mean we should piss on their bonfire this month. So leave them alone !

A Discussion of the Human Condition

2008-08-08T22:31:00.003+02:00

Yesterday morning my letterbox made a sound and I found my Bradt guide to the Congos. which I'd ordered at the beginning of the week. I ploughed straight into it. It looks like a great part of the world to visit (which we're saving up to do next year) and, despite the differences between it and the parts of Africa that I know, it brought memories flooding back. One of the biggest differences between Africa and northern Europe is the social interaction, the possibility of just talking to anyone for hours on end about nothing at all without it seeming like space filler. It's just fun. This evening rather contrasted with this book and these memories.

I went to a bar tonight. Firstly, it was Friday. Secondly, there were birthday drinks. Thirdly, it was something to do. And last of all, I like places where other people are. It gives me a chance to be social outside of a computer geek setting, and to people watch. Generally, people watching is limited to looking at girls and to observing people doing weird things and being critical of this in a very cynical kind of way. It does have other uses too, though. Having lived in 3 countries and visited many others (and having visited bars in most of these places), it's easy to pick up on local habits, notice trends among people from different places, and then sometimes see them everywhere and get annoyed by them. Going to a Finnish bar is an intriguing experience in terms of people watching; it is, at once, and a good place to get to know the Finnish psyche and a bad place to get to know it. It's a bad place because people do tend to go out to get plastered here, which naturally unleashes the inner self which never exposes itself in times of sobriety. It's a good place, however, because in the same bar you can see a cross-section of society to a far wider degree than I've noticed anywhere else. A frequenter of a Finnish bar will conclude that practically the entire Finnish nation consists of 4 types of people:

- People who have dyed their hair black, usually have tattoos of bats or incomprehensible Chinese characters, and wear t-shirts bearing slogans like "DEATH", pictures of skulls, and so on. Such people will almost always be dressed in black and red. Optional extras include black fishnet tights over red leggings (for women) and a shaved head and large goatee beard, or long hair tied into a pony tail (for men).

- Middle aged women sitting drinking gin long-drinks accompanied by other middle aged women, looking somewhat uncomfortable. I'm tempted to say that they are possibly looking for male company to replace the husband who has ditched them but, given that I'm not qualified as a psychiatrist and have no knowledge of telepathy, it's outside my mandate to guess such things.

- Geeky looking guys, almost always wearing square glasses, with blonde hair tentatively gelled up into spikes, also looking uncomfortable. I'm tempted to say that they are possibly looking for female company, and that they are probably hoping that this company doesn't come along until they've had a couple more beers. While having no knowledge of telepathy, I'm confident of being fairly accurate with this suggestion.

- "Past it" old guys, with 3-day stubble revealing their 3-straight-days drinking habits, usually with faded tattoos, sleeveless vests (preferably leather) and glazed expressions. Nevertheless, these people (if they have been admitted to the bar in the first place) are quite animated, and will talk loudly and at length with whoever cares to listen.

If one has lots of money and the patience to go to a overhyped club which is just as crappy as the others but loved by the masses from the rich suburbs for some reason, you will discover a 5th type - the young professional who probably drives a sports car, does not own any clothes which cost less than 50€ (including socks), and will generally sit around talking about sports cars and expensive clothes (possibly not including socks).

In any case, today I noticed several things which I've decided to share with you all. Now, I know I have been quite negative about Finns on several occasions in this blog and I've explained the reasons for this. They happen to be a people that I have a lot of time for - they are honest to a fault, very friendly once you actually get to know them and, once they get pissed enough, quite chatty and open and curious about us foreigners. Sober, they're quite quiet - this bugged me at the beginning but I've understood now that silence is not awkward here and nothing to shy away from. Hard for me to understand, but that's just the way it is. However, there are a few things which I've noticed here enough to write down.

Tonight, for instance, there were 5 of us at a bar - me, and 4 of M's friends. On sitting at the table, 3 of them started speaking in Finnish to each other (which is completely understandable - even if maybe not from a linguistic point of view) and one of them got a newspaper out and started doing a crossword. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this slightly strange ? If I went to the bar with a group of friends and one got a beer and pulled out a crossword, I'd take that as quite a blatant social "fuck you" and wonder if this person wouldn't be happier at home. As it happened, the other three didn't bat an eyelid at this and continued their conversation. I stared into space and drank my pint. To me, this fits into the same category as the girl and guy at a bar both writing text messages which I've seen here and there, and the people who walk along with someone else and pull out an MP3 player and start listening to it. The silence-as-a-conversational-tactic thing is something I've got used to even if I don't really enjoy it - outwardly giving signs of turning away from social company in a "sorry you're too boring for me" is something I just don't get. Again, it seems to be something which is taken as unproblematic here and, again, this is not an essentially Finnish disease - I've seen it in various places. It does seem to be quite rampant here though, leading to my conclusion that it's generally accepted as OK. It's also quite a complicated social fabric to work out given that people seem to go very hot-and-cold on the whole issue (e.g. if I'm out with a group and manage to corner one or two of them, they're absolutely open and chatty and lovely people to be with, and I fade to the background again when we reintegrate the herd). I plan to continue the research.

Life in Helsinki Part 5 : Nutritional Information

2008-07-30T12:39:00.003+02:00

Given that nothing of note has happened to me here (i.e. I've been at work, and Saturday night I went for some beer and played minigolf) this series can continue. I've already elaborated on some of the more difficult points of adapting to life in Finland for the foreigner, but one of these points has received considerable media exposure over the last couple of years. A quick look at Maslow's triangle of essential human needs will reveal that in order to live one needs communication, sunshine, clothing, sex (I've had another visitor to this site from Austria on that very subject), and the odd trip to the pub/Tallinn. This blog has covered all of those subjects and now the final issue, I'm sure you've all guessed, is food.

The Finnish culinary scene has come under somewhat of a microscope in recent times with both Silvio Berlusconi and Jacques Chirac having a good poke. The truth is though that the quality of food in this country, much like that of the women, varies enormously, from immensely tasty to downright dangerous. Firstly, one of the first things I ate in Finland - Mämmi. At this point even the Finns shudder, despite the fact that practically all of them eat it. It's an Easter "speciality" which everyone claims to hate, yet nearly everyone eats it anyway, just because that's what you do around Easter. It looks like crap (literally) and also tastes quite similar, even when, as the natives do, you absolutely drown it in cream. It looks something like this. Other appetising dishes include those made of blood - for instance sausages, small pancakes, and soup - as well as pea soup and a sausage which is so low on meat that, according to EU directives, it's actually a pastry. Sadly, most things don't actually taste of very much and it seems that this is because of some kind of Northern European healthy reflex which sees it absolutely impossible to get anything in the supermarkets which are not free of this or low on that. Add to this the fact that every person in the country is allergic to something (lactose, gluten, sugar, fresh air, you name it) and the task of finding something decent for the ordinary, unallergic, uncomplicated eater becomes rather more difficult. Getting a decent cheese in a shop, for instance, takes good luck and a decent map of the supermarket, and finding milk products which are not low-fat/lactose free/reduced calcium/in powdered form/etc. also takes quite a bit of dedication to the cause. I've also read that spices are not really used in Finland because of a traditional belief that they were harmful to the consumer's health. And in a country with such a high intake of alcohol that's quite amusing.

However, let's surprise you all here with a few revelations. Finland produces, in my opinion, far and away the best strawberries in the world. Strawberries !! You wouldn't expect them here and I thought it was some kind of joke the first time I saw them in a supermarket but they're bright and red, juicy and tasty and you don't buy them in a bag which says "reduced beta-carotene" or "vitamin free !". Secondly, anyone heard of a cloudberry ? They're strange little things that look like raspberries except that they're orange, and they don't taste like anything else I know. Finns make great cakes out of these and, for that matter they make great cakes out of most things. Anyone had beef jerky ? Well a Lappi speciality is reindeer jerky. Moose sausage is also pretty good and I've also eaten a moose curry, which wasn't bad. Moose steak is eaten with lingonberries, which is also tasty. The Lapps also have some kind of oven cheese which squeaks on your teeth when you eat it, and also tastes of something. Sadly that's the only cheese you can buy here which really tastes of anything at all, but it's a start So unlike what Chirac and Berlusconi seem to believe, the situation here isn't really all that bad. Going to a restaurant isn't something to be feared if you're going to eat Finnish food.

For some reason though, foreign restaurants in Helsinki are useless. The Chinese restaurants are pretty tasteless, and nothing much else exists. When a Moroccan restaurant opened last year, I went with watering taste buds thinking that I was actually going to eat something which was knowledgeably spiced, and came out thinking that it sucked. Fast food is expensive and, even after a heavy Finnish night out, tastes pretty crap. I guess part of the problem is that the largest immigrant communities in Finland are (at least this is what it seems to me, it's not backed up with statistics) Somali and Russian. Neither are exactly tasty food paradise and makes you wish that more Arabs, Indians, Chinese and Mexicans could be imported here. They would then be encouraged to start up decent restaurants instead of dodgy imitation chain restaurants.

