Goodbye Finland, Hello Soviet Union
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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?
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. 


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.







