Finns are serious when it gets to winters. Whatever gets in the way of a proper winter surely becomes a grave topic. This year they’ve decided it is the climate change that caused the European winter. Who’s causing the warm weather? How to reverse the trend and reclaim our snowy, sub-10-degrees-below-freezing real winters?

Pretty sure almost everyone knows that they have collaboratively contributed to this year’s black Christmas, as Finns like to call Christmases when there’s no snow around. But when it’s so hard to let go of the always hot saunas, domestically produced tomatoes and all that paper consumption. Or, rather, for many it’s difficult to be the first one to give up on those things and start protecting their environment. Not to mention that it’s probably most environmentally unfriendly to live this far north and build a self-sustaining society at the same time.

But when it comes to problems it’s easy to revert to the ol’ good blame-the-other strategy. Who’s to blame for the terribly polluted Baltic sea: Russians. Who’s causing the climate change: Americans. Not so fast. According to the recently published WWF Living Planet Report 2006 Finland has the third largest ecological footprint. If the total supply of Earth’s biocapacity in 2003 was 1,8 global hectares per person, an average Finn consumes 7,6 hectares–four times as much. Something doesn’t add up here.

It’s quite obvious that those two million saunas in Finland must be heated up somehow and that agricultural production here consumes much more energy then in sunnier and warmer climates. At the same time it’s also quite obvious that environmental preservation is important. This at least shows in their meticulous recycling habits. I’m quite sure Finns have developed one of the more elaborate recycling systems. Citizens diligently divide their garbage into nine different categories, yes nine: paper, cardboard, bio-waste, dry waste, glass, containers (such as milk and juice cartons), fabric, used batteries and tin. Believe me, taking the trash out is quite and ordeal. Unless you take it out daily, you’ll definitely have to make more than one trip to the nearest garbage bins. And even “Darling, could you take the trash out?” brings out a new response: “What garbage?”

Obviously, it will take more than just improving on the recycling habits that will bring back the thick layer of snow for Christmas and a real Finnish winter. Hopefully people will turn out to be smarter than the Miss Finland 2006 Ninni Laaksonen who when asked about the climate change and its prevention came up with the following wisecracker: “I haven’t even thought about it. I’ve seen the word in the headlines, but I cannot remember now what do they mean by climate change. Isn’t it that that there would be a longer and warmer summer? I don’t know how to prevent it.”

Mladen

I’ve had tons of fun in the past few weeks, even though they’ve mostly been permeated with something people usually dislike: moving. Yes, I am moving again. This time I’m moving from Jyväskylä, Finland to Göteborg, Sweden. And as you can imagine, I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s life like in Sweden. Which also means that I’ll write about that too.

Moving around is fun. Sure, it can be a bit stressful doing all the paperwork and trying to figure out all the packing so that it’s done right on time and as efficiently as possible. There’s always just that one more book I’d like to read before I pack it. It could take forever for me to move, I guess.

But with moving also comes a fine opportunity to clean up your life a bit. You definitely learn to throw stuff away. This experience is especially therapeutic for a person like me who always finds a use for something, somewhere, at some point in the very near future. You see where I’m heading. You should just take a peek into my hard drives. Thus seeing all those papers go into recycling bin is nothing short of exhilarating. But most important of all, I have finally got a hold of my library. Or at least that part of my library that came along to Finland.

For a while I’ve been looking for software that would be able to handle my books without much effort on my behalf. After sifting through all kinds of applications it boiled down to just two options Delicious Library and Booxter. If it was for the mere eye candy, Delicious Library would have won, but Booxter does the job much, much better: it searches through 26 different databases from Brazil to Sweden, retrieves enormous amounts of information about many books and exports to all the formats one would ever want (almost). Job well done. And it really made indexing my library a breeze, even though I don’t have a web-cam or a bar code reader and had to type all the ISBNs. Even if I have had twice as many books, it would still be fun to do it.

Writing and packing during the day, watching movies at night. For the past seven days I’ve seen a movie each night and finally caught up in many ways. I have had sort of Woody Allen retrospective going on for a while now. Woody is just incredible. His movies are so eloquent, full of details and incredibly fun dialogues, characters and interactions.  They are so life-like I can imagine myself watching them all over again when I see them all. But most recently I’ve seen Zelig, Love and Death, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask and Manhattan Murder Mystery. Great stuff.