Going to the supermarket is even more frustrating unless you live to eat ready-made things straight to the microwave or the oven. Go to a supermarket here and try to find something simple, like chicken for instance, and you'll see it's impossible !! Chicken in marinade, chicken soup, lactose-free chicken, all OK. Plain, untainted chicken breast, sorry - no can do. I won't go crying about it too much though, even if I do cry myself to sleep every night over the fact that I haven't eaten merguez for months or that to make a poulet yassa I have to deep clean the marinade off the chicken legs. I suppose the Finns go to Western Europe and complain that they can't find rotten fish, Mämmi, cloudberries, low-fat bacon, or lactose-free lactose. This is what intercultural dialogue is all about.

One more thing I'll stand up for Finland in is the following. When Chirac criticised Finnish cuisine, he did it indirectly by stating that Britain was "after Finland, the country with the worst food". This is not true. OK, Finnish food is on the whole quite tasteless, but comparing it unfavourably to British food is simply unfair.

A couple of small thoughts

2008-07-12T13:12:00.003+02:00

A couple of small thoughts in no particular order.

Firstly, since writing the article "Sex sells" I've had 4 visitors who have come to this site specifically having gone to Google and searched for sex-related themes - one from Israel, one from Iran, one from the United Arab Emirates and one from France. I think that's a reasonable amount, given that this blog doesn't contain any porno or erotic literature or whatever. Maybe I should continue the research and write a steamy story and see how many people click onto me then... As a further sign of this, M has told me she doesn't read Teppo M's blog any more, the reason being that he isn't writing it any more. The reason for this ? His story has been bought out by a publishing house and a company planning to make a movie about his story. Yup...

Secondly, I have been quite negative about Finland and Finns so far in this blog. This shouldn't be taken in the wrong way - I know many very nice and friendly (and even talkative !!) Finns here and I think the country is one of the most beautiful in Europe, even if it could probably do with having a mountain or 2 to break the monotony. I like to entertain though and the truth is, like it or not, that taking the piss generally offers more opportunities to have some cheap fun than saying how lovely this or that is. So, yes, I am presenting this country and its inhabitants in an unbalanced way. It's not to make everyone hate you, my fellow residents of this frozen wasteland, it's just to try and make people smile.

Hey Rastaman !

2008-07-12T12:30:00.005+02:00

First up, an explanation for the lack of text recently. I moved house, had the flu, got a new job, and then spent a week working it. I'm now a tester and translator for mobile phone video games, spending my day translating simple phrases from English to French and then playing games for hours on end, surrounded by computer geeks. And they actually pay me for this ! It's great.

Now, onto the main idea. Looking at the title of this entry - it's not only black guys with dreadlocks who have this said to them. It's also white guys who go around with either necklaces or bracelets with red, green and yellow on them. You'll usually be drowned in comments with mock Jamaican accents like "Rastafari !" or "De colours of Jomaaaica maan !". If you say this to me, then you'll expect quite a bit of a lecture back in return. Red, green and yellow are not the colours of Jamaica - look at the flag. It has black on it, and also has no red on it. Look at the flag of Ethiopia instead, or the flag of numerous other African countries. These other countries adopted the colours of Ethiopia as a sign of pride in and respect for Ethiopia, which was the only country in Africa to successfully resist colonisation. The Rastafarian religion is Jamaican, as is reggae music. The colours associated with them, however, were adopted from Ethiopia and their God is Haile Selassie I, former Emperor of Ethiopia, seen as the chosen leader of the black community given that, in the 1930s when the Rastafarian movement began, Haile Selassie was the only recognised black head of state in the international community. Rastafarianism teaches that the black population of the western hemisphere was stolen from Africa and must live as close as possible to African ways while awaiting their return to the continent of their roots.

Anyone who's listened to reggae will know they go on about lions a lot - this, again, comes from the fact that the Emperors of Ethiopia claimed descent from the Queen of Sheba and the Israelite tribe of Judah which had a lion as its symbol. Given that these guys then went on to rule Ethiopia, they referred to themselves as the Conquering Lions of Judah. Haile Selassie had loads of lions in his garden as pets.

Another line I heard a lot is "reggae singers go on about Zion ! They want to go to Israel !" which is not true either. Zion as a concept is a utopia or a promised land. It was a word which indeed came from Jewish lore, as a hill in the area of Jerusalem has been called Mount Zion for several millenia. Obviously, as a consequence, history has placed Zion in the Jewish context given their status as a population in exile for those few millenia and the Jewish yearning for the promised land has been dubbed Zionism. Rastas, though, refer to Africa in general and a historically independent Ethiopia in particular as their zion, or promised land.

It doesn't stop there, however. After I went to an interview a few weeks ago wearing them, M warned me against doing it for any high level job. Not because it would come across as not being serious, but because I would be assumed to be a pothead. "What ??!" I enquired. She told me that this is what these colours are associated with here. So in Finland it's not even associated with a country with which it shouldn't be, but just places me into a serial waster category, which is even more interesting if depressing. I'm sure this happens in a lot of other places too, although Finland does have quite a strange fixation with weed. Having grown up in a country where you can see people sitting around in the capital's main square smoking up freely in the summer, it comes as a bit of a shock here when you roll a cigarette and people look at you curiously and say "joint ????". And it happens a lot too. Sure, everyone jumps to conclusions, but to assume I'm too much of a joint smoker to do a job properly just because I happened to buy some beads in Senegal (whose flag is red, yellow and green) does seem to me to be pushing the boat out a bit too far.

So, to recap, given the strong identification of Rastafarians with Ethiopia, the colours that crop up in Rasta culture are the same as the ones which crop up in Ethiopia. So when you see me with these necklaces, drop the Jamaican accent. I've never been to Kingston and I got these necklaces and bracelets in Africa. Also, less than 1 in 10 Jamaicans is Rastafarian. So even if these colours are loosely linked to the religion and the music, they have nothing to do with the country. Thank you.

Life in Helsinki Part 4 : The Travel Industry

2008-06-19T14:29:00.005+02:00

The issue of travel has come from a potential event which didn't actually happen. The idea of going on a cruise was floated (sic.) last night, but it never really got off the ground. To 99,9% of the world's population, the word "cruise" conjures up images of cocktails, evening socials, outside swimming pools on deck, luxury cabins and sunrises in the Bahamas. To women with an active imagination, it also conjures up images of a short, dashing Scientologist who appears in action movies. The remaining 0,01% of the world's population, however, are Finns. The word takes on a slightly different meaning here. There are 2 choices from Helsinki - you get on a very large boat and go over to Sweden on an 18-hour-each-way sailing, with a potential stop to do nothing much in the Åland Islands on the way; or you go to Tallinn in Estonia which takes around 3 hours each way. There are no palm trees, no outdoor swimming pool and ladies in ballroom dresses don't sip expensive cocktails while chatting with gentlemen in tuxedos. The idea yesterday was to hop on a boat at 9pm tonight, return to Helsinki tomorrow afternoon, and in the mean time go over to Tallinn.

The first surprise to the outsider is that "going over to Tallinn" on this cruise, for a lot of people, does not actually involve going to Tallinn at all. The boat sails over, docks in the harbour, and people stay on the boat and get drunk. This is encouraged by the ferry companies and on this particular trip, even though the boat arrives in Tallinn at midnight, no one would be allowed off the boat until 8.30 the next morning. The advantage for others is that, given that people go on these boats with the sole aim of getting trashed, astronomical amounts of money are spent on booze. This drives ticket prices down and you can get over to Stockholm and back for as little as 25€, and to Tallinn for 10€ return.

The majority of people who disembark at the other end will go to the closest shop, stack up with Estonian price vodka and cigarettes, get back onto the boat and start drinking again, stopping only when the ferry arrives back in Helsinki. When the time comes to step back onto Finnish soil, you see a gang of Finns lined up like cattle in front of the door with trolleys specially designed to hold the maximum allowance of cigarettes and vodka. After they have smoked and drunk everything, they book another cruise to Tallinn. It's quite amusing and quite depressing at the same time.

Despite the enormous size of the boats (most of the friends I've had over to visit have been so amazed by the scale of the beasts that they've taken pictures of them) there really isn't all that much to do on them. The boats to Sweden, for instance, are on about 12 floors - mostly car parking spaces, cabins to sleep off hangovers, restaurants, bars and a nightclub to get pissed in and a duty free shop to buy booze and cigarettes in, and lines and lines of one-arm bandits and poker machines, seemingly to encourage kids to lose their money. Add to this the fact that the aforementioned bars and nightclubs are crap, and you suddenly find that joining the cattle in the duty free shop and getting sauced up and facing the prospect of wandering around Stockholm hungover isn't such an unattractive idea after all. In fact, it's almost compulsory to do so in order to divert your mind from jumping off the deck and swimming to shore just to give yourself something to do.

