Only slightly bent

Goodbye Finland, Hello Soviet Union

I think stores should be allowed to stay open anytime they wish to; hence, I welcome the May-August period when stores in Finland can be open on Sundays. Last Sunday I went to our local grocery store to pick up some fresh bread – or so I thought. Here’s what they had on offer on Sunday evening:



Perhaps I didn’t want bread after all.. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet Union, doesn’t it?

Hmm, wonder what that is… Let’s call it scrambled eggs!

We were in Kuopio last week for a friend’s wedding which was a lot of fun. During our visit, we stayed at the Cumulus Hotel. Without going into unnecessary details – I do NOT recommend the hotel. One thing that we, prior to witnessing the actual fact, thought was positive was that the breakfast was included in the price. Now, hotel breakfasts can often be judged by their eggs – in better places they will make you a perfect omelette just the way you want it. In good places they will at least have decent scrambled eggs and crisp bacon.

In other places they have this:



On the left are the scrambled eggs from Day 1. On the right is the same scrambled eggs dish on Day 2. I didn’t dare look into it on Day 3.. I don’t know about you, but I doubt one can classify pieces of rubbery eggs floating in water or a huge block of cooked eggs as scrambled eggs. Eww!

Luckily it was possible to find good food in Kuopio – more about that in a later post.

So why don’t we put one like, I dunno, everywhere?

Another snippet of Kuopio. It is a common complaint that there are not enough trash cans in the downtown area of any given city. The Kuopio market square, however, hardly suffers from this problem:



That just might be a bit of an overkill, don’t you think?

We’ve all heard the supposed reasons behind the increasing food prices; rising fuel and other costs, failed crops and all that. Some of them are downright lies and the others are becoming increasingly dubious as over the past 6-12 months the prices of energy and commodities have fallen quite significantly. As such, all or most of these reasons have become to resemble excuses. If the reasons behind the rising costs disappear, one would – naively, perhaps – imagine that prices would come down.

That logic may work elsewhere, but not in Finland.

Curiously enough, food prices in Finland continue to rise at much higher rates than pretty much anywhere else. In 2008 food prices rose by 10,7% in Finland – a higher rate than any other European country with the exception of Iceland. What’s more, while food prices have recently started decreasing in some countries, food prices in Finland still rose by (what I hope is annualized, the story doesn’t say) an incredible 7% in January of 2009. As an example comparison elsewhere, in the U.S. the food price inflation is currently running at an annualized pace of 1.4%.

Therefore it’s not very surprising that Martti Luukko from The Finnish Consumers’ Association comments ever-so-carefully (translation mine) that:

- Onko nyt jotenkin niin, että kilpailu ei toimisi ihan täydellä teholla, Luukko kysyy.

- Could it somehow be so that competition is not working at full power, Luukko questions.

“Could it somehow” my @$$! Ahh, the beauty of an oligopoly – the story of Finland in so many other areas as well. I have no doubt that there are people even in Finland who go hungry because of this.

Since I’m on a food-related rant here, there are two other issues that tick me off:

Here’s some cheaper food – only you can’t buy any!

There actually are places in Finland where you can find semi-reasonably priced groceries. These are the cash-and-carry wholesalers which there are a few of, but the catch is that for some inexplicable reason, they are off-limits to normal consumers.

I really, really cannot come up with a good reason why this is so so could someone tell me why such idiotic rules are in place?

When the economy packs save money only for the merchant

One of my pet peeves when grocery shopping in normal stores are so-called economy packs. Of many products, there are economy packs available – i.e. larger amounts of the same stuff. Supposedly these are cheaper per unit (liter, roll, kg, whatever) – but the annoying fact is that the so-called economy packs are cheaper per unit in maybe only 50% of the cases. Half the time the stuff in the bigger package, though cheaper per unit to produce and to sell, is more expensive to the consumer.

That’s just deceitful.

Resources:

• YLE: Ruuan hinta kallistuu edelleen (in Finnish)
• Eurostat: Harmonised indices of consumer prices
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index Summary

I know it’s uncharacteristic of me to have two posts on snow, but it’s such a rare phenomenon in Southern Finland nowadays that it’s warranted. You can click all the photos here to get a bigger version – my apologies for the lousy quality though, I only had my cellphone with me last night.

First, as much as the energy company Fortum is disparaged for their executive pay and price hikes, there’s one nice thing they do: bring some light.

As most people know, light is in extreme short supply in Finland during the winter months. Hence, I was glad to see Fortum once again installing their bright light lamps on selected bus stops. On the right is what the sign says, roughly translated as “Bright Light 3500 lux – recharge some energy from here in the midst of the darkness”. The bright light lamps have actually been proven to help in the seasonal affective disorder which most people suffer from to some extent.

The relative brightness of the light is better represented in the photo below:

Snowfall of 30cm or more during a 24-hour period is, perhaps surprisingly, quite rare in Finland. This situation on the streets and the cars hiding under piles of snow – see below – reminded me more of Boston than it did of Finland. From where I’m now looking at this, it’s so unfair that both summers AND winters were better (i.e. more sunlight and warmth during the summer, more snow in the winter) in Boston.

But that shouldn’t detract us from the beauty of the current situation. Last night Helsinki looked like a winter wonderland, which it rarely does anymore. Even though the melt has already started, it was nice to see this anyway:

Isn’t that pretty? Yes it is. And it’s also enough to fulfill my winter quota for a year, so bring on the summer!

