The sweet revenge of the bitter Grandmas United Against Pedal Pushers Club in Munkkivuori, Helsinki. I wonder what caused the installation of this fabulously hilarious and absolutely nonsensical speed bump for bicycles. Were residents of this quiet area riding their bikes too fast? Too reckless? I really wonder just what the hell was going on here that someone actually took the trouble of bolting the bump onto the concrete path tiles. And it’s not that it would require incredible effort to ride around the bump, it’s the sign that scares the bejesus out of me: “No thoroughfare.” I’d much more expect to spot something like this in one of the German speaking countries, not Finland.

I regretted so much that I was on foot, as otherwise I would gladly engage in an act of civil disobedience and ride right through. Boohoo.

Mladen

Bothered by strangers or friends sitting next to you on a park bench? You shall be bothered no more, at least not in Helsinki. Come to this park right across the street from Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and enjoy your loneliness.

I have no idea how popular these are as I have not seen a similar concept anywhere else. Anyway, when I was in the park, observing these single-seat benches amused, they were as lonely as people resting their derrières on them would be. It was a sunny day and everyone hanging around in the park seemed to be happy enjoying the company of other people rather than isolating themselves.

Variety is great and I appreciate it, but sometimes it seems a bit too extreme. Even though Finns might appreciate a lot of personal space, I am sure that benches like these could just as well be found in places where most would get attacks of agoraphobia by just looking at them.

Anyway if you want to sit alone in public, you are welcome to Helsinki. Or alternatively you could get your very own private park. There you have it.

Mladen

It was a perfect day. After running some errands in town and after a bit of writing I jumped on my bike and set out riding through the forest until I reached a nearby lake. And that nearby lake can never be too far away in Finland anyway. I leaned my bike against a tree, glanced at the kids splashing in the lake and perched myself on a sunny chair-like rock poking out of the water. After a contemplative moment I decided to pull newspaper instead of my swimming shorts out of the shoulder bag.

It is summer and coming from about twenty degrees south of here, I am still very much used to associating summers with scorching heat and thinking oftentimes about ways of protecting oneself from the burning sun and hardly bearable heat. Both of which is usually accomplished by staying indoors only to peek out once the sun has set. I believe I need not remind you anymore that matters such as weather are rather different around here. Although there are a few perks that are definitely still worth mentioning. One of them is tolerance.

All the technological advancements in garments aside, people everywhere still complain about bad weather. I don’t ever expect this to change. Bad is of course whenever something is falling out of the sky or even if it’s just being hot or cold. So it’s not really a big surprise that people spending their whole life living in the same place get used to the local climate complain merrily when they relocate to a different environment. Heck, some complain regardless of what is going on. Finns can be particularly vocal when the winters are not cold enough. Which is strange enough as they also perpetually complain about them being too cold too. Often both statements by the same person in the same sentence.

I’ve noticed this is no different when the summer comes. Alright, one would expect that rainy and cold summers might not be this nation’s favorite flavor of the season, but hear, hear, they spread it all over the front pages of their national newspapers when it gets too sunny and warm too. And you’d be surprised how cold this can still feel.

A couple of years ago I’ve read an interesting piece about weather and how our bodies adjust to temperatures and as a result we have different perceptions on when the weather is cold or hot depending on where we live. I can’t remember the exact details, so don’t quote me on this in your high school science reports, or anything similar. Anyway, it was the temperature differences that astounded me so much that I remembered the numbers from the article. The authors claimed how the limit for hot weather in Greece is around 35°C, while that same limit in Finland is around 25°C. A difference of whole ten degrees Centigrade.

Even if it wasn’t for reading this article I couldn’t track down, this difference is already obvious by just looking at the thermometer and looking at what people are doing outside. I think I’d have a really difficult time imagining that anyone would walk around topless at 25°C in Greece. Not only that Greeks wouldn’t go purposefully sunbathing, the thought of it alone wouldn’t even begin to cross their minds in such chilling conditions. And Finns? At 25°C, men are more than happy to take their shirts off, women will lie for hours at a time in their bikinis wherever there is anything green in town and newspaper editors will send their junior journalists on assignments as absurd as checking which bars in Helsinki would serve topless men without issuing complaints about their half unnatural attire. And it doesn’t even have to be 25°C, on a sunny day 20°C is more than enough.

Their affair with natural waters is similar. They swim in the sea and lakes all around the country at what are for me suspiciously low temperatures. Sure, they like it when the water is warm, but it’s difficult to figure out when warm is as people really do go for a swim, whether the temperature of water is 4°C and they need to cut a hole in the ice or 24°C. A couple of months ago the temperature of the Baltic sea had risen to something even my mother who doesn’t even think about dipping her toes into anything less than hot spa water would consider for a swim, just to see it drop to no more than 13°C overnight. But I don’t think this temperature swing made anyone change their mind. Ten degrees up or down, who cares.