During the course of the trip, you'll probably see most, if not all of the following :
- A bunch of students dressed up as superheroes or wearing stupid wigs on a stag night
- A middle aged man/woman in a severe state of emotional decay, with the possible presence of tears and a consoling friend
- Someone wandering aimlessly along the cabin corridors, drunkenly staggering from one wall to the other
- Groups of people standing, not talking to each other (see most other posts for further details)
- A balding man in a suit desperately looking for younger female company
- Someone asleep on the floor

The slightly richer Finn takes these trips on Silja line, which is more expensive. I've never been with this company so I'm unable to comment on it but I'd imagine it's a higher class example of exactly the same thing. The much richer Finn will generally go on a package tour to Thailand, lie on the beach and come back with a tan and, in the case of single men, a wife. A Finn who goes anywhere else has undoubtedly declared him/herself to foreigners as "not the typical Finn" and, in my opinion, this isn't so far from the truth.

So to you all I would suggest the following - indulge yourself in the Finnish travel industry, hit the boats, go on a "cruise" - It'll probably be one of those things you'll be happy you did but won't be jumping to do again...

Sex Sells

2008-06-12T02:09:00.007+02:00

It's gone 3am. I tried to sleep for 3 hours and gave up. Insomnia is something that isn't new to me so, even though it still bugs me, I look for the positives. Amongst them is that the hours spent lying around in bed can be used to think various thoughts. With Euro 2008 in full swing it's obvious that football will take up a lot of my cerebral wanderings but, as wonderful as it is, it can only take up a certain amount of time. The weather's gone bad here and so mosquitos and bikinis (c.f. previous entry) are nowhere to be seen, and so my mind has to go further for inspiration.

It came to my attention a few days ago that a guy in Finland, known as Teppo M, has written a blog called Sataa Naista (One Hundred Women). My Finnish isn't good enough to really get much of it but from what I know, it started with his breaking up with his wife and subsequent frustration that he wasn't getting any action. A drunken bet with a friend of his led to him waking up the next morning with a 10.000€ wager that he could sleep with 100 women in 1 year, and his blog chronicles his efforts. A look at the site leads one to two conclusions : Firstly, the blog is in Finnish, and therefore can only be reasonably read by Finns living here (of which there are just over 5 million), foreigners abroad who can speak Finnish (who I'd imagine are quite negligible in number) and Finns in the diaspora (who I'd imagine are also quite negligible in number). Secondly, the guy has received over 500.000 visits to a site he used at the beginning and was active on for only 3 months. All in all, from this lesser used site, he's had 2000 hits a day since he began. This compares with 1,95 a day for me. Call me a cynic, but would so many people be reading if he'd aimed to drink 100 different beers in a year, back 100 winning horses in a year, complete 100 Rubik's cubes in a year or, to go for something as difficult as he has, to learn to speak 100 languages fluently in a year ?

There's nothing really groundbreaking here - Internet + Sex = Readership isn't exactly a formula which would have Fermat or Einstein spinning in their respective graves but, at times where I can't sleep, it's a symptom of society's state which I'm interested in. I'd imagine that people read this kind of site for the same reason that they watch Big Brother or read about celebrities' secret confessions in glossy no-brainer magazines - to satisfy the voyeur inside themselves while safely at home which they'd generally deny the very existence of to the outside world. Here's something that might surprise all the same - and above all, it should surprise guys who have been trying to weave their magic in nightclubs - a survey has revealed that 25% of European women get drunk in order to increase their chances of getting sex !!! Having spent my fair share of nights out and about, I find that statistic extremely hard to believe. In my case it's certainly worked - the majority of my "conquests" I wouldn't have touched with a barge pole if I hadn't been drunk - but had I known what was coming those nights I'd probably have been on the lemonade instead.

As a closing statement to this subject, I'd like the wish Teppo M the best of luck. Having been single for more than a year while I've been here, women (read: people in general) in Helsinki's nightspots are generally antisocial or completely battered. Neither of my two successful sleazes here have been Finnish and even Ross, the man who gets all, failed here. It ain't easy.

And in order to keep you all interested and reading - I'm on 12 so far. That's an average of 1,5 a year since I started.

I'm off back to bed.

Fashion Review - 2008

2008-06-06T22:32:00.005+02:00

Remember that 6-lane road I used to look at out the window ? These days it's been replaced by a small suburban car-park. It's hardly more inspiring but it's been absolutely drenched in sunshine over the last couple of days. According to the weather on TV yesterday I could stand up and say "I live in the hottest large European city aside from Athens, Istanbul and Malaga !". I wouldn't have believed a word of what I said but there we go. So, summer has arrived in Helsinki, finally. This unexpected situation led me to dig through my considerably small wardrobe to see what summer clothes I had. T-shirts are never a problem in this country as you have to wear 4 or 5 of them, ten months of the year. Besides those though, I discovered, I had one pair of shorts and no summer-friendly shoes. Having put on these shorts and promptly burnt a big hole in them with a cigarette, I came to a conclusion. It was time for me to go out and do something that has split the sexes more than anything in recent history - probably aside from the release of the Sex and the City movie - clothes shopping.

Anyone who knows, has known, has seen, or has vaguely heard of me will very well know that I'm not on the peak of the fashion iceberg, nor am I anywhere above the surface of the water. I am sitting on the ocean floor, chilling with the octopuses and platypuses, attempting to act as if fashion didn't exist or, if it did, was pointless. Now that I was forced to go and buy a pair of shorts though, I had to stare this issue in the face. Having perused shops all the length of Aleksanterinkatu and explored, in increasing states of desperation, the entirety of the Forum and Kamppi shopping centres, I sat, exhausted, on a pavement and rolled myself a cigarette with shaking hands, drenched in nervous sweat, dreaming of a utopian society where we could all walk around naked like our ancestors did without having to care what a bunch of fashion designers think we should all wear this year. My choices were, by and large, to pay large amounts of money for Hawaiian flower shorts, or to pay large amounts of money for a pair of 45-year-old-man-on-safari-in-Tanzania shorts. As I prepared to enter what I had decided what would be the last shop of the day, I noticed the greeting by the escalator:

FLOOR 6: Administration
FLOOR 5: Menswear (and outdoor Womenswear)
FLOOR 4: Womenswear
FLOOR 3: Womenswear
FLOOR 2: Womenswear
FLOOR 1: Womenswear

My mind went back over the nightmarish 2 hours I had just endured, and came to 2 conclusions. Firstly, a window on the 5th floor would be good to jump out of in case I didn't find anything apart from flowery shorts or safari shorts here. Secondly, I noticed a slightly familiar theme here. And it's not that I want to suggest that things are imbalanced at all, but... doesn't this seem slightly imbalanced ? All through the day, as I now realised, I'd been shoehorned into 3 square metres with one other bored looking guy staring at 1 pair of jeans, 1 pair of safari shorts and 2 t-shirts with ridiculous, meaningless slogans on such as "I slept on the Virgin Island - St. Thomas V.I." and "Archipelago of Tuamotu - Live the Dream" while the women wandered around an area the size of a small country wondering which of 847 designs of blue bra with red straps they should buy.

At some point, in Benetton, I found the bedside table housing mens clothes and on it were a screwed up pile of T-shirts, apparently backing Youssou N'Dour's project to grant microcredit loans to small enterprises in Africa. One caught my eye - it was green, decorated like the back of a Senegalese minibus. I liked it. I bought it. That I had made an impulse clothes purchase in the first place showed how desperate I was for success. A little something in my bag that said "you COULD have had a nap, yes, but you've got something now." It was a consolation, however small. So for you Africa lovers, you people with more money than ideas or you idealistic people who want to give a helping hand out there, go to Benetton and buy an "Africa Works" t-shirt. They're funky and they give guys on desperate shopping trips something to be slightly happy about. And as a good supporter of this project I'm going to reach out to everyone here so, to all you White Supremacists out there - go to Benetton and buy these t-shirts. If they have more money it'll stop them coming over here right ? You know it makes sense.

In the end, I dragged my panting, suicidal self up to the 5th floor and, after trudging past the usual assortment of crap, found myself in desperate man heaven - a pair of shorts which I could actually wear and cost less than 80€ !!! I grabbed them, kissed them, bought them, and walked out of that shop to have the coldest, most welcome beer I have ever had.

There's something very liberating about the summer though, even if it only lasts about half a week in this country. Walking around in hard-earned shorts and sandals and not feeling the onset of frostbite just feels good. Sitting outside and having a beer in the sun doesn't feel good because of the beer, or because you're warm - it just does because you CAN do it. Maybe it's the rarity of the situation in Finland which makes you treasure it all the more. Lying around in the park surrounded by girls in bikinis doesn't feel good BECAUSE they're in bikinis right ? It's because they are liberated isn't it ? Don't get me wrong, I'm a great admirer of the unclothed female form as well... Or maybe I'll just give up there. I'm a perve and I know it. And I'm proud.

Summer brings big football tournaments as well, although it also brings mosquitos. Summer is when you like to spend money arsing around, although you hate being locked up at work instead of out in the sun. It's a season of contrasts, although I'll happily take bikinis, football and sunshine at the expense of mosquito bites and being locked up at work sometimes.

Finland being Finland, of course, I must interrupt my daydreaming on these wonderful topics and go to put my shorts back in the wardrobe (or indeed the cellar.) The weather report indicates that in a few days it's going to get cold again. Alea iacta est.

