Entries tagged with “finnish” from kotaraindustries.com, the helsinki branch

It is now time for me to tell you about Hevisaurus.  My friendly neighborhood KISS Army member taught me about them, and they are basically a dinosaur heavy metal band for children.  This is one of those things that it's best not to explain, but just to witness:



These guys are actual real musicians from real bands (um, like DIO!?) and actually play wearing those costumes.  And even though it's obviously a total gimmick and geared towards the kiddies, their songs are actually good.  There is a particularly funny forum about them on cracked.com, but I've pulled out the choice comments here:

• "A triceratops. With a keytar."
• "This answers basically every question I ever had about Finland."
• "No matter what happens in life, a song where a dinosaur who plays heavy metal asks the audience 'Is it your bed-time already?' is awesome."
• "That's absurd. Dinosaurs and mammoths didn't live anywhere near the same time.  At the end of the Cretaceous, the only mammals were little nocturnal tree-dwelling varmints the size of rats.  I'm beginning to question the scientific accuracy of this entire enterprise."

They usually play at actual rock clubs (where they of course make it all ages, and it is hilarious to imagine Tavastia full of 3 year olds), but right now they're doing daily shows at Linnanmäki which is the local amusement park.  Last night, I had the honor of seeing these creatures play live.  It was the weirdest thing ever.  First of all, it wasn't really a concert, it was a musical/play thing.  On one hand it was a little bit disappointing because they used a soundtrack and only mimed playing their instruments.  On the other hand, it was totally great because I had to try to follow this plotline:

So there was a little boy who didn't want to go to sleep because he's nervous about starting school the next year and he can't say his "R's" properly, and so his mom reads him a book about dinosaurs and how they all died off 65 million years ago except five dinosaur eggs remained.  Then he falls asleep and/or doesn't fall asleep and gets his dagger and alarm clock and stuffed woolly mammoth toy and goes into the forest where these 5 eggs are, and these prehistoric girls in glasses and shiny skirts start dancing around and then suddenly the eggs hatch and dinosaurs burst out of the eggs already wearing leather jackets and holding instruments, speaking perfect Finnish and immediately start rocking out. 

Then the little boy makes friends with the dinosaurs and gives them all high fives and they start talking about pizza and popcorn...then out of nowhere these gigantic muffins covered in popcorn come out on stage dancing.  THEN after a snack and another song, they move the little boy's bed to the middle of the stage and pull the covers back and find another giant egg, but this one is hot pink/purple and suddenly a witch appears who really, really wants that egg so she can make an omelet.  Then there is a big battle for the egg that equals more singing and dancing and then some spinning...and all this activity causes the egg to hatch, and out pops a baby DRAGON.  The baby dragon makes friends with all the dinosaurs and the little boy, then suddenly they're all floating around in the sky and then the dragon sings a duet with Herra Hevisaurus. 

Then the little boy realizes he really should be going home before his mom gets mad, so he says goodbye to all the dinosaurs and the baby dragon and treks home...but forgets his woolly mammoth toy.  This is a perfect segue for Hevisaurus to sing their "Goodnight, Last Mammoth" song, and then the baby dragon takes the woolly mammoth toy and finds the boy's house and sneaks into his bedroom and returns it while he sleeps, but can't get out because the magic closet door is stuck.  Then some other stuff happens and then the little boy finally learns to say his "R's" and everyone comes out to sing a big finale song together, including the witch, and the backup dancers.  (But not including the two roadies who have been moving the drum and keyboard risers around.)  The end.

1. Keep in mind that this whole thing was in Finnish and I only know a tiny tiny bit of Finnish, so my entire summary here is based on what I saw and the few explanations that Sinttu was able to whisper to me.
   
   
2. I had to ask Sinttu several questions throughout, and the question I asked most frequently was, "Am I on drugs right now???"
   
   
3. There was one part where the dinosaurs went backstage for a nap, and something happened with the witch, and all the little kids started screaming "HERATYS!!!!!!!" (This means "WAKE UP!")  I mean, these kids were going apeshit about it, particularly the little girl right behind my right ear.
   
   
4. Also this same little girl knew every word to every song, and sang them.  Loudly.  And off-key  It would have been annoying...if it weren't so dang cute.

And so dang weird.  Then the evening got even weirder when we went to a heavy metal karaoke bar, but that's a story for another time.  (Spoiler: it was a DINOSAUR heavy metal karaoke bar!) 