However I’ve also watched Spike Lee’s impressive documentary about the disaster caused by the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August and September 2005 that was ran on the Finnish public TV station YLE last week. As I watched When the Levees Broke, I’ve more had an impression that the documentary is really about the breakdown of solidarity in the US. It’s just sad to see how individualistic, myopic and money centered the US society has become. I highly recommend this documentary that kept me bolted down for every single of its 255 minutes.

Mladen

For the past year or so, I have been following the Finnish media quite closely. Since I’m not really a TV person, I’ve been reading various newspapers and listening to radio a lot. And I’ve learned a lot about the Finnish culture and society through these. For instance, one of the interesting things I have noticed is that Finnish media are extremely homogeneous and almost hermetically closed to everything and everyone that is different.

On one hand I’ve found all these newspapers and radio stations very informative as they cover a wide range of topics ranging from local to global. But on the other hand they also do what media can do best: ignore. There are topics and issues that are completely ignored. And what is ignored by the media is practically removed from the public debates. I’ve identified at least two such almost “forgotten” topics: minorities and immigrants.

In Finland six minorities are officially recognized: Samí, Romanies, Russians, Tatars, Swedish-speaking Finns and Jews. Even though they are not very populous Samí, Romanies and Russians are noticeable in everyday life (Samí in northern parts, Romanies, Russians and Swedish-speaking Finns in central and southern parts) and all visibly influence the majority culture and language. However, with the exception of the Swedish-speaking Finns, they are hardly ever mentioned in the media and when they are they are most often either perpetrators or victims of criminal activities. This is especially true for the Romanies.

Simiarly could be said for the immigrants. The picture of immigrant life was until very recently even more blurred. Until just a month or so ago there has been very little talk about immigrants even though they represent a substantial part of the population, especially in the southern parts of the country and Helsinki area. But there has been some noticeable positive progress.

Finnish commercial TV station MTV3 in November begun airing a TV series Mogadishu Avenue. Mogadishu Avenue peeps into immigrant life in Helsinki. The series takes place in Meri-Rastila, an area of Helsinki where every fifth resident has a foreign background.

Also in November national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat opened on their Web site a section devoted to immigrants. Even though there is not much to read there right now, I expect that they will be expanding this section in the following weeks and months. Then on November 30th Helsingin Sanomat organized event Uusia helsinkiläisiä – kaikki hyvin? (New helsinkians - everything alright?) where both immigrants and locals presented and discussed various issues they encounter in their everyday life. And the topic is quite hot right now. I don’t exactly know if this is so because the parliamentary elections are taking place in March 2007 and immigrants are definitely one of the top campaign topics for many parties. Or is it simply because just now the number of immigrants has reached a point when a public discussion had to be initiated.

Whatever the reason, I think this discussion has been awaited for a long time now. There are many obstacles immigrants need to cross in Finland. Following the topic in the papers, I got the feeling that all immigrants need to be better in every aspect to be equal to locals. And that applies to everything including the knowledge of the language. In a recent article editors from different media almost unanimously claimed that they would employ maybe second or only third generation immigrants, all blaming the difficult language for such delay. There must be something else at stake here, especially when the managing editor of Helsingin Sanomat Kimmo Pietinen states that “the influence [of immigrants] can only be positive. Anyway, buses wouldn’t move, offices wouldn’t be cleaned and maybe newspapers would be delivered.”

Mladen

As you have noticed I have made a few changes to my blog. I gave it a facelift, moved it to its own domain and what you’ll notice as you read it here, the content will from now on be a bit different too. Yes, it was about time I change a few things. And changes are both welcome and necessary.

I have decided to expand the scope of my blogging. Hence the change of the name. So it won’t be only about life in Finland. True, that was not the only topic I wrote about on Suomessa blog either, but was more or less it. It’s not that life is not interesting in Finland anymore, or that my ideas are running dry, but rather I think it might be more enjoyable for me to write and for you to read about something else too. I hope you agree with me.

Come back, come often, spread the word. Hope you enjoy it.

Mladen