"I Endorse Bloody Massacre" Says Celebrity Chef

2008-05-30T13:28:00.005+02:00

Living as we do in a world populated by a lot of quite frankly stupid people, you get used to reading stupid things. However, the following link is of a stupidity which is quite impressive, even by conservative American standards, which are obviously quite impressive in the first place.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7427206.stm

Ridiculous eh ? But wait, there's more ! The Boston Globe report quotes her as saying that "The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad, popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons."

M has one. Should I get concerned ?

I'm waiting for the next wave of news to come out of the states in its anti-Impending-Apocalypse paranoia.

"Man arrested for growing beard"

A homeless man was arrested for growing a beard yesterday, reports the Squagmattavilleport Times. Bruce McFleas, who lives under a bridge, claims he did not have access to a razor. Local residents, however, have claimed that McFleas' disgusting mass of facial hair could drive their children into the hands of radical Muslims.

or even....

"African American arrested, caught red handed reading book"

Well what ? It could have been a Quran, or a bomb-making manual. And it's better to be safe than sorry isn't it ? And given that he's black, he could be dangerous.

Finland of course doesn't have this problem. Given that no planes have been flown into the World Trade Center in Helsinki, there is no such paranoia. And I can spend the evening outside despite the fact that I, very much like Osama bin Laden, have two arms and two legs.

Life in Helsinki Part 3 : The Art of Communication

2008-05-29T00:44:00.004+02:00

Learning Finnish is not the key to communication in Finland.

It can be helpful of course, particularly when you get out of the big cities (or, more accurately, big city. Or even more accurately, big town) to where the rural natives have never seen, heard, or know the concept of a foreigner. People in this thriving megapolis, however, do speak English - sometimes in a very funny way too - so the ignorant foreigner can come here and be understood. As I've tried to learn Finnish, and speak it more, I've come to be understood less. When, eventually, someone does understand me, I don't understand what they say back to me. A very constructive relationship with the natives, as can be seen.

What is more important is learning how to speak. That is to say, learning how not to speak. For having a conversation here is quite a difficult task. People may find you arrogant if you speak too much, and I find them boring if/when they speak too little. The key to this is realising that talking is not actually all that important, but giving weight to your words is. Asking someone a long, complex question and then sitting around for half an eternity while they stare into space and finally utter "yes" does get quite irritating but it's also something you get used to. Just like the tramps on the trams, waking up to find the city covered in smoke from some Russian forest fire or people thinking you're too drunk to think straight just because you happen to offer them a beer. On one particularly animated night out in yet another of Helsinki's über-lively nightclubs, a guy came and set next to me in order to inform me that he was very happy that foreigners should choose to live in Finland and to enquire as to whether I was enjoying my stay in this country. Awkward conversation followed and I don't think the guy said anything other than "yes" or "no" to me for the rest of the conversation. Then I met a guy from Angola and things went back to normal.

The exceptions to these awkward conversations are few and far between. There are :

a) Bizarre Finns like M who actually like talking just for the hell of it. Other people are generally intimidated by members of this category.
b) Drunk Finns who are as talkative as anyone else on the planet. These sentences are often short and basic in terms of grammar and sophistication, ("Fuck you", "I'm so drunk !" and "Where is the afterparty ?" are regular phrases one can listen out for) but can still be a breath of fresh air.
c) People from Karelia and Savo regions who are apparently extremely rude because they occasionally interrupt other peoples sentences, an offence which is punishable under Finnish law. I have never met any such people.
d) The old men in long distance trains' restaurant cars who argue about whether or not Finland should have invited Germany to occupy it during World War II. These old men always have someone to argue with as it seems that, no matter how many old men there are and no matter who they are, there always seems to be at least one from each camp. And, as in anywhere in this country which involves a long period of sitting down somewhere, these characters soon metamorphose into category b).

Communication as a topic was chosen today for a simple reason - I lost my mobile phone yesterday, again. Doing so the day after applying for a job possibly wasn't the greatest timing but this happens. It's annoying though. Especially in this country, where 98% of the population owns a mobile phone. My boss sends me my shifts by text message, you call someone when you lose them in a pub instead of looking around for them. In the last place I lived here I paid for the laundrette with my phone, and my parents send me text messages to remind me to reply their emails. I play Snake on the tram when I'm bored, the list is endless. But, you could ask, why in a nation of so few words do so many have mobile phones ? For some reason, Finns speak an incredible amount on their phones. From the greeting "Missä sä oot" ("where are you ?" which for some reason everyone asks - who cares anyway ? It's not like you're going to talk to them face to face) until the ending "Joo, kiva, mooooi" ("yup, nice, bye", which is just as common) people are gossping for ages about how ugly Leena's new handbag is or how Pekka was shagging Annukka AGAIN or how little they remember from the party last night. Strangely, I've seen lots of people who have obviously gone to cafés or bars together and are both sitting at the table..... writing text messages ! I used to think they were just on crap dates and ignoring each other but I'm beginning to suspect they're actually conversing through SMS just to make the whole experience that little bit less difficult. God only knows what these people do when they're stuck in an elevator together or having sex or end up in a pub without a phone OR a television. I'd imagine life is planned so that none of these things really happen.

In public life, of course, things are different. If you want something from a shop or a bar, you have to ask for it. And given that, in general, you won't have the phone number of the girl behind the counter or the guy behind the bar (guys also work behind counters here and girls behind bars, but it seemed overly elaborate to point this out) you have to ask for it, in words, face to face. Fear not though - words have been rationed in these cases as well. I lost the habit of saying goodbye to cashiers a long time ago as the result you'll generally get is a bewildered face before they compose themselves and say goodbye back. "Could I please have a pint of your finest ale, sir" has been compressed into one word - "Tuoppi." This means "pint". I could imagine going into a bar in France, leaning over the bar and declaring "pint", and I could just as easily imagine getting laughed out of there again. Still, less chat with the barstaff does leave you more time to sit in silence with your mates !

The conclusion of this story ? I picked up a new SIM card this afternoon. I can live, work, and talk again. Hallelujah.

"I'm Still Alive"

2008-05-20T23:57:00.004+02:00

Recent times have been dominated by late mornings due to laziness, late nights due to work, general lazing around, productive working on my thesis (seriously !) and, as time has gone on, spending more time buried in the Lonely Planet guide to Iran which M and I got from the library a few weeks back. Looks like a great place, full of interesting stuff, suitable for our budget (which is a diplomatic way of saying "dirt cheap" and we can fly into Turkey and out of Armenia in September for next to nothing. I called the consul in Helsinki yesterday who seemed to suggest that getting a visa would be an absolute breeze. I'd like to think I believe him. In any case, the trip seems to be getting off the ground although, without any flights booked, it's tempting fate to write that. I'll do it anyway though, 'cos that's just the kind of guy I am.

Last weekend I played golf. It's the first time I've ever done it and before I never really saw the point, thinking of it as a lazy man's sport. Having spent an afternoon on the greens (or, more usually, in the trees trying to dig my ball out of a rut of tree roots) I still think it's a lazy man's sport. However, I've realised that, as a lazy man myself, I quite like it. The fact that it was 27 degrees and sunny did no harm at all to this pseudo-sport's impression on me, nor did the fact that I came joint first out of a group of myself, M and her parents, both of whom play it regularly. The stiff arms I had to put up with for three days afterwards was a small price to pay and I'm tempted to do it again.

I'm also quite a fan of golf of the crazy variety - M and I have a bet going. We play a game every couple of weekends and whoever has the most wins by the end of the summer gets a steak dinner courtesy of the other. After 2 games, I'm 2 games up. Golf doesn't get any better than that.

Other than Iran and golf, there's nothing much really going on. The foreigners in Finland are sitting around waiting for the summer to arrive, and the Finns are happy that the summer has already arrived. The Africans living here, I'd imagine, are probably waiting for the end of the winter. Tomorrow I'm going to write some more thesis and then go to work. I'm sure this is not what life is supposed to be like but, given that it's not -25 and that I don't have to plough my way through 2 metres of snow to go anywhere (like my extremely exciting visit to Pasila library to get some books today) I'm happy to put up with it until something more interesting comes along....

So for now, as the Iranians would say (and will say to me in September, inch'allah) Kheyli mamnum and khoda hafez....

Life in Helsinki - Part 2 (The Vappu Special Issue)

2008-05-04T14:07:00.003+02:00

Dear Fans, Enemies, Randomers.
It's been a while, and for that I apologise. I could come up with some ridiculous excuse but the bottom line is that I just haven't sat down to empty my mind onto a screen since April 19th. Fear not though, I am today seeking redemption.

Two events have taken place in Helsinki since then. The first was rather predictable, given that it lands on the same day every year. April 30th and May 1st were a celebration of Vappu, the name given to Labour day here. The second was slightly less predictable, given that we are subject to the evil temper of the northern European climate up here. The sun is shining !!!!!!!!!!