I have been taking Finnish lessons for 3 months now.  And although I have a vocabulary of maybe a few hundred Finnish words, when it comes time to assemble them into sentences my brain fully locks up.  I'm also incapable of listening and understanding what is being said.  .

For example, today in class the teacher was introducing us to the words for professions.  And when she told us the word for hairdresser, she decided to illustrate with a little personal story.  She told the entire story in Finnish (but very slowly and used lots of pantomime).  I thought I was following along okay.  I certainly didn't get all of what she was saying, but I felt I got the general idea, which I thought was:

Her hairdresser has a little 7 year old girl who hangs out in the salon.  And when my teacher goes in for her hair appointments, the little girl wants to play house.  The little girl plays the mother, the hairdresser plays the father, and my teacher plays the daughter.  Then while the hairdresser is doing my teacher's hair, my teacher brushes the little girl's hair.

After she finished the story, she asked us how much we understood, and then summarized the story in English, which was:

She has been friends with her hairdresser since she was seven years old.  They used to play house, and he would always want to brush her hair.

Sigh...  Not even CLOSE.  I managed to introduce a whole character into the story who wasn't even there!

Earlier today, I was testing my Finnish chops over IM with my friend.  That, too, was a disaster:

sakke: yo haleemeister
halee: tervehdys, herr sakke
sakke: :)
sakke: excellent! (just add an "a" to the end of herr)
halee: so you mean, "excellent...but wrong"
halee: suomea on vaikeaaaaaaaaaaaa
sakke: awesome! (but it's "suomi" sorry...:)
halee: i quit.
sakke: you're doing well!
sakke: i understood everything isn't that what counts?
halee: really?  i thought "suomi" was the country and "suomea" was the language?
halee: no?
sakke: no
sakke: suomi is the language as well
sakke: "minä opiskelen suomea" so the "suomi" just changes a bit because it becomes the object of the sentence or something
halee: ahhhh.
sakke: it's the same like "minä katson televisiota" even though the word is televisio
halee: gotcha.
halee: i mean, "minä ymmärrä"
sakke: you forgot the "n" at the end of "ymmärrä" :)
halee: N!

So in conclusion, I tried to say three of the super easiest sentences in Finnish history (noted in bold), and I didn't get one single one correct!  Will this ever click?  Brain...come on!  I need you!

I seem to always luck out with landlords.  The landlords of my apartment here in Helsinki may rank as the sweetest ever.  (You may remember them, you met them before.)  Eero is really kind-hearted and checks in on me over email from time to time to make sure my apartment is warm enough, that I don't have the swine flu, to see how my Finnish lessons are going, etc.

He stopped by my apartment briefly last night to let in a maintenance worker.  I had told him I wouldn't be home to let the worker in, but I got confused with the dates so we were both very surprised to see each other.  Afterwards, he followed up by email....

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from    Eero
to    Halee
date    Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:55 PM
subject    today
   
Hello Halee agein!
 
Fortunatelly the replacement of the meter was not a major operation  ; no pulling down of any cupboard as anticipated.  I was so pleased  to  see you, hope you can limit your working hours somehow !  Winter can be a little depressing, but pretty soon the sun willl be shineing brightly and reflect intensively back from the snow.  Then folks get the natural dose of vitamin D !!
 
Eero

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from    Halee
to    Eero
date    Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 9:55 PM
subject    Re: today

Hi!  I am so sorry that you came all the way over to let the worker in when I was actually home.  I got confused with the dates, I hope it did not waste too much of your time.  The worker left a few minutes after you, he was very fast.

It was nice to see you, too!  I was happy because today (tänään?) there was sunshine (aurinko?), I can feel spring (kevät?) coming soon.  The winter (talvi?) has been beautiful (kaunis?), but I am tired (väsynyt?) of it and ready for a change!  Hopefully March (maaliskuu?) will be warmer (lämmin?).

ready for vitamin D,

halee

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from    Eero
to    Halee
date    Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 4:07 PM
subject    Re: today

Hi Halee,
 
Don t worry of my lost time. Would I be any wiser  watching instead Dr. Phil on TV yesterday, hardly.!  
 
Your two lines resemble poetry. Here comes translated version in finnish.
 
Oli hauska nähdä myös!  Olen onnellinen, koska tänään ( today ? ) aurinko ( sun ? ) paistaa, Voin tuntea kevään ( spring? ) tulevan pian.

