Moving is usually a straight-forward business. But there’s always a bit of uncertainty. Canceling everything connected with the old life and ordering everything anew. Although this can be exhilarating, doing such things in certain places can be a tad bit on the unnerving side. Sweden fits among such places. Sure, it could be a lot worse, but there is also a lot of room for improvement.

Canceling the apartment lease two months before leaving is still quite reasonable, but it strikes me as incredibly obtuse that in Sweden you have to literally beg to get the electricity bill. Not that I’m incredibly gung-ho about parting with money, but I cannot understand why the electricity company wants to send the bill in two months’ time and obviously to the wrong address as some complete stranger will live in the same place. And when it comes to Swedish bureaucratic thinking it’s not that difficult to imagine incurring huge debts and eventually being hunted by the international crime busting special forces.

Speaking of which, this is not even the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to Swedish slowness in processing things. What one would expect it would take a couple of key strokes or at most hours to resolve, takes literally months to accomplish in Sweden. Say, for instance, student registration. I arrived to Sweden in January as a visiting student at the Göteborg University. One would think that it would be only a matter of a simple formality to get the official stamp confirming me being a student. But no, after three months I became one and was entitled to everything students are, such as a library card. I mean seriously, think about this. It’s not like I get paid by the university to study. It’s the library card type of things that are at stake here.

I don’t want to get started again on the witless bureaucrats and their papers, but there’s just one more thing that I cannot resist mention.

One thing I was sure about when I was leaving Sweden was that I can stay if I desired to do so. Not just to study, but also with a working permit. Forever, if I wanted. Too bad I found this out two days before I left. Yes, just two days before my departure I have received a letter from the Swedish immigration office stating that I am allowed to stay, study, work or do whatever in Sweden. Thank you and good to know, although I would feel much more welcome if I were to receive it a bit earlier, nevertheless.

But what really kept me busy the morning of departure as I walked in circles around the only room in the apartment is, where the hell am I going to stuck all these papers, those few but only dishes and tons of tiny useful crap. There isn’t much choice as everything that does not come along goes to the garbage bin. And being the hamster I am, that would really be the last resort in desperation to catch that five o’clock train.

Even though the situation was a bit tense at that moment, I was at least happy that I could at least in theory take all my possessions with me. This time around the name of the game was carry all that you can carry and not 20 kg, without sharp objects, water, bare feet and in fear of latex gloves being prepared for inner inspection. That said, I am incredibly tired of flying and all the haste and unneccessary security crap associated with it. Trains are great. They might be slow, but people are more relaxed and I can take chef knives, water, wear shoes on my feet and as it turned out 108 kg of, well, stuff. Or to be more precise 54 kg per person: six backpacks and three boxes. Mind boggling, but it was actually hilarious.

Six hours of packing later, and finally, the last item gets to go into the box. Fridge is empty, stomachs are full. In the attempt to avoid wasting any food new culinary combinations are tried out. After eating sushi gari, truffles, pasta, pesto and mustard and washing everything down with milk, I didn’t wonder anymore why such dish is not on offer in any restaurant. I did, however, hope this last minute foolish experiment wouldn’t cause digestive problems on a three-day trip ahead.

The apartment is locked and stuff carried to the elevator with great amusement as this is the first time I actually lift my share of backpacks. All together they weight 44 kg and had to be carried to the train station. But once everything was on the train, the rest was pretty straight forward: sit down and enjoy the ride.

Mladen

Last two months have been quite busy, but mostly in the sense of traveling and meeting people. While at the same time I’ve tried to stay away from computers as much as possible. And it’s been great.

I’ve spent whole June traveling throughout Slovenia and Croatia and made two trips to Venice. As you can imagine one month’s time is enough to visit a lot of places. Thus I’ll mention only those that have really made a lasting impression on me.

Istrian peninsula in Croatia is a gem. I especially like the northern part which is dotted with small, picturesque villages on hilltops. The towns of Motovun and Grožnjan are an absolute must if you are in the vicinity. Both have served as a settlement since the medieval times and still retained some of that spirit within narrow, cobbled and winding pathways between stone houses.

Another great place I’ve visited in June is the Croatian coast with its thousand or so islands. The nature is absolutely fantastic and in spite of the often unfriendly and even plain rude service, I’ve really enjoyed island hopping on the northern islands of Krk, Cres, Lošinj, Ilovik and Murter. The sea on all these islands is crystal clear and since I’ve been there in off-season period in most of the places I’ve visited it was not hard to find a quiet spot and a private beach.