Firstly, I'll explain to you, in a nutshell (or in a pint glass), what the concept of Vappu entails. Like many countries in the world, Finland is ironic in its honouring of the workers of the world, by declaring the day a bank holiday. This, in Finland, is the green light for students, workers, and general human beings alike to pour out into the streets and parks of the city, and proceed to get royally drunk until late at night. Like last year, my boss had given me a shift until around midnight so I did the honourable thing and took a pre-mixed bottle of viina-cola to work and cracked it open as soon as I got out the door, joining M amidst the amassed throngs of partiers getting sauced up in a park. I call it a park - it's actually a cemetery where the Finnish victims of the Great Plague are buried. Anything goes.

Another feature of Vappu is the wearing of overalls. This is reserved for students (although no one really goes around enforcing any type of rule so if you're not a student any more you can, in theory, get away with it. Just.) and each all-enveloping jumpsuit is coloured and designed differently according to what school you're in. Mine is red, M's is green. She could find hers, borrowed a red one off a friend, and was absolutely horrified that she would be going out to Vappu identifying herself as a chemist. We got home around 5am, went to bed, and M woke me up at 11 by planting a can of cider onto my face, and off we went again ! Went to work at 3, pretty tipsy, got off work with a free bottle of wine from the boss and started again. Drink, work, sleep - that's Vappu in a nutshell. It's fun, and probably scares the crap out of tourists who find themselves in Finland on that day by accident, but probably useful that it only happens once a year...

The second event, as I've written, is the emergence of the sun over the weekend. This leads to another couple of typical Finnish activities. Firstly, crazy golf. The courses are dotted around the city and I've always liked that. Secondly, something which the Finns love nearly as much as beer - ice cream. Anyone who comes will be amazed by the amount of ice cream on display - life is normal here but decorated by ice cream. So for example, when builders are taking a break from work, they won't be standing around smoking a cigarette like in other countries. They'll be standing around, smoking a cigarette, and eating ice cream. Businessmen will walk around in suits, briefcase in one hand and ice cream in the other. And Finns, given their immense knowledge of all things cold I'd imagine, make some seriously good ice cream. In a few weeks two more features of the Finnish summer will arrive. Finnish strawberries (yes, really !!) which are big, juicy and tasty, and Finnish mosquitos, which are also big and juicy. I love the strawberries, the mosquitos love me. What goes around comes around. In conclusion, as short as it is, I like the Finnish summer. And I'm going out to enjoy it now.

Elämä Jatkuu

2008-04-19T21:19:00.003+02:00

It means "Life Continues". And indeed it does. Today consisted of hoovering, cleaning, spending long hours trying to fix M's computer which, for no reason, slowed down to the speed of a Belgian civil service bureaucrat (for those of you who don't know, that means very slow. And for those of you who have suffered through this interminable ordeal, I feel your pain and I sympathise), and taking part in an activity which has gained growing importance over the last few weeks. This is lying/sitting/standing around with M and talking in increasingly desperate tones about where we can go next, which wonderful destination will receive us next time we get out of Helsinki, and in how many days this escape will take place. We've talked about South America and Iran. I've talked about Afghanistan, and M has looked at me doubtfully. Africa seems to be too big to be done this year so we need a trip to pass the time. Most likely the next one will be a day trip to Estonia when we really need something to do, but the will is there. Proof: we've reserved the Lonely Planet guide to Iran from the library and we're going to pick it up when it's available. Oh yes.

On Thursday I took part in a Finnish student tradition - the early-starting pub crawl. It also started in a traditionally Finnish student way - an agreement to go for "a beer". This beer was bought in a supermarket and drunk slowly with a donut on the stairs of the cathedral. We were then called up by a friend of a friend to go for a beer in a bar. OK, we said, but only one. Virtanenska, who lives downstairs, had to be back to do some hardcore studying and so had an especially good reason to be back early. We went to the bar, had one, then another, moved to another bar, had a couple there, and I won some money on the poker machine. This of course only encouraged me to carry on. M didn't need any encouragement (and she got bought a drink by a big hairy biker in the next bar so it certainly was a good choice) and Virtanenska was beyond caring by this point too. We called M's friend and had a few more with her. I remember coming home on the tram but I'm not really sure what time it was. The next day, in any case, I did nothing at all. This whole story isn't very interesting, we did nothing much interesting apart from sitting down, drinking beer, talking about various things and, in my case, get involved in an animated discussion with a Bangladeshi barman about why his colleague flatly refused to tell me where she was from, but I've written about it for you in order to complement my previous post.

My parents called the other day and wondered from my tone of voice if i was depressed. They also thought this last time I was here, and I haven't been. Last time I wasn't having the best time but I wasn't depressed. This time I'm very happy. They may have picked this up for two reasons: a) My dad called to talk about his dad's funeral, during which time I was obviously not going to sing him a cheery song and tell some jokes; and b) I think this is also slightly what Helsinki does to you. So to all of you who are concerned for my wellbeing, I'm not depressed at all, I'm purely slowly becoming an average Helsinkiläinen - monotonous and uninspired by my surroundings.

I'm also resolved to writing something positive for my next post - watch this space !!!

Life In Helsinki - Part 1

2008-04-10T23:16:00.002+02:00

...And so begins my series on life in Helsinki.

Disclaimer : This series may not be completely pleasing to any Helsinkiläiset who are especially proud of their city. To them, I say I'm very sorry. You have a beautiful country, but your capital city is, in my opinion, a bit of a hole. Having kept my identity secret from all except those who know me (and let's be honest, does anyone else actually read this thing ?) I will proceed to be completely undiplomatic safe in the knowledge that no hordes of angry citizens will be showing up at my front door armed with axes, hockey sticks and smashed bottles of Lapin Kulta and Suomi-viina baying for my blood. So here goes.

The first section will be dealing with quite a regular scene for most people in this city - the "restaurant". This is a name that Finns give to a pub or a nightclub in order to make it seem different to what it actually is. Despite the fact that the Finnish word for restaurant, ravintola, includes the word ravinto which basically means food, there is no guarantee at all that such a restaurant will serve food of any sort. They will be full of people of all ages, from the "just out of school" kids exploiting their newly-found freedom, to the aging women who will happily tell you through beer-soaked breath that their 6-year-old son is waiting for them at home. They are generally boozed up on overpriced crap beer and dancing to awful music (in the case of a night club) or sitting down listening to awful music (in the case of a bar). In fact, these are the only two types of place to seek entertainment in Helsinki's night scene. Being out at night in one of Helsinki's night-spots can be compared to being in a middle-sized English town. Someone who parachutes into an English town can never know where they are as they all look exactly the same. Similarly, someone who wakes up in a bar in Helsinki will have no idea where they are as all places play the same music and have the same atmopshere.

This, however, appears to be attractive to the average member of the clientele as most places are absolutely packed over the weekends in particular. I went to a bar called "Cuba" last week, which opened since I left in October. M tells me it used to be good but it now sounds and looks much like every other bar in the city. It does sell mojitos, though, which does make it retain the faintest air of Cubanness. When I listened very carefully, I could also hear faint latin rhythms being played in the toilets. Quite sad.

There is also the tradition of pikku-viikonloppu, which means "small weekend". This, in turn, means Wednesday night, where people once again emerge from their homes to get battered. Whether this is because they are unable to wait from Saturday to Friday to get battered again or if they want to enjoy to atmosphere of Helsinki's delightful nightspots I'm yet to find out, but in any case the rate at which they charge through the sauce is quite impressive. You know when you've got accustomed to living in Helsinki when seeing middle-aged men fall over tables on terraces outside without blinking, and going to morning lectures sitting next to some completely battered guy on the tram at 9am. A few years back my metro was delayed because a drunk had fallen off the platform onto the tracks at 11am. Instead of thinking that this was ridiculous, I saw it as an inconvience instead. Minä olen Helsinkiläinen.

It's somehow difficult to avoid this though as Helsinki gets its grip onto you. "What shall we do today ?" is usually followed by a brief pause as the mind thinks well... the weather's too crap to do anything outside. What else is there to do ?...

"...Let's go for a beer ?"
"Yeh, spose so."

A few hours and many Euros later, the conversation will generally turn to how crap the nightlife is. In our own little way, while trying to entertain ourselves, we are contributing to our own downfall.

Clouds, Beer, Blonds

2008-04-05T17:59:00.003+02:00

You guessed it - I'm back in Helsinki ! It had been about 6 months since I last set foot in this country but when I landed in Tampere airport it seemed like just yesterday. Nothing much has changed here and everything seemed familiar. It's great to see M again and I've moved in with her, living in a one room apartment by the sea in a suburb not too far from the centre. It's going to be hard to fit back in I'd imagine - the culture, the language, the climate, the fact that life is quite different here to what it is like in Brussels. Still, it's temporary - I'm going to finish the studies, I've got my old job back and life is going to get started again after this week of moving in, sorting things out and bumming around with M getting to know each other again.

The 6 lane road has disappeared to be replaced by the Baltic Sea but the itchy feet are still there. Coming here is the next step towards the big rollercoaster of life - a place where I can get money coming in, work a job which actually pays, get the Masters finished and find out where I'm going. As long as I can avoid spending it all on overpriced beer...

