Only slightly bent

There’s been a lot of discussion lately how Finland is badly in need of new immigrants to keep the country afloat when the population starts to age and retire. Numbers being tossed around are in the range of needing a minimum of 100,000 new immigrants and 400,000 new employees total. Large numbers for such a small country. Considering there are very few foreigners in the country now, Finland better do some promoting and fast.

And Finland needs to do a lot better job at it than it is doing now, because what promotion there is, is… well… interesting. Here’s a promotional video by the Ministry of Labor which speaks for itself. Remember, this is supposedly geared towards attracting people here – not putting them off.

Click here to see the video.

In case it didn’t speak for itself, we’ll let the Economist put in a few words:

IT MIGHT be the endless pine forests, the locals beating themselves with birch twigs in the sauna or the odd notion of golfing in the snow. Whichever it is, the Finnish labour ministry’s promotional video to attract skilled foreign workers has a ring of desperation.

Oh come on! Seriously.

Choose any floor you want

This is an elevator at the downtown Helsinki branch of Sampo bank.

Just like their customer service and web-bank functionality, it apparently has no clear way to go up.

Intimate customer knowledge?

As I’ve said before, people in the “industry” often keep pointing out the significant, intrinsic assets of mobile operators. With advertising being (undeservingly, I might add) hyped as the next big thing to save the falling ARPUs, people are falling over each other extolling the intimate knowledge that the operators have of their customers.

Except there’s a small problem – what intimate knowledge? In the best-case scenario, one is a post-paid contract customer who receives a monthly bill for mobile usage. In this case the operator knows your name, address, phone number and … and that’s it.

Then we have the pre-paid customers. Here, for example, is a photo of a vending machine at a commuter train station that sells chocolate, snacks, water – and SIM-cards. For €9,90 you get an instantly functioning SIM card for your phone. And in the pre-paid case, which accounts for 95% of subscribers in some countries, what does the operator know about you?

Nothing.

Sure, operators have call and messaging logs and all that, but it’s (fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view) unusable due to privacy regulations and restrictions.

From NIMBY to PIIMBY

There’s a lot of wind generation potential in Finland and the majority of the people are in favor of building more capacity. But then there’s a crucial group of people who are opposed to it – predominantly those whose backyards they would occupy.

So it’s a classic Not-In-My-Backyard-phenomenon. But there’s a very simple way of turning it around to a Put-It-In-My-Backyard: pay them. At a measly 16 inhabitants per square kilometer, there’s no shortage of space in Finland so could we just please get over the NIMBY-whines?

Spring is a great time, not least because things large and small come back to life after excessive winter hibernation. It’s also a good time to take your camera out for a spin and come back with some colorful photos. Like this small decorative cabbage in our nearby park:

(click on the images to get a bigger version)

Since the scenery at large is still void of leaves and thus looks a bit raw, it’s also a good time to look small. Like this moss below – not very exciting when shot from so far away, now is it?

But if you take a closer look at the tiny little thing in the center of the above photo, you’ll find another, beautiful world.

Those little things grow up to be bigger things like the one below left. (Note my impeccable knowledge of the local flora; in all fairness, “the little thing” is probably not scientifically an entirely accurate name for it.. ) Finally, I’m really looking forward to those other little things turning into big leaves (below right):

A quick business trip to Düsseldorf started with a stark reminder of the progress the world has made in smoking bans – when you enter the nice-enough-as-such airport, you’re greeted with a thick blanket of cigarette smoke emitting from nearby open-space restaurants, where smoking is allowed. Gross.

I found that smoke amazing on many fronts – first, it’s amazing how fast one gets used to the smoking bans and the resulting clean air. Second, it’s amazing how little progress certain parts of Germany have been making in the past 10 years; whereas most civilized countries have banned smoking in restaurants, bars and public areas, Düsseldorf still felt like it was firmly stuck in the past.