Talvi ( winter ? ) on ollut kaunis, mutta olen väsynyt ( tired ) siihen ja valmis muutokseen!  Toivottavasti maaliskuu ( march ) on lämpimämpi ( warmer ? )
 
Eero

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I went to my colleague's house for dinner tonight.  This colleague is a Spanish guy married to a Finnish girl, and they have an adorable 4-year-old son who speaks both Spanish and Finnish.  The little boy is too young to have learned much English yet, although he apparently fakes like he speaks English sometimes by walking around jabbering and littering his jabber with the only English words he knows: "chicken" and "fish."

My Finnish is only at the level of a 1 month old baby, but my Spanish is decent enough to carry on a conversation with a 4-year-old.  So this little boy and I became fast friends.

When we were in the house, he wouldn't talk much.  He mostly just pointed and giggled at me, giggled at the toys he brought in to show me, at his coloring book, whatever.  But when we got in the car so they could give me and Leslie a lift to the metro station...the little boy suddenly became very chatty.

After arguing with him in Spanish for 10 minutes on why he shouldn't open the door while the car was moving, he took off his glove and held it in my face.  This conversation ensued:

Boy: "íCómelo!" ("Eat it!")
Me:  "Ew, ¡no!" ("Ew, no!")
Boy: "íCÓMELO!" ("EAT IT!")
Me:  "No.  Tiene el olor de....stinky." ("No, it smells like...stinky.")
Boy: "Chicken?" ("Chicken?")

I had begged him all evening to say his English words to me, and as it turns out, all I had to say was "stinky" and he would be ready to talk about chicken.

Today is Finnish Independence Day.  I'm still trying to figure this out, but from the best I can tell it is like a combination of 4th of July, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, and Oscar night.  The entire day is spent in celebration of Finland declaring their independence from Russia in 1917.  (I think.)  They have parades, dignitaries go hang out in cemeteries to honor the dead soldiers, they wheel out the remaining veterans (apparently there are about 2 left) to clap at them, and then 2,000 special people are selected to attend the President's Ball.  At the ball, they all wear super fancy dresses (usually by Finnish designers) and tuxedos, queue up for their chance to shake the President's hand, and then the Finnish equivalent of Joan Rivers and Steven Cojocaru run commentary on what everyone is wearing.

It is basically 2 hours of this:



I'm about an hour and a half in, and I have seen:

• Several women whose dresses look like they drifted right in from a figure skating performance.
• One girl who had her hair in one of those pompadour-style ponytails, and had pink rhinestones lining the sides of her head like racing stripes.
• James Lipton!?!  No, sorry.  Fakeout.
• The infinite patience of President Tarja "Conan O'Brien" Halonen, who has to shake the hands of 2,000 people.

My little nieces are very cute and very curious about Finland.  (Hi, girls!)  We decided that they would give me assignments to go investigate, and then I would report back with the answers.

Today's topic is Finnish currency.

While the rest of Scandinavia is still hanging onto their various kronii (the Swedish kronor, the Norwegian kroner, and the Danish kroner), Finland's currency is the Euro, and has been since 2002.

Before that, their currency was called the Finnish Markka, and I actually found a few little finnmark coins here in my new apartment that I will be pocketing for my foreign currency collection.  Finland was among the first European countries to adopt the new Euro currency when it was first introduced in 2002.  Other countries using the Euro are Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, Germany and Greece...so if I decide to go visit any of those countries, I won't have to convert my cash to use it!  Awesome!  (Too bad I get paid in US dollars and the exchange rate is not very favorable right now.  Not so awesome!)

The euro symbol looks like this: €.  Wikipedia says: "Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) - a reference to the cradle of European civilisation - and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to 'certify' the stability of the euro."

I'm not sure why the author put 'certify' in quotes.  I guess better 'certify' than 'stability'.

Anyway, it has been very weird because I've had to update all my Excel documents to be formatted in the Euro, and they usually put the currency symbol after the numbers, and not before like we do in America.  For example: 1.389,25 €.  Did you catch that other tricky thing there?  They use commas for the decimal, and periods for the thousands comma.  My Excel documents are all sorts of confused.