Well, as a matter of fact, I do. Even though I don’t need a thermometer to figure out if I’m going for a swim or not. If it’s only kids gleefully splashing in the water and their observant parents sit fully clothed on the shore, I’ll try some other day.

After all it’s not really difficult to figure out an optimal climate for Finns, it is impossible. And it doesn’t really have to do with the weather anyway.

Mladen

For all I know I am in the right place as far as reading is concerned. Recently I’ve been plodding through all kinds of statistics for you, so what follows is the juicy stuff, or at least I believe there’s something really interesting in these numbers which are quite telling and just as appropriate for the point I am trying to make here.

If you’ve ever been to Finland and stopped by any store or kiosk to pick up your favorite magazine, you’ve probably noticed that there was an incredible amount of papers and magazines in Finnish you had to shuffle through before you could maybe find something in English, or maybe in Swedish. Well, that at least was my experience and as a result I got brave enough to pick up a Finnish language version of National Geographic, even though I’d been around only for a week at that time and was completely new to the language. Nevertheless, I was, and still am astounded at how many different magazines, papers and other periodicals there are in the stands only in Finnish.

This might sound like a silly observation to you, but my experience from, for instance, Slovenia is that there are many more foreign language periodicals than Slovene language ones. Although this might have changed in the last two years a bit, I seriously doubt the balance would have shifted the other way. Just for the illustration, in Finland more than 300 different periodicals on various topics of culture, science or based around other intellectual viewpoints are published regularly. This number does not include tons of new-age magazines for women, men, children, teenagers, car or gun nuts, which are published in Finnish too. And they still say that the market can take more.

Let’s dig deeper into the numbers.

The three most read Finnish daily newspapers have in the year 2006 on average published 676.735 copies every day of the week, of which Helsingin Sanomat alone had a daily average circulation of 426.117 copies (the other two being Aamulehti with 138.258 and Turun Sanomat 112.360). In other words Helsingin Sanomat has the highest circulation among all the newspapers published in the Nordic countries. And I should mention that none of these three largest Finnish papers are tabloids, or are based on yellow journalism. Just for the record, the two most read tabloids are Ilta-Sanomat with 186.462 and Iltalehti with 133.007 copies published six days a week. That’s a lot of newspapers, almost a million copies daily (996.204, to be precise), and we’re talking only five newspapers here.

It’s difficult to imagine where all these numbers stand, so let’s put them into perspective a little bit. The largest British non-tabloid is The Daily Telegraph which published daily 901.238 copies in November 2006, while the news authority in the US, The New York Times, is printed in 1.120.420 copies on weekdays.

I’m no statistical guru and really have no idea how circulation, population and readership comparisons are made, but here’s a little experiment I’ve come up with. Before you begin ranting, yes, I do know about those three types of lies, nevertheless, I think this is fun, so please bear with me.

I took the number of people living in each of the three countries where the above mentioned newspapers are published and have divided that number by the circulation of each newspaper. And I have to say that the results absolutely stunned me. Here they are: The New York Times publishes one copy per 270 people (302.495.015 / 1.120.420), The Daily Telegraph one per 67 people (60.209.500 / 901.238), while Helsingin Sanomat publishes one newspaper per 12 people (5.310.000 / 426.117). Now I think that is quite telling and even though I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, it’s still difficult to wrap my mind around it.

If there are some of you out there smirking at my playing with numbers, here’s another calculation for you. Even if I take for instance USA Today with supposed circulation of 2.25 million and divide copies among the inhabitants of the US, 134 people would still need to line up for one copy of the paper each day, which I think you would agree wouldn’t make it a very practical daily paper. Similarly goes for the British The Sun, which is supposedly one of the papers with the highest circulation in the world and has been as of June 2007 published in whopping 3 million copies a day, but for which in Britain 20 people would end up queueing each day. And The Sun really is only ambulance, celebrity and scandal chasing tabloid, all of which are characteristics to disqualify it outright from our otherwise serious reading.

And this is not all. All these newspapers, but Helsingin Sanomat, are published in English language which is by some estimates spoken by roughly 1 billion people today. While if I estimate the potential readership of Helsingin Sanomat at around 6 million, I would probably be grossly exaggerating. So this even further brings the population to circulation ratio of this Finnish newspaper at odds.

Which brings me to my final point. Even if I disregard all the circulation statistics and my little number experiment above, there is the everyday reality by which I am surrounded. Finns of all ages are very passionate about reading. This might be just my subjective feeling, but I cannot not mention that I have never anywhere before seen so many people reading so enthusiastically practically everywhere.

After all, what is most telling and important of all is how well people are informed. One of the most common questions I am asked is where I come from. So a couple of years ago when I came to Finland, I was startled every time when as I was about to begin explaining which city in Slovenia I came from, people would ask before I could tell: “Now, do you come from Ljubljana or from Maribor?”, citing the two largest cities in Slovenia. Which is, sad to say, but nevertheless a stark difference from my experience in the US from the mid-1990s where after telling people that I came from Slovenia, very common replies would be “Well you must have traveled a long time from Siberia” or “So how is life in Somalia these days.” Not to mention that I often had to explain that yes, we do have electricity and cars too, and that I know what a microwave oven is.