As if that wasn’t a bad enough start for the trip, it turns out that Düsseldorf (where I hadn’t been before), has one of the most confusing train systems ever. Not only are there no route maps available anywhere, there are no English instructions to how to procure a ticket (except for cryptic ones on the ticket machine), you have to buy the ticket from a machine that only accepts coins and small bills (i.e. there are apparently no people selling these, at least at the airport) and there is no sign telling you which kind of ticket you need to get downtown (a “short trip” or Zone A, B or C? Turns out, after enough asking around, that it was Zone A). Finally, with a ticket in hand that I wasn’t quite certain was a correct one, I arrived downtown just some 10 minutes later. Quite a convenient trip from the airport.

But then again, I shouldn’t really complain – certain airports in the world (*ahem*, like the one in Helsinki) don’t even have a train connection to begin with and I can only imagine the difficulties foreigners have figuring out the correct bus connections from there.. A confusing train is certainly better than no train at all.

Being in central Europe, I was expecting to see a rather neat main railway station – they tend to be quite nice. So I was a bit underwhelmed and disappointed when I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in Düsseldorf (image above left); it feels like a large version of the “asematunneli” in Helsinki. It was a vertically challenged concrete hell, and the platforms (image on the left) weren’t much better with ceiling made from 60’s corrugated sheet metal and concrete. Cute. Not.

Luckily, things improved from thereon.

For one, it turned out that Düsseldorf has some interesting buildings. While there really weren’t anything you could call a skyscraper, there was the occasional sprinkling of nice tall buildings like the one below left. Then there was the trio of strange-shaped office buildings, below middle. And the tower Rheinturm, below right, with nice views from 175m or thereabouts.

These views revealed that the river crossing the city, Rhine, separated two very different styles of urban planning. On the other side there was a river boulevard (of the collection below, photos top left and bottom right) complete with an endless supply of touristy-looking restaurants, river ships offering cruises etc docked beside it and so on.

And on the other side of the river? Sheep.

Yes, sheep. Dozens, if not hundreds of sheep. I don’t know what they were doing there, but it was an interesting contrast.

Anyhow, already in early April spring was showing some signs. The magnolia trees were blooming and the river boulevard was slowly coming to life.

The tradition whenever I visit a new city and have only a few hours to spend is to just walk around, pretty much aimlessly though aided by a map. Often I tend to gravitate towards parks, and Düsseldorf was no exception. I stumbled upon a nice small park that had some (very friendly) swans and beautiful blooming trees and all kinds of nice things:

All in all, Düsseldorf felt like a generally agreeable city with two major annoyances; the ubiquitous cigarette smoke and the confusing transportation system. I’d never travel there for vacation, but as far as business destinations go, it could be worse. Particularly the transportation from the airport is quick and easy once you get over the braindead ticketing system.

(All photos can be clicked for a bigger version – sorry for the low-ish quality, I only had my old compact digicam with me..)

I didn’t get along with communication technologies today. At all.

First, I had a conference call to take while out and about – for that, I had received a presentation that was supposed to be discussed during the call in the e-mail, so I went to a café and searched for a WLAN. No dice.

No problem, I thought, I’ll use my phone as a modem. Except that I didn’t have the USB cable with me – which wouldn’t have been a problem had Bluetooth worked, but the Bluetooth on my laptop had just died. Great. I didn’t have time for reboots, so I took the conference call without the PowerPoint at hand.

Outside. In the rain. Why? Because the handsfree headsets are inherently incapable of filtering out the music playing at the cafe.

Sometime after the call, I needed to make another call so I whip out my phone – only to find out it had died. It was dead – dead dead. No life whatsoever. There was plenty of juice left in the battery. Even a hard reset didn’t do anything, so my 4-month-old lovely N82 has now officially died. And let me tell you, it’s suddenly not so lovely at all when it’s dead. A glorified useless paperweight, that’s what. (Tomorrow we’ll find out how many weeks it’ll take for Nokia to replace it under warranty..)