On this same trip I’ve also managed to visit National parks of Plitvice lakes and river Krka. It’s simply unbelievable how much water runs through these places and how green both of them are.

And the result of the similar geological processes and strucutres in Plitvice lakes and river Krka waterfalls is Križna cave in Slovenia. Now, in Slovenia there are around nine thousand caves of which I have visited only a few, but Križna cave is something special. As they want to keep the cave in as untouched state as possible, they only let in four people per day. And since it’s a water cave it is not possible to enter it if there’s been much rain in the preceding days. So it’s not exactly easy to get in, but it was definitely worth the effort and schedule juggling.

You enter the cave in caving overalls, rubber boots, with a helmet and a head lamp, which all make you fell you’re ready for a real adventure. And that’s exactly what it was. In the cave there are more than a dozen lakes, so practically the whole four hour trip is done in small rubber boats. Besides plethora of stalagmites, stalactites and columns, you also get a chance to experience moments of total darkness and total silence. And believe me, such a place is a treasure today. Once you are 70 or so meters below the ground there’s no way any light or sounds would get in … except for those you bring with you. Although the feeling could be nerve racking (imagine being lost there!), it is absolutely relaxing.

I could go on and on about this and other places, but I’ll rather let you enjoy some of the pictures from these short trips I’ve made in June–you can find them in the gallery.

Now I’m back in Finland ready for new adventures, so come back soon.

Mladen

Last weekend I’ve finally made that short trip to Estonia’s capital Tallinn which I have written about when I came back from Stockholm. Thus below you can find a list of seemingly random notes and observations from this short trip.

Going to Estonia is simple, rather quick and Finns do it almost as often as they hop on a bus or tram. And judging by the frequency of ferries and boats floating between Helsinki and Tallinn, one would quite even easily find connections with city transportation. However, on a second thought this is hardly surprising as the whole travel business to Tallinn is mainly propelled by the alcohol tourism I’ve already written about when I went to Stockholm. Although going to Tallinn is so much quicker that there are several, often sold out, boats a day connecting the two capitals. Another big difference between Stockholm and Tallinn is that in Tallinn retail businesses have developed around the idea of people getting there to buy booze. Check out the gallery for more details on that. It’s quite nuts, but I think I’m actually slowly becoming adjusted to this and might begin losing interest in booze amusement. Or maybe not.

I’ve never before been to either Estonia or Tallinn and I was pleasantly surprised with Tallinn. It’s a wonderful medieval city of completely manageable size. I’ve spent two days there and it was definitely enough for a first impression, although I will definitely return for more as there are other interesting sites around Tallinn that need to be explored. While the surprising tidbit is that the first thing upon entering Estonia I was asked by a female border control officer: “When are you going back?” Back where? Oh, the idiocy of borders.

The city of Tallinn itself has an old part which is enclosed within medieval city walls where I found a mash of cobbled narrow streets and passages. A real gem for strolling and enjoying a surprising historical and architectural varieties. The heart of old town is a small knob from atop of which you can get a fantastic view of the city and beyond, if the weather is nice … and weather-wise it was definitely a jump into the future (at least comparing to Helsinki, not to mention Jyväskylä) as there was no snow, anywhere.

Large part of the second day of my stay in Tallinn I’ve spent in the Kadriorg part of the city. It’s one of the nicest and these days is becoming even a prestigious residential area. Otherwise Kadriorg is known for it’s wooden architecture (similar to Puukäpylä in Helsinki). Just as I’ve mentioned the prestigiousness of Kadriorg I should mention that it is almost immediately evident that social differences are huge in Estonia. These are reminiscent of wild forms of capitalism based either on bad legislation or high corruption, or both. I don’t know which is the case in Estonia, but the social differences are evident even to a tourist. And just as in any society where people got rich quickly, the first thing they do is that they go crazy with their big and expensive cars, while at the same time big parts of the city are literally deteriorating and it took Estonia more than ten years to build a single museum of art. And that museum of art is KUMU in Kadriorg. The average gross income in Estonia is 520€ (for comparison, in Finland that amount is around 2500€). Enough said.

Estonia has only around 1,3 million residents and it regained its independence in 1991 after the demise of the Soviet Union (it was already independent between the 1918 and 1944 when it was recaptured by the Soviet Union). Considering how few people live in Estonia and that the Russian government used to and still thumps minorities’ rights including their languages, it is surprising that Estonians managed to preserve their language during the Soviet era at all. But even more surprising than this is that recently there have been quite strong tendencies in Estonia to reform the higher education with a brutish lack of understanding: the proposal was that the official language in institutions of higher education would be English. I have a really hard time comprehending such an idea.