On that note, I'm off for a beer.

Religion: A Useful Aspect

2008-03-24T12:36:00.005+01:00

It's blamed for wars, stops human beings from different sides of the world trusting each other and promotes a lot of mistrust all over the planet. Sure, it provides spiritual guidance to those who need it but I think we can generally argue that religion has caused as much harm as good over the centuries. However, today I have it to thank for my situation. It's Monday, it's nearly 1pm, and I'm in bed and not planning to get out any time soon. Even though I'm completely unreligious, I still get a day off work to honour the memory of Christ. Fantastic.

Paris was fun, and longer than expected too. Last week I found out I'd get the Friday off work as well so I started looking for options to leave to Paris on the Thursday night instead of the Friday night and have an extra day there, an extra 24 hours is the company of M and her friends E, who I know well from Helsinki, and L, who is from England and who I didn't know at all. The buses were completely full for the weekend and so I wandered off to the Gare du Nord to see if I could pick up a train ticket there. 10 minutes later I wandered off again with a first class ticket (and yes, it was the cheapest one i could find !!) on the Thalys which cost half of the money I owned. For some reason, this seemed like nothing at all and left me wondering how much love warps all of your senses. At 10pm that night I rolled into the Gare du Nord, dropped my stuff off at the flat and headed straight back into town for what was to be one of the 2 main scenes of this weekend - the pub. The other main scene was on the sofa in the flat watching "The O.C.". Having already risked the ire of the religious with my comments on how pointless and destructive it is, and knowing how O.C. watchers are no less fanatical than church, synagogue and mosque-goers, I'll decide not to publish my thoughts on this particular series. Once again though, it's brought me one advantage. If I ever get a Trivial Pursuit question on series 4 of this vacuous show, I'll more than likely know the answer. Friday night, after a day of O.C. I got unreasonably battered, Saturday we watched O.C. and then proceeded to go to the pub again. Sunday we cleaned the flat and by midnight I was back in Brussels after a 4 hour Eurolines ride. We did manage to get out and about in town a bit as well though, took a lot of pictures and arsed around aimlessly, obviously the best type of arsing around. Another 4 days passed before the big move back to Helsinki then, and onto my final week in Brussels with everything nicely lined up. Tomorrow I'm back into the hamster wheel at the office, Wednesday there's France against England on TV, Thursday the BAT is arriving for a long weekend, Friday there's a Youssou N'Dour concert, Saturday there's the sister's birthday party which I'm going to shamelessly gatecrash as a leaving party, Sunday will be a lazy day and Monday I'm packing up, and staying up through the night with unreasonable paranoia as my train on the first leg of the journey up to Finland leaves at 5.30 in the morning. Hmm.

End transmission.

Rgh.

2008-03-16T18:18:00.003+01:00

The hamster wheel of life completes another revolution - it's Sunday, it's raining, I have a hangover. Yesterday was the end of the football season, which means that for most of the guys it'll be many months before they can return to sticking their boots on, running around in a swamp and occasionally getting kicked. We drew 3:3 and when the chance fell to me to make a hero of myself and win the game, I took the ball down like a rock, snaked my way past 4 defenders in the box and then fantastically lost my footing in the mud, managing to swing a leg towards the ball. It bobbled up, I smacked it into the ground and it rolled lamely towards the keeper. Ah well. The final whistle, however, didn't signal the end of my day on the wing, as shall be revealed !

The whale of a crew was reduced down to two as Ross and I headed back to the flat, snapping up bottle of vodka from a night shop on the way, greatly amusing the guy behind the counter with our discussions on what mixer to buy. We ploughed into the vodka-7up, watched some videos, chatted some crap and got slowly warmed up while we carried out the main activity we came back to the flat for - prowling the internet for a new place to go, just to put some variety into our Saturdays. Teklands, a party on the VUB Flemish University of Brussels campus seemed interested if mysterious. We went down there, paid our 5€ entrance, stepped in, looked around, looked at each other and laughed. It was a small room, half empty, and those who were there all appeared to be entranced, hoodie-wearing wasters jigging around disjointedly to the most bizarre "experimental electro" music (and I use this word very loosely). We wandered up to the bar only to be informed that they didn't accept money, only coupons that we could buy from the entrance. This little chopped up pieces of card, which I imagine could easily be forged, was then traded for the most immensely strong whiskey and coke I've ever had, one of the 2 items on the drinks list. The other was a small plastic cup of beer. We tried to dance a little, but the music was too crap. We tried to talk to people, but they were too out of it. We went to sit in the chill out room, but it was just another room where the music from the main room blared in anyway. Emerging from this bizarre little joint into the concrete wasteland of the VUB campus, we got absolutely drenched and decided that maybe the Fuse wasn't such a bad option after all.

Inside the Fuse, I carried out the duty that all men must when their time comes. That is, to play the wingman. Scenario - Ross bumped into a girl on a long weekend from London, ironically, who was with a friend. Ross tries to pull this particular girl, but obviously said girl wouldn't leave her friend just to hang around alone. This is where the wingman comes into his own, and I spent a while attempting to entertain this character (who will remain anonymous in order to protect her honour). The conversation (and again, I use this term in the loosest sense) was short, uninteresting, uninspired. She appeared to have some sort of social defect which impaired her ability to talk to someone else, and instead spent most of the time just staring off into the void.

- So why did you choose to come to Brussels then ?
- No reason really...
- Aha ok... what do you think of it here ?
- It's alright I suppose

It continued along this vein for much of the evening, and in this context I spent a lot of time contemplating matters in the bottom of a glass and ended up getting rather wrecked. This probably didn't help my conversational skills either but, eventually, she cleared off and I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I don't mind doing this duty at all, but you, all the ladies out there, please show some compassion when you're being entertained by a wingman. Sure, we'd rather be doing something else too, but we're in this boat together and let's make it as interesting as we can, shall we ? Thanks. Got home, tried to write an e-mail to M. Typing correctly was a big struggle. She's leaving for Paris today, another week in the hamster wheel at the office and I'll go to meet her there. And this time, I'm not going to choose where we go out to.

And, dear reader, I leave you now in order to carry out the most familiar of hangover activities - the long trek to the shop, in the rain, to buy hangover food. I love you all.

Back to the Grindstone

2008-03-10T21:31:00.003+01:00

The pint of beer costume didn't work out. This was for several reasons - firstly I had to go straight from work to the shop to buy the materials, and secondly I had to meet ATS on the way. The first part of this plan was easy, the second was less so. ATS is as much of a great guy as he is a useless guy. He forgot to show up. We went dressed as plants instead, which was difficult but well worth the effort - delicate operations involving brown wallpaper, sticky tape and pieces of tree stolen during a night-time raid into the university gardens down the road armed with a pre-mixed bottle of vodka-lemonade and a pair of scissors. Being a pushover as I am, I was talked into going clubbing after the party, got to bed at 5am and felt pretty out of it at work the next day. Saturday I woke up feeling better, played football, went and got trashed once again at Momo's leaving party and felt out of it the next day. This morning, once again, I've woken up feeling better and I intend to keep myself feeling that way for a while at least.

Momo is going back to his home town of Marseille this weekend - that's how things go here. Friends come and friends go, but we're usually good at keeping in touch and I have no doubt that it's not the last I'll see of him.

As for me, I'm getting closer to the date - I'm leaving for Helsinki on April 1st with a typical poor student over-complicated route which serves the purpose of saving a little bit of money. I'll be leaving Brussels at 5.30am on the train and with stopovers in Luxembourg, Frankfurt-Hahn airport (which is nowhere near Frankfurt) and Tampere, I'll arrive knackered in Helsinki about 13 hours after leaving. I usually travel this way, even though the money I save on the cheaper air fare usually goes out the window again on overpriced airport sandwiches and bottles of coke and, quite honestly, I don't really know why I do it. For the fun I suppose.

Moving back to Helsinki will be accompanied with a shifting of focus from that side of things as well - whereas whenever I get into money in Brussels I'm looking at airlines flying for cheap out of here, my eyes in Helsinki are looking more at maps of Russia and Eastern Europe. I've wanted to go to Moldova and Belarus for quite a while and hopefully I'll make it this year before running away to Africa at some point in 2009. Either way, it's been on my mind a lot recently. Sitting in an office is probably more comfortable physically than burning yourself on oven dishes working in tapas bars but throughout this job (my first ever office job) I've been thinking to myself - surely there's another way to live than this ? Everyone seems to aspire to it, to get their feet on the ladder with the aim of going up. I aspire away from it, but I haven't really managed to work out how to get out of the rat race before I'm sucked in and it's too late to escape. All of the ideas have gone through my mind - take up freelance photography, journalism, travel writing, development projects around the world, opening a bar or a campsite somewhere, but it seems that everyone with my best intentions at heart is telling me to get something good on my CV, get a serious job and be happy with my 3 weeks of holiday a year so that I can get off to the Costa del Sol and get bored stupid on a beach. It's pushing me to try harder to prove them all wrong but I'm also setting myself up for a harder fall if it goes wrong.