Anyhow, I still had to make a call or at least send an SMS. So I walked over to the Kamppi Center – surely there’s a WLAN there I can connect to and use Skype or whatever to get things done. And I did find several, though only one of them was open: Welho WLAN. After connecting, I found out you need to pay to use it. The below screenshots are in Finnish, but here’s how it worked (i.e. didn’t):

Payment with a credit card or via the Finnish bank payment systems. Good enough for me:

Input your information.. basic stuff, so far so good. One euro per hour – expensive, but I needed a connection so what the heck.

Only when you get to select the payment method, there is no option to pay with a credit card after all! Hmph. So I select Sampo, my bank.

And here’s what I get for that:

Oh damn it! I don’t know whether to blame Sampo (who have been doing some braindead web banking “upgrades”) or Welho’s WLAN portal.

But the end result was that I was left with a dead cellphone, completely disconnected in the promised land of high tech and cellphones. I still needed to make an important call, however, as I was going to meet my wife “somewhere” downtown. And of course there are no ancient things like phonebooths anymore – luckily a store clerk was kind enough to borrow his phone for a short call and at least that part worked out sort of ok.

All this brought up several thoughts about communication. One of the topmost ones is that people, myself including, rely way too much on cellphones compared to how reliable they actually are. In just a few short hours I had to do without one, I was a) annoyed and inconvenienced because I couldn’t get stuff done and access the ‘net and b) bored for not having anything to do on the bus ride home. It could’ve been much worse.

The second main thought is that why can’t things ever work when you really need them to?

Third, all cafes and shopping malls etc ought to have open, free WLAN access points.

Oh, and high-end cellphones should last more than 4 months.

Last week on a short notice, again under the kind sponsorship of my sister, we got a chance to go eat out somewhere – and being on such a short notice, it was going to be with our daughter. We thought the clientele at Michelin-star-studded places probably wouldn’t really appreciate having a sometimes-hyperactive 6-month-old around so we steered clear of those and went couple steps lower to Ravintola Verde, located in the Holiday Inn Helsinki City Centre by the central railway station.

Upon arriving around when the restaurant opens for dinner at 6pm, we found our reservation entirely unwarranted – we were the only ones there. In fact, even when we left an hour and a half later, there were only 4 other people in the restaurant that seats something like 150. So there was a certain eerie feeling to the place. Anyhow, as our goal was a relatively quick dinner we just asked for a couple of Kir Royales in place of starters. I was quite surprised when our waitress said that she’d ask whether they have any crème de cassis. Excuse me? This was in a hotel and if a hotel doesn’t have something as basic as crème de cassis then something is seriously wrong. Anyway, they did, and we got our cocktails.

The menu included a decent cross-section of typical dishes from pasta, fish and chicken to meat. A bit uninspired and playing it safe along the lines of something-for-everyone, but otherwise fine. For the main course I went along with the somewhat boring menu: House special pepper steak with cognac sauce and garlic potatoes (€26,80). As can be seen from the picture on the right, the steak was a bit covered with / buried in the sauce but at least it was cooked right and tasted good. The garlic potatoes were also very good. I wouldn’t call it anything special, but certainly quite decent and there wasn’t anything particular to complain about. Sarita went with reindeer noisettes (€29,80) which I hear also got her approval.

Dessert choice was easy if also a bit traditional – crème brûlée with strawberries (€7,40). It was excellent and the fresh strawberries were also surprisingly tasty, especially considering it’s winter so they had to be flown from who knows where. For comparison, the fresh strawberries I got from the supermarket a few days earlier were nowhere near as sweet.

Overall, the food was good and there wasn’t anything major to complain about the service either. Considering it was “only” good and nothing to write home about, I would consider the prices a bit too high – but that is to be expected of a hotel restaurant. It was still an enjoyable experience – and all but empty, Restaurant Verde is a good choice for those last-minute needs when you can’t secure a reservation from the better places.