There’s a lot of talk that Estonian and Finnish languages are very close. True, they do belong to the same Finno-Ugric language group (actually, linguistically they are even closer, as both languages are Baltic-Finnic). But just how close actually are Estonian and Finnish languages? Not that close. I’ve spoken about the issue to both Finns and Estonians and both could point out similarities in words and grammar whereas on the functional level languages cannot be interchanged. Thus both tend to use English for straightforward communication. Both languages don’t have a distinctive future tense, both use inflection of words and both lack grammatical gender, however Estonian words are usually much shorter than Finnish counterparts, while some words have completely different meanings in the two languages.

All in all I’ve really had a great time in Estonia and will definitely visit again. And if you get a chance, I encourage you to go.

Have a good one,

Mladen

Although I have touched a bit on the subject of the alcohol-nation relation in previous posts, believe me, I have barely touched the subject at all. And it is definitely a topic which I cannot cover in a single post. But since I’ve just yesterday experienced one of the holy grails of this relation, I thought, well, I have to begin somewhere.

The experience in question is a two day ferry trip between Helsinki and Stockholm (which actually spans three days). You might have noticed something peculiar in the previous sentence: a ferry trip between. At first I saw those daily cruises from Helsinki to Stockholm as a cool way to travel to Sweden, but boy was I wrong. For 99% of the travelers the trip has absolutely nothing to do with reaching the geographical, but rather a mental destination. People get on these ships not to travel, but, well, you’ve guessed already, to drink … and buy cheap booze (courtesy of exploiting the international waters’ taxation policies).

I can hear you saying already: “What the heck, what can a simple cruise change in people’s relation to the capital A?” But there are at least a few things you need to understand before you can put these cruises into the correct perspective. One of them is that ships do not leave only from Helsinki, but at least from Turku (the former Finnish capital) as well. Another thing is that two ships leave from Helsinki each day. Yep, no matter what, sun or hail storm, calm summer seas or frozen Baltic sea, two ships embark on this roughly 19 hour trip each day. And on top of that these ships are huge. The one I was on can accommodate more than 2500 people (which is the number of beds on the ships, thus the number of passangers gets much higher especially in the summertime when people sleep, or rather, party on the ship’s decks) and is 11 stories high. And the ship I took is not the largest one either. And above all the transportation is dirt cheap: if you make a reservation in advance the trip can cost even as little as 17 euros (that’s how much it costed me). Of course, they don’t really make money off of fares (as you’ve probably figured out already); it’s the on board shopping that brings in the most dough.

What in the world is sold on such a shopping craze that can make these trips profitable for the cruise companies? As is extensively advertised in the on board catalogues and is quite obvious from the passanger behavior indeed, you can save as much as 72% on booze if you buy it on board: anything from regular beer to wine costing 130 euros per bottle, and needless to say, everything in between. No, it doesn’t look like booze department of a duty free shop, it looks like a booze fair. And that’s exactly what people do. In fact I am sure that they would buy much more then they do as there are restrictions on how much each passanger can carry away with them. And what are the restrictions? One liter of booze, two liters of wine, 16 liters of beer - and these are one way restrictions! If you are wondering who the hell buys this much, well enough passengers that the on board stores sell even the olutkärry, or the beer carriages where you can strap on all your newly acquired booze and pull it to your doorstep. Of course, the cruise companies make sure that you don’t regret your amazing opportunity by reminding you on the back of the ticket: “Kannattaa ostaa suurin sallittu määrä!” (”It’s worthwhile buying your full allowance!”, allowance of booze of course).

True, a lot of that booze gets to go home with passengers, but you can imagine that huge amounts don’t get to see the home fridge at all. You probably still remember that I’ve emphasized the word between at the beginning of this post. And the between for a lot of passengers means just that - they get so wasted that they don’t even get to see any of the Stockholm, heck they probably don’t even get to see the harbor at all. But those that do, well, it’s no wonder that those Finns can be heard singing on the streets of Stockholm to the children’s Christmas tune “helvetin kova krapula” (”a hell of a hard hangover”) during the day.

Alcohol is one form of income on the cruises, the other being peliautomatti (the coin gambling machines). These follow you on your every step in Finland, but their population density on the ferries is much higher than the average. People mindlessly throw in tons of coins and banknotes, blinded by the fact that those machines are made for them to loose and for the owners to gain. Quite a site. People gather, sometimes several at a machine and cheaply sell their hopes. It doesn’t take a lot of smarts to connect the dots between booze and mesmerizing sounds of gambling machines. You get the picture.