Mladen

What could be better than spending a warm sunny summer day picking strawberries. Picking and munching to be precise. With tens of strawberry fields in vicinity I can’t wait to get down on my knees and get my hands dirty. Picking is quick. In fact so quick that it’s relatively easy to get about two kilograms in about half an hour. It’s kind of fun, even though I have to admit that cultivated strawberry fields are more for the city slicker type of adventurers. You basically don’t even have to look for any berries as they are right there on the field staring right at you, it doesn’t require any special skill or endurance and even if you tried really, really hard it would be rather difficult to get lost. Which makes picking all other berries a completely different affair. They grow out in the wast forests and swamps, so you might want to put that emergency helicopter number into your mobile phone. If you are picking in the area with a network coverage, that is. Even though this might sound a bit strange, but they are much sweeter when picked like that. It could be more challenging and fun, but could also be too much for the feeble.

By visiting an open market in any Finnish town around this time of the year it’s easy to tell that we’re in the midst of the berry season. Strawberries and bilberries will soon be followed by raspberries, lingonberries, cloudberries, crowberries, cranberries, and what-you-know-it-berries as they gradually ripen in the weeks to come.

And people love picking them. According to some statistics I’ve stumbled upon two-thirds of Finns will pick berries during the summer. So if you spot a person standing in the swamp who appears to be loitering, it is very likely that they are literally knee deep in the berries (and water). Although this is Finland, it is not very likely that anyone would want to be killing their time in the middle of the swamp. Anyway, if you do happen to stumble upon such individuals, chances are both of you are in there for the same reason. Which also means you’re not only invading their turf, but also their privacy. Finns are nuts about their forest fruits and their personal space which can be on a clear day, out in the open within the radius of up to 80 kilometers.

Obviously this whole ordeal is about much more than just berries. It’s about being out and about your favorite swamp, enjoying silence and hopefully solitude too, taking in fresh air, getting a snack on the way and saving some for later. And taking pleasure in such activities is deeply rooted in cultures of all the Nordic peoples. All with the exception of Danes who live in way to densely populated areas to have developed such primal urge for the untouched nature. And the attitude of being one with flora and fauna is also a part of everyman’s right enjoyed by these peoples.

However, even before it was codified into law, which happened in the Nordic countries mostly in the 20th century, everyman’s right was a generally accepted custom. At least in Finland everyman’s right guarantees everyone the right to roam freely in the countryside, without the need to obtain permission from the owner of the land.

This custom has been an integral part of Nordic cultures where people have enjoyed it for hundreds of years. However, everyman’s right covers much more than just free roaming. One of the basic premises of this right is enjoying the fruits and joys of nature as long as you don’t cause any permanent damage. Not only are you allowed to pick berries and mushrooms, and fish without permission to a certain extent, but can also traverse the land at will and camp on it freely. And all this comes without the fear of getting shot, as might be the case in, for instance, the US where it is advised to take the ‘No trespassing’ signs with utmost seriousness. Here, the case is exactly the opposite: it is illegal to put up a ‘No trespassing’ sign and build a fence, even on your own land.

As if it wasn’t difficult enough to wrap my central European mind around such concept of practically boundless freedom, there is still more to these comforts. If you want to sell the collected fruits, not only are you allowed to do so, but are almost encouraged as you do not have to pay any taxes from the sales. Generous? If you consider that Finns annually collect more than 50 million kilograms of berries, I think it is not only generous, but also very tempting.

Even though I am pretty sure that most of berries end up being consumed before they are sold, the volume allocated for sale is still far from negligible. For some this means big business, while for others it can provide a livelihood. What has become a constant in the recent years in Finland are seasonal workers from Thailand who come here to pick berries during the summer months. They usually number in hundreds and in the matter of several weeks they pick enough berries to earn a living until the next season comes about.

Of course, these professional pickers are a bit different than you and me. First of all they have their own areas and know when and how to pick. Secondly, the work might not really be appreciated or even endured by many. The most praised and consequently the most expensive berry in Finland is cloudberry which grows only in swamps. I spoke to a salesman on the local market who buys cloudberries straight from pickers and he told me that on average these pickers pick anywhere from 100 to 150 kilograms of cloudberries per day. And during the high season cloudberries can easily reach prices of about 10€ per kilogram. However, I can’t really imagine that carrying a bucket of berries on my back and wading through the mosquito infested swamps would be fun for more than half an hour. So, I am pretty sure that every cent these people earn is well deserved.

But before you start packing your things and heading to Finland to do some lucrative business consider that this year the season has been worse than usual.

Mladen