At least here's one advantage of being next to the 6-lane road in a moderately sized European city - you haven't fallen yet, your life is in front of you and you're going to give it a damn good crack, and you're all invited to my bar in suburban Kinshasa for free beer on the opening night ! A good dream to take back to the office tomorrow.....

Victory Over Flu, Defeat Against Manchester United

2008-03-05T00:24:00.005+01:00

...can't win em all, can ya ?

The day progressed, I stayed in bed. The Simpsons floated in front of my eyes for several hours as the clock ticked by and, having slept for 16 hours last night and complemented that with some high class laziness during the day, I felt better and decided to celebrate this by heading down to the Old Oak to watch Lyon destroy Manchester United. This sadly didn't happen and, tail firmly between legs, I came back home again. This is where the big thinking session of the night came. On Thursday night I'm invited to P's birthday party where the theme, interestingly, is the letter P. I have my poncho as a back-up option but I've come up with an ambitious plan with ATS to go dressed as a pint and a packet of Pringles respectively. We're going to meet up to work on it one of these days. ATS studies at an art college and so we're hoping we can skank some supplies from there and make this great. If it works, expect to see some pictures. If it's a horrendous flop, just imagine me in a poncho and accept my apologies for the lack of illustrations.

From yesterday, a cautionary tale. Why should one never trust sisters ? Probably for reasons like this. As I went down the elevator to attempt my aborted day at work, I looked in the mirror and realised I looked like some kind of overgrown bush. On the way home, I looked in the same mirror and thought the same thing. At this point I decided to ask my sister for a haircut, given that she has one of those cranial lawnmowers and I still only have 2€ in the bank. Sure, she says, how long ? I ask her for the longest one, and she says "9 then ?" and, being the idiot I am, I say well yes. 2 minutes later, in the bathroom, comes one of those little giggles. "Oops !! It put itself on the shortest one !" Yeh right. "Well feel it !" As my quavering hand reaches towards the back of my head I realise that there's not much hair left there. And by not much, I mean hardly any. And it's a big stripe down the side of my head. "I can probably salvage it by doing you with a 6", she says. And if that's halfway between the shortest and the longest, it shouldn't be too bad. This is where having flu and a haircut at the same time is a problem. You become some kind of moron who floats through the day and is incapable of intelligent thought. I firstly believed my sister (error number 1) that there were only 3 measurements on the razor (error number 2) and then didn't wonder how the middle of 3 lengths with a big stripe of the shortest length would appear seamlessly on my head (error number 3). After a while, I was informed all was done and that I could admire myself in the mirror. The result was quite impressive - somewhere between a chemotherapy patient and a neo-Nazi militant. Fantastic. "It looks good !" she assures me. It seems the flu has disappeared somewhat because, for the first time, I'm not sure I believe her. After some prolonged niggling I find out that the longest cut is actually 21. I decide to do it myself next time.

In 16 days I'll be off to Paris. I've been there a few times before but never for very long. Actually my most recent visit there was also my longest. Given that this was in 2001 and that I stayed for 2 nights, it's quite obvious that I don't know Paris very well. This time I'm going for.... 2 nights again. Being an office monkey as I am now, however, I can't go there for longer so I'll just have to take what chances I have. Given the Lyonnais roots of 50% of myself, I spend most of my time poking fun at Paris and disdaining Parisians as snobs, bad drivers and various other things Parisians are well known for being. So why I am travelling 8 hours on the bus in order to spend 44 hours there, you might ask ? The answer, as it often is, is M. She spent 6 months studying there and she's now going back for a week, to immerse herself in culture, sunshine, and beer. Or maybe just the last one, but it is impossible to go to Paris and not immerse oneself in culture, is it not ? This jury is still out... In any case, it was impossible to know she would be so close to Brussels and not to see her. So I'm going to arrive at 10 on the Friday night on the bus and take the metro across from the Porte de Bagnolet to Neuilly-sur-Seine to the apartment she'll be staying in with some friends. So what's the plan, M ? "We're going to Coolin for some beers !!!" A good respite from the week !

And once again, as they did from the jungle paths of Cameroon a few nights ago MSN windows call me back from the bars of Paris to an Brussels apartment where I can continue dreaming of the big wide world............

Sundays

2008-03-02T21:38:00.001+01:00

Sundays eh ? What a pointless day. Physically, it's not yet Monday but psychologically it is. I'm still ill and have done absolutely nothing all day. And for once, my call to the clock was "hurry up you bastard !!!" I haven't left the flat, I haven't thought about anything, and the only idea of any consequence that I've had is that I should buy shares in UPM-Kymmene, given the amount of toilet paper I've ploughed through on blowing my nose today. I also ate some salad and some pasta.

To make things worse (or maybe better, and probably a combination of the two) I spoke to Marsh online today. He's in Cuzco. The conversation was interrupted by me looking out the window at the 6-lane road and imagining little red lines criss-crossing South America.

Back to the office tomorrow for another week on the countdown.....

An Ill Blog Brings No Good

2008-03-01T20:24:00.005+01:00

I woke up this morning and realised two things.

Firstly, it was Saturday. I always like Saturdays and I always have. It's always been the kind of day where not going to work or school is a novelty, unlike Sunday where it's completely worn off and you're just looking at the clock thinking "slow down you bastard !!!". Saturday means sleeping in, watching football, playing football, having some beers and generally basking in the warm feeling of not having anything in particular to do. When I was a kid, Saturday was the day where I'd really appreciate having lunch at home, just because it felt like a weird thing to do. Almost like I was given a day off school. A Saturday is the first time in six days where you can wake up in the morning and then go to sleep in the evening without having got out of bed. Not that I really ever have, and in practise that would stink, but it's cool to know that the option is there all the same.

The second thing I noticed this morning was that I was cold and wet, and that this was a familiar feeling. This, fortunately (or unfortunately ?) was not a flashback to the toilet training days, but the familiarity came from several times in the night where I woke up in a cold sweat, with a sore throat and a headache. This is the downside of Saturdays. Much like Christmas or your birthday, it's almost a guarantee that if you're going to get sick, you'll keep it for this particular day that you've been looking forward to for ages. My sister, has been sick for several days with the same thing and as soon as I knew this, I was sure I'd catch it on Saturday morning. QED, karma strikes again.

These two realisations led me to my first mental process of the morning. What the hell was I going to do today ? Being ill, just like being hungover, inspires many feelings in me. I'm generally lazy and apathetic towards life in general, but I'm also very easily bored and look for something to do. Without any energy at all this generally leads to me sitting on the computer for half of the day and reading a book the other half of the day, and I get bored with sitting around. I then look for something else to do and don't find anything that satisfies my low-energy-requirement quota, and then go back to the computer. Today I've made the time pass ("go quicker you bastard !!!") by chatting with anyone who would care to listen, let my mind wander around Google Earth (of which there should be compulsory ownership for everyone in my opinion), downloaded maps of Africa and drawn lines on them. This is what I'm plotting with M. Going to Africa, that is, not drawing lines on maps. In the last couple of minutes I've entertained myself by trying to keep my sister's dog out of my bowl of tortellini.

Maps though, are they cool or what ?? I've never seen such an inspiring red line as the one that goes between Nkongogonogorogo and Mbolomboloudougouni in Congo or Cameroon (or wherever else these two fictional villages may be representing are) which is, may be, isn't, or never was a road. What it represents is a dream, a possibility that one day I may leave Nkongogonogorogo, looking out for monkeys and hippos, getting out to walk when those potholes get too damn big, and eventually arriving in Mbolomboloudougouni and being irrationally excited about the whole thing, despite the fact that both of these places look exactly the same and I didn't see any hippos on the way. Maps are documents which say to you "I know you're bored NOW, but one day you'll be walking around on me !" It's frustrating in one way, but a straw to cling to in another way. They give funny impressions too. I remember when I was a kid I had a map, and Senegal was coloured in green. Being in Africa and being green, I assumed that Senegal was completely covered in tropical forest, monkeys and hippos, and it took quite a long time for me to realise that this wasn't the case. In the same way, I'm hoping to find out, once I get to Nkongogonogorogo that the red line to Mbolomboloudougouni isn't a road at all, but a little path through the jungle to be walked along and hacked through with a machete and where you have to sleep in a tent when the night falls. As usual, at this point, MSN windows start flashing and you realise that you're still in your room next to a 6 lane road in a moderately big European city, and you've suddenly become bored again.

Third thought of the day. Will anyone actually bother to struggle through this uninspired and uninspiring post ? I haven't read it again and probably won't be bothered either. It's been a way to make the time pass more than anything. If you fancy something more interesting, go to the Google Earth home page, download it and zoom in. That's what I'm off to do right now. Wishing a good Saturday night to all...

Keskidi ?!