Let that be all for now. However, this is just the first part of my first hand experience of the floating booze relationship between booze and Finns. Today in the afternoon I’m leaving for Tallinn to experience the second part. Stay tuned.

Cheers!

Mladen

True, I haven’t written anything in almost a month … and as all of you can imagine a lot has happened around here in all that time. I finally got to travel around Finland a bit, visited a couple of friends, met a whole bunch of new and interesting people, been to a brainstorming retreat as a part of my studies programme, had a few exams at school and experienced a plethora of other things. Which of course means that I have also been taking pictures, and a lot of them too, so do make sure you check out the gallery to get a visual glimpse of what I’ve been up to lately. OK, where should I start? Since I have not been updating the blog as things happened I will try not to think and write in chronological order but rather as things come to my mind. I hope that that won’t spell confusion for you.

I’ve probably already written at least a bit about how the university school system works here. Well, there are two periods per term and this change of periods occurred within the last month or so which means that there was a so called self-study week during which there were not supposed to be any lectures but just exams - or no school work at all for some which is the reason they end up calling this a vacation week. But this was not the case for me as I had both some lectures and a couple of exams during that week and could not really leave Jyväskylä for more than a few days. Anyways, to cut the crap, I passed both exams (Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Methodology and Digital Arts and Culture classes) … and yeah, it was interesting to see how examinations work around here. I especially preferred the open-endedness of examination as there are no multiple choice tests which was too often the case in my previous encounters with schooling. ’nuff said about that.

The more exciting part is definitely traveling, reuniting with old friends and meeting new people. It’s been fun and I have done a lot of it recently. OK, first a friend of mine invited me to her hometown of Kuopio where I’ve spent a day with her and her parents. Kuopio is a town located about 160 km northeast of Jyväskylä in the Savo region of Finland. The town is of about the same size of Jyväskylä so there’s really nothing too exciting there, but still, I have enjoyed the city as it has quite a few interesting galleries and museums. My friend’s mom had a week off at the time of my visit so she took her time to show me around town where we visited the Korttelimuseo - literally translated as ‘a block museum.’ It’s a block where they have gathered the most interesting buildings from the history of Kuopio, which almost inherently includes the history of town life in Finland as well.

But Kuopio was neither main nor the only attraction that week as I’ve spent the weekend in Helsinki. I was invited to spend a couple of days there with a professor that has been lecturing at our university about the Nordic archeology and prehistory (I wrote about him a bit already in the post about the trip to Saarijärvi in October if anyone can still remember that). As Brian is an extremely interesting and knowledgeable person I definitely grabbed the opportunity to tour the Helsinki with him. And yes, that was something as he knows a lot about the history of Nordic and Scandinavian societies, especially about Finns and Swedes, relations between the two nations and about many other local cultural peculiarities. As he is an archeologist, you can only imagine, that we have spend quite some time in the prehistory section of the Kansallismuseo (The National Museum of Finland). Yes, the artifacts are all there, and everything is neatly tagged and marked, but hey, how often do you actually get a chance to tour a an exhibition with someone who has actually researched these artifacts for several decades. Besides the Kansallismuseo I’ve also visited the Designmuseo and really enjoyed the exhibitions there as well. Of course, all the exhibitions had to do at least something with Finnish design: Nokia, Fiskars, Metso and contemporary Finnish designers. Overall impression: fantastic.

And as always, I do love to just walk the streets of any city and I have done a lot of that too just getting to know how Helsinki lives and breathes. It’s probably because of all the Art Noveau architecture that Helsinki actually reminds me quite a bit of Ljubljana, well, sort of, but it is quite a bit bigger and more definitely more metropolitan. During that first stay in Helsinki I also paid a surprise visit to my two friends who live in there and whom I have met in Jordan this past summer. OK, one of them actually knew that I will be coming to town, but the other one didn’t, so he almost crapped his pants when he saw me sitting in the bar with Olli. Imagine that. Yeah, we had a couple of beers together and as usual my evening ended up in the gutter … just kidding, I found my way to hotel pretty easily since it was 0400am and the air was rather fresh.

Then less than a week later I again took off to Helsinki. Yes, as you could tell already, I enjoy this city. Well, come on, it has more than one street, and besides that I have not been in a real city for two months. This time I’ve left Jyväskylä with one of the first trains in the morning and was in Helsinki already before 1100am (it’s a three and a half hour train ride). Finnish trains are really enjoyable, especially if you get to sit on the first floor from where you can really enjoy the landscape. Well, I did sort of, but since I had to turn in a paper on Tuesday for the Cultural Theory class, that also meant that I had to organize my time for writing the paper on the train - and yes, I have managed to finish it while traveling between Jyväskylä and Helsinki.