Paper money ranges from 5€ to 500€, all the same size but in varying and exciting colors:




Coins range from one Eurocent to 2€, and if you know me at all, you know that I have been crusading to kill the paper $1 bill in the US, and move to the $1 coin...so I LOVE having not only a 1€ coin, but a 2€ coin, too:



So having said all that, forget everything I just said.  Because the real Finnish currency looks like this:



Because absolutely nobody uses cash for anything.  No transaction is too small to just charge it.  They don't use paper checks for anything, either.  All transactions are electronic, and they laugh at me when I ask about checks and tell me they haven't been used here since the 70s.

So I'm currently working on a (probably) overly-ambitious project to organize every photo that has ever passed into my possession, ever.  This involves editing all the image files' metadata to ensure the correct date/time is embedded, as well as doing all sorts of extra content tagging for location, people, events, etc.  And in going through every photo you've ever had, ever, you can get pretty nostalgic.

On another note, the weather had finally gotten consistently nice and sunny for the past two weeks.  But yesterday and today have been cloudy/rainy/pissy, and have immediately filled me with dread at the thought of 9-10 months of rain to come.  So since it's an icky day, I'm here at the house tagging photos and I just so happened to be on the folder from my trip to Scandinavia in 2006.  Cue music to reminisce by....

I was at the Kiasma Art Museum in Helsinki, and wandered into a viewing room for a video installation.  The featured video was called "Helsinki Complaints Choir," and the concept was that a composer conducted a survey asking a bunch of Finns what their biggest complaints about life were.  She then consolidated all the complaints, set them to music, and got a large choir to sing the song about all these random (and very Finnish) frustrations of daily life.  It was completely charming and wonderful...and I loved it so much that I sat in that video installation room and watched the video from start to finish three or four times.

Just like I did a few minutes ago as I was tagging it.  And sadly, these two lines caught my attention as far too relevant:





The rest of it isn't quite so depressing: Helsinki Complaints Choir on YouTube.

I customized and bought myself a pair of Nike ID sneakers.  Lookie:



If you'll notice, on the inside they'll embroider the phrase/word/proper noun of your choice.  I agonized over what to put on mine.  "Kotara Industries" was the obvious choice, but I really wanted to use some foreign words to make my shoes seem more exciting and exotic, and fake like I got them in a faraway land.  I decided it should definitely be a Scandinavian language.  Swedish was the obvious choice since they were the colors of the Swedish flag.  I decided on my theme, and went about figuring it the words in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish....

• Swedish - Vänster / Höger
  Damn!  Nike does not accept special characters!
  
  
• Norwegian - Høyre venstre
  Damn!  Nike continues to not accept special characters!
  
  
• Finnish - Vasempaan / Oikeaan
  Really?  No 'äs or ää's or äää's???  Yay!!  I really wanted Finnish the whole time, anyway, it's my favorite.
  

And what does "Vasempaan / Oikeaan" mean?  It means "Left / Right."

Well, I hope it means "Left / Right".  With my luck I probably got it exactly wrong, and some Finnish person is going to stop me on the street and ask me why my shoes say "Gone" and "Prerogative."

So today I was featured on our intranet homepage in an in-depth interview:

So, Halee, what's your favorite...?

... film/movie that you've recently watched - Top Secret

... reality TV show - n/a....unless Match Game '76 counts

... childhood TV show - Land of the Lost

... song - "Take on Me" by A-ha

... news source - What Would Tyler Durden Do? (wwtdd.com)

... car - Gravedigger

... book or music CD - John McEnroe's autobiography

... sports to watch - tennis

... item of clothing - my calculator watch

... landmark - Southfork Ranch

... game - blackjack

... amusement park ride - anything at Dollywood!

... city - Helsinki

... candy bar or candy - 100 Grand

... time of day - 8:30PM

... time of year - springtime

... fruit - banana

... breakfast - cinnamon rolls

... cocktail or beverage - hummingbird (half raspberry framboise, half pear cider)

... thing about Americans - our ability to turn any cause into an excuse for a car magnet

... language - Finnish, which is wonderfully robotic and angry-sounding and has words with 25+ letters

... compliment - "Wow, you have a spreadsheet for everything."

... thing about ZAAZ - my window seat with a wonderful view of downtown Seattle



And I am quite tickled to report that my article was immediately followed by this one:

The long, strange journey of Soundgarden's Chris Cornell

At the corner of Fifth and Bell, among what is now a canyon of condos, sits one tiny piece in my own little Seattle rock-history guide: There, in a mid-'80s dive bar, was the first place I saw Soundgarden.  more...