2008-02-29T20:11:00.010+01:00

A few weeks ago on Ross's blog, I was referred to as "tragic and hilarious", which I found quite amusing and, given the evidence he provided, quite accurate. Today while eating my camembert sandwich and between dropping the crumbs all over the keyboard, I was reading the news and came across a story which I found tragic and hilarious. Maybe not hilarious but quite funny all the same. Bearing in mind that I was tired, it was Friday afternoon and I'd spent all week sitting in an office, a working environment I still haven't adapted to the slow pace of yet. After working in a kitchen for most of last year, spending 10 hours at a stretch on my feet, getting hit by a blast of 250C air from the oven every 5 minutes and leaving the place stinking of grease and feeling I'd earned my pay, working in an office is something of an anticlimax where you leave the place sleepy but no less physically tired than when you went in, and wondering what the hell you've done to earn your money. Not that I'm earning much anyway as I'm an intern, but I digress. One of the things I did manage to get done today was to read this particular story on the news.

It turned out that an English guy, a member of the Freeconomist group which thinks that the world would be better off disposing of money altogether and letting humanity return to a communal way of life where everyone supports everyone else (which, apart from being completely and utterly unrealistic, isn't a bad idea at all), decided to prove a point. His point was that currency was useless and that the heart of each human is warm enough to support anyone who comes across his path. With this in mind, the guy set off with no money, and no intention to touch any, on a walk from England to India. The aim of this project was firstly to prove that humanity is generous and open enough to support him on his trip, and secondly to take a pilgrimage in doing so to the village where Mahatma Gandhi was born. His walk through England was successful, and he then arrived in Calais, where he realised that he didn't speak French. People there, not speaking English, thought he was a freeloader or an asylum seeker and he didn't find anywhere to stay. A few days later, he returned to England with his tail between his legs. Metaphorically speaking.

Now this leads me to make two points.

Firstly, I do admire this guy's idea but it seems that the level to which he was misguided in his beliefs is only matched by the level of suspicion with which people in the rich world treat anyone else. Anyone who is tall, young and male (such as I am) walking around a city anytime after dark will realise that some people will switch their bags to their other arm to protect them, start running and then walk again once they've got past you, or just shuffle along looking at the ground as if looking at my face would unleash some kind of violent force in me and send them to a sudden yet painful death. One day last year, I was walking in a well known large city in France with my cousin who is, like me, male, tall and young. He's in the army part time and has a shaved head, and what with it being the summer and all, I had short hair too. Several people crossed the street to avoid us. And this is outside on the street, in a public space. I could probably live in this city my whole life and never be invited by anyone I didn't know to their house. That doesn't bother me in itself as I don't particularly expect that and, having been brought up in this environment, if someone did invite me to their house I'd probably wonder what the hell they were after. Having been lucky enough to visit other, much poorer parts of the world, it strikes me every time how people are generous and have much less of a concept of personal space. I've slept in many houses belonging to people I had barely met, even though I have not had a sex change, a growth spurt or a sudden, unexplained rejuvenation since then. I have had several haircuts but I don't see any correlation between the length of my hair and peoples' generosity with their personal property, so I won't try to discuss that. This is what leads me to think that, even though the ideas of the Freeconomists are ridiculous and completely unachievable in a practical sense, it's grounded in something decent. In another, less theoretical sense, if we had no money, we wouldn't be able to get our hair cut so often and this might reduce the effects of the apparently mortifying effect we have on people.

The second consequence of this story on my psyche was a reflection on how damn funny the guy's failure was. Not in the failure itself, but the circumstances surrounding it. The concept of hilarious tragedy is, in my opinion, well encapsulated by the sight of two people trying to get a point across to each other without a common language, and this is what I imagine happened to this unfortunate character. Living in Belgium, I see this with alarming regularity. The best examples come in the shape of short term visitors, usually from England, who don't speak French and have that well known Anglophone view that everyone should speak English because... well just because !! The unproductive exchange of views between these people and checkout operators, for instance (and I've noticed that British Airlines air hostesses are almost always guilty of this linguistic idiocy, having seen them quite often in the supermarket under the City2 shopping centre), leads to absolutely nothing except sighs on the Anglophone side and rolled eyes on the Francophone side. It's very possible in Brussels to hear a conversation somewhere along the lines of this. Let's imagine we have Barry, the Englishman who's just moved to Brussels and speaks no French, and Chantelle, the cashier who doesn't speak any English. Or, just as likely, both speak a little of the other language but can't be bothered.

Barry - "Excuse me, do you sell light bulbs ?"
Chantelle - "Quoi ?"
Barry - "Do you sell light bulbs ?"
Chantelle frowns to indicate, without having to say anything, that she does not understand
Barry - "Light bulbs. Light.............. bulbs. Light bulbs."
Chantelle - "Je ne comprends pas l'Anglais hein ! 6 Euros 50 s'il vous plaît"
Barry - "Never mind then. Cheers."

Of course the third guilty party here is me in the queue not stepping in to help these two, but it's far too entertaining to put to an end. It's probably equivalent to seeing a guy walking down the street reading a book, unaware that he's heading straight for a lamppost. Your conscience tells you to step in, your sense of humour and ridicule tells your conscience to shut up. In the end you haven't got the same sense of satisfaction from helping people, but you've had a good laugh.

I also remember a few years ago that a Belgian cartoonist explained Belgium's disappointing performance in Euro 2000 along these lines. In his cartoon, which appeared in a national Belgian newspaper, the guy without the ball exclaims in French "Passe la balle !". The guy with the ball looks at him and exclaims in Flemish "Wat zegt je ?". It's sadly reflective of reality. It makes you wonder how come the Dutch, Swedes, Finns etc can actually learn another language and then actually speak it. M was born speaking one language (once she'd actually learnt it - I don't mean to say that she profusely thanked the doctor for cutting her umbilical card and asked him what the weather was like today), she now speaks four. Whereas in Belgium they refuse to speak each others languages on principle, the English and the French don't learn because a) they're generally useless at it, and b) they don't see the point. All three of these reasons are quite ridiculous.

As a product of both France and Britain, I can speak both French and English, and I've tried to learn a variety of others on the side. This means that, besides being able to understand the rationale behind making the effort to be able to communicate with people of other cultures and consequently making that effort, I can also ask for a haircut in most countries in the world. I'm aware and grateful that I've been given this headstart but if I can learn Finnish they hey, anyone can learn anything.
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As an epilogue, the guy from the news story is now walking around England and learning French as he does so, to try and walk back to India next year. One can only wonder what will happen when he gets to the Italian border.

Intro

2008-02-28T18:15:00.007+01:00

This blog was born at 1pm on February 28th 2008, in an office in the centre of Brussels, to mixed parentage. On one side, I wanted something to do while i was eating my sandwich. On the other side, it reflects a desire to see things, express them as I see them, and take it with me along the wild ride of life. Back in my suburb on a rainy, miserable and windy evening, I'm ready to have my first conversation with the newborn.

At the moment, I'm in Belgium. I'm here for several reasons. Firstly, I grew up here and Brussels is as close as I have to a hometown. Secondly, I found an internship here which would act as a blade of grass to my desertified CV. Thirdly, I quite like the place. And now that I write, I think that's about it. It gets a lot of crap, this place, without really deserving it, and simultaneously while deserving all of it. It's seen as boring, pointless city in an equally boring and pointless country where gangs of guys in suits tell everyone else in Europe what to do. having spent 8 years here since I moved over, I know it quite well and, even if the roads are falling apart, the system is infuriatingly dysfunctional whenever you need it and totally inflexible when it works, and it rains all the time, there are some decent things to do. My bank account informs me that I have 3€ left so i might not be able to have the sort of entertainment that the gangs of guys in suits might be able to enjoy but this is one of the few cities I've been to in Europe where i can walk around aimlessly and actually enjoy it. That's not to say I want to stay here. 8 years anywhere is far more than enough. 8 years of battling with Belgian bureaucracy is also far more than enough. More on that another day.

Fortunately for me then, in 4 and a half weeks, I'm moving out, to Finland. Helsinki's a place I know a little, given that I lived there for 2½ years before I came back here for a bit last October. Although it's a pretty unattractive and boring place, there are several reasons I want to go back there too. Firstly, in the right conditions, it's not a bad place to be. This means either at the beginning of the winter, when you haven't become bored of the snow, or at the beginning of the summer, before you've realised that it's not going to get above 20C this year. Again. Secondly, Finland in general is a very attractive place which I could happily bum around in for quite a while. I'd imagine that if you don't like lakes, trees or mosquitos then you'd probably like it quite a bit less, given that there's not much else, but I happen to like two of those three things. Thirdly, you don't get taxed out of your eyes and nose, it's possible to live cheaply and the pay is pretty decent, which is all completely the opposite of here. I've got a job probably waiting for me as soon as I arrive, which is lucky because they're tough to find if you don't speak Finnish or Swedish. Once you get onto the system though, saving up to do something big is quite easy there. And I'm saving up to do something big. Fourthly, and surely the biggest reason, is that M is there.

I'm going to miss the mitraillettes, the waffles, the chocolate, and drinking beer that can actually be tasted but it'll be worth the move and I'm looking forward to it. And that's all. I'll be spending the next 24 hours trying to poke around and find my identity in cyberspace, identity that I've been looking to avoid outside the screen. And I'm also sure that no one will have read this.