This second visit to Helsinki was rather different from the first one. In many ways, of course. This time I was actually visiting my friends Olli and Hannu (and stayed at Olli’s place, which I really enjoyed a lot) and spending time with them. So on Friday I visited a couple of exhibitions (Ensi Valtaamme Museot in Kiasma and Japan Pop in Tennispalatsi) and the rest of the night I guess we were drinking, if I can remember correctly. And yes, these two Finns (OK, it was not just the two of them) actually managed to get me drunk. The only thing I was really happy about was that when I woke up in an unfamiliar place in an unknown bed, I woke up alone. What a relief, one might think. Yes that evening was loads of fun for all of us. Which doesn’t mean that we did not have fun the next day as well. I am not really sure if I should admire these people or not, since the first thing they do in the morning after they have been drinking all night is, guess what, begin drinking the moment they get up and continue in this fashion until the next day. I was not able to handle that, but had fun nevertheless. But the weather was fantastic that Saturday and we visited Soumenlinna and had a few hours of fun there. Suomenlinna is located just outside Helsinki in the Helsinki archipelago and is one of the largest fortresses in the world and was built by the Swedes to show of their dominance in the Baltic region.

As I was in Helsinki at the time when the Helsinki book fair was going on I naturally visited the fair. I have to say that I was amazed and surprised at the same time that about 97% of all books exhibited there were in Finnish and that almost all (except for a few Swedish stands) all stands were occupied by Finnish publishers and book retailers. Finns really do read a lot, and I mean a lot. Just imagine this: there are a little over 5 million Finns and I have never seen so many specialized topics magazines in any other country, in local language of course. If you speak the language you can enjoy the numerous science, design, lifestyle, sauna, hobbies, literary, politics, computer, music and magazines on many other topics. And it is likewise for books: one gets an impression that if something was written, it was probably translated into Finnish as well. And that is one more motivating factor for me wanting to learn the language.

As I have already mentioned, the beginning of November the second period begun at school, which mostly means that I have some new courses. And this time I have actually decided to take a couple of courses in Finnish as well. To say the least, these really are amusing: I can sit in a lecture room, pay attention to what the lecturer has to say, read the slides and most of the time I type gazillions of words into my dictionary. It’s hard as hell, but I don’t think any of you can actually imagine how much fun am I having in those classes (aside from the fact that I can just chuckle when everyone is wholeheartedly laughing at some joke … and I of course chuckle at the fact that most of the time I have no clue why they are laughing). And it is such classes that tickle my brain. Got carried away there and almost forgot to mention what these classes are about; they are the Introduction to Software Engineering (yep, rather basic, but let’s not make it too hard, shall we) and Man and Machine or HCI. I’ll definitely take more of these in next term as well and hopefully will be able to keep my sense of humor and understand at least a tad bit more.

All the other classes I’m taking are in English. Nordic Mythologies: now this one is really fun and I was really looking forward to it (and yes, it’s exactly what the name of the class says it is). Then I am taking the Aesthetics of Everyday. A rather theoretical course, but I enjoy it immensely nevertheless. We’re mostly discussing the works of Barthes, Benjamin, Crary, Maffesoli, Vattimo and Virilio. Then just this week I will be attending a Nordic Net Art conference also known as Live Herring. This period I’m also taking Scandinavian Film, Internet Research and Suomi Yksi classes. So, again my schedule is rather busy.

But the best of all so far this period was the Digital Culture brainstorming two day retreat at the Konnevesi biological research station some 60 km east of Jyväskylä. This research facility is part of the Jyväskylän Yliopisto. And it was pretty cool as we didn’t really have to worry about much more than brainstorming itself: they cooked the food for us, the sauna was there and the company was enjoyable. Hm, I just hope that they will be organizing more of these kinds of retreats. Oops, almost forgot to mention what we were brainstorming on: about the topics of our MA theses. I guess it was more or less useful, but I already know what I want to research and write about and thus didn’t really expect that I’ll hear some revolutionary ideas about my topic.

I guess I could go on and on about what I am up to since there’s so much exciting stuff going on here. Here’s what I’ll do (but I definitely cannot promise that), I’ll try to write more often and thus include more details as they occur. Which means that you have to come back for more as there’ll be more interesting stuff to read about soon.

Mladen