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June 27, 2004
home
I now have something resembling a home here in Helsinki. I think I was pretty lucky; rental flats seem to be in short supply at the moment. I found a newly renovated flat, with a balcony, in a good area of town, and I can walk to work, past the cranes and ships of the shipbuilding docks. In price terms, I'm paying the same in Euros I was paying in Pounds in London - so it seems cheaper here than the UK. Those coming from elsewhere in Europe have found it very expensive.
My stuff arrived on Thursday. It was meant to arrive on Tuesday, but it was stuck in Sweden. Oh well. It's here now, only a few broken items, nothing too sentimental. You learn to appreciate things, like a bed. And tv. I have never been without tv for so long in my life, ever.
I did have a secret weapon - my dad came over to provide project management, moving company hassling, DIY, heavy lifting and trips to Ikea. There is no way I'd have accomplished this much in such a small amount of time without him - kittoksia!
my living room, before the ten cubic metres of me arrived
all the media I own - books, magazines, CDs, videos, DVDs...
It's interesting learning a different attitude and ways of doing things. Everything has been really quite easy, but occasionally you get a reality jolt to remind you not to be so complacent. Only one moment of complete stupidity - my ATM card was eaten. I'd tried getting money out, each time it was spat out, and a receipt printed, saying that there had been some kind of error. Being English, I kept on sticking my card in, and trying again, but pressing the buttons harder. Nothing. More slips of paper. Fifth time lucky, it ate my card. At that very moment, I worked out what was wrong - I'd been using my UK pin.
Feeling rather dumb, I caught the metro into town, and went to the biggest department store, Stockmann, which has a bank branch inside, open late. Without question, they could see my card was in the machine, and gave me a new card and pin there and then. No blame, no making me feel stupid, no intimation that I had done anything wrong. Real customer service.
If I was niggling, I could say that this may not have happened if the cash machines spoke English (they do, but only for credit card withdrawals), you could change your card's pin, it had errorred when I entered the pin, not after appearing to let me carry out a transaction, and the error should have said 'wrong pin number', not something generally is wrong. But this is unfair, when the whole system is set up so that even when things seem to go wrong, they are resolved with such finesse.
There is a key difference here to the UK. I am my identity, and my passport proves this, I am not a record in a database that I try to get access to. If I turn up in person somewhere, I can seemingly do anything. Getting cable tv was as simple as showing my passport, giving them an address, and my registration number. No address checks, no deposit, no credit card information. Maybe I've just been lucky. All this probably only works in a culture which is generally honest.
Other systems to get used to include a recycling culture. It's not quite as anal as Germany, but generally paper, glass and 'biowaste' get seperated. You pay for all carrier bags in shops here (with paper costing more than plastic, weirdly), and all cans and glass bottles having a deposit. All supermarkets have magic money machines that turn empties into money.
What I don't understand is that there are traditional bottle banks too. Are these for people too lazy to cart their bottles back to the supermarkets? Anyway, I've seen someone turn this into a business opportunity. He drives a clapped out car from bottle bank to bottle bank, using specially adapted tools (coathangers) to fish out unbroken bottles, to then take to the magic money machines. Locals tut at him, and it does seem to be going against the general principle of the thing, but a large part of me congratulates him for his cunning. I wonder where unclaimed deposit money goes?
Language so far hasn't been too much of an issue. It has meant, however, that traditional literal clues and cues have disappeared, and become purely visual. Signs, adverts, websites, bills, letters, mean nothing any more.
there are some universals - though this is pretty much the only international fast food brand that exists here
The big event here is midsummer, which means corporate summer parties, and pretty much everyone going to their summer houses, apart from us expats. At least the weather cleared up for a while, and we went to Seurasaari for traditional bonfires, mosquitoes and makkala. It's hard to complain when the place is this pretty.
a traditional Finnish post-midnight post-alcohol activity
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