Huh? What do you mean “maybe in six months”?

*sigh*..

A while back, our ex-neighbor gave us an interesting book called “100 Social Innovations from Finland“, which catalogs some of the social innovations that Finland has made. At first it sounds like a pretty self-righteous book but it’s actually quite interesting – at least after you realize and accept the fact that many topics covered are not, in fact, originally from Finland and many are not innovations at all. In short, it’s a good read though probably not for the reasons the authors envisioned.

Each of the 108 topics gets two pages, written by numerous semi-well-known Finns. The topics are incredibly wide-ranging. Some of them actually deal with genuine innovations from Finland – like Linux, SMS and Xylitol. Xylitol for one is very good stuff in terms of dental health so one would hope it gained wider global acceptance as a sweetener. Some, on the other hand, more describe the society than any innovation therein – topics like Sámi people, NGO proliferation, ice fishing, ice swimming and bilingualism would go into this category.

Some topics are just weird, like “Eroticism in everyday life”. Qué? In Finland? Luckily there are some everyday topics that are rather honestly seen as having a significant cultural impact, like Salmiakki Koskenkorva (from all foreigners’ point of view, interestingly flavored vodka), mämmi and HK Blue Sausage (both food products that, by many accounts, should not be classified as such) as well as Liquorice.

Then there are some topics that must have required some quite creative thinking in order to put a positive spin on them. For example, it is presented in unquestionably positive light that the amount of psychiatric hospital beds was reduced by 51% in just ten years along with increases in outpatient care. I don’t know about you, but I think there are far, far too many patients in outpatient “care” than is good for the country.

Given the messy nature and wide variety of the topics, what is the book good for? Well it’s an interesting collection of stuff about Finland – I myself found it informative, amusing, appalling and interesting. For foreigners the book provides a nice window into the Finnish society, or at least the official truth of it, as a lot of the basic features making up the fabric of the society are discussed. I’m sure it also includes some new tidbits of information for most Finns as well. On the other hand, it does contain some pretty self-righteous material, some of which is funny and some much less so. While you need to take it with a grain or two of salt, it’s worth flipping through.

Sticky tape makes x-rays

This has got to be one of the coolest things I’ve learned recently. According to a recent Nature article (see e.g. the ABC story here or last week’s Economist):

One of the more unusual things you can do with a roll of adhesive tape is to take an X-ray photograph of your finger.
[..]
Peeling take from a reel results in a phenomenon called triboluminescence. The breaking of intermolecular bonds that hold the layers of tape together releases energy in the form of light. As the tape peels, the sticky acrylic adhesive, on the back of the tape, becomes positively charged, while the polyethylene roll becomes negatively charged, according to this hypothesis.

How extraordinarily weird.

Speak UP!

What is it with Finns and their sparing of words? I know I’ve brought this up before, but it just never seizes to amaze me how people here consider the following completely normal:
• Elbowing your way through crowds in a bus, a grocery story, department store etc without saying a word. Not a single word.
• Whizzing 1cm past you from behind on a bike without ringing the bell or yelling “on your right!”
• If a bus goes past your stop despite having pressed the stop-button, what do most people do? Nothing, that’s what. Rarely does anyone speak up and ask the driver to, like, stop when he’s supposed to. No, people just continue to ride to the next stop or wherever, resigned to their fate.

Seriously. One would be forgiven to think that most Finns are mute altogether. But unfortunately what it really is is bad manners and disrespect.

The most-broken law in the country

For some years now, it’s been illegal in Finland to speak to a cellphone when driving if you’re not using a hands-free kit. However, there is nothing anywhere to make you think this would be forbidden. If you take a look at the traffic, you’ll soon notice that 10-20% of the drivers are breaking this particular law at any given point in time.

This includes everybody from the hockey-moms to the busy businessmen and road “professionals” like taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers etc. There is conclusive evidence that speaking on the phone while driving is dangerous, though I’m not sure there is evidence that hands-free systems help significantly. In any case, it’s blatant disregard for the law. Kind of like red lights, which don’t seem to mean a thing – or at most, means “hit the accelerator” – for some drivers in Helsinki.

The fall, huh? There are actually two of those going on:

Interpretation 1: we’re living the best of the fall season in Finland right now.

Interpretation 2: the market crash.

I’m feeling ambivalent about both. Here’s – briefly – why:

As for the fall the season, I love the awesome colors but I don’t like what fall as a season heralds. I like the clean, fresh and moist air but I don’t like the inevitable rain or the cold temperatures. I welcome the dark nights and the evenings, but I loathe the darkness’ intrusion into the daytime hours.

And as for the fall the crash, I like the fact that with this, some more people might understand that infinite growth is not possible. I don’t like it that it started from the financial sector or that it’s spilling over that now. I would’ve preferred the crisis to having been caused by the realization of Peak Oil or something similar because had that been the case, maybe the trillions of dollars now being spent in an attempt to stem the crisis could’ve produced some good, tangible results instead of trying to desperately clear up a mess created by financial wizardry-gone-awry.

I like the fact that some of the most absurd salaries in the financial sector will now come down. I don’t like the fact that we can’t get any of those hundreds of millions of dollars back that have already been paid to the executives responsible for this mess. I don’t like the privatize profit, socialize risk-schemes and the enormous consequences they have.