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

It was a dark basement.  The drummer made eyes with the girls on the front row, took off his shirt, and took his place behind his drum kit.  The lead guitar player slung his guitar over his shoulder and made sure his tattoos were visible.  The bassist fluffed his hair and assumed the standard bassist wide-leg stance.  The singer was nowhere to be seen.

After the rest of the band started playing the intro the first song, he appeared from the wings.  His hair was blond and voluminous.  His bandanas were plentiful.  His leather fingerless gloves were mismatched.  His pants were skin tight, and belted (despite the pants being lycra).  His denim jacket had the KISS logo on the back.  His eyeliner and lip gloss were flawless.  He took to the stage, and each step was a high kick that would be the envy of any Rockette or Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader.

Welcome to the Reckless Love gig.

There have been a lot of these throwback hair bands over the last few years.  Like The Darkness.  And Steel Panther.  But I always feel like those guys are playing with a sarcastic "wink-wink, isn't this funny and retro?" undertone.  Not so with Reckless Love.  When I hear their songs or watch their videos, I'm instantly whisked away in my mind to my basement in 1988, playing pool with teased hair, and listening to Poison.  Actually, there is a lot about Reckless Love that reminds me of Poison.  Can you spot the similarities?

                        


It was a small venue, so Anji and I were able to squeeze our way to the very front to have an unobstructed view of the band.  There was lots of eye contact.  And winking.  And lip puckering.  And pelvic thrusting.  And additional high kicks.  In fact, anytime there was a break in the song, Olli would just break into high kicks and I'm not sure how the bass player made it through the whole show without getting kicked in the head. 

All in all, ridiculously fun show.  When it was over, I was sad to leave the warm embrace of 1988 and come back upstairs.  I wanted to stay in that time warp basement, lost in the bass player's eyes, forever.

(This post is the closest thing I've ever written to fan fiction.  But it was real.  This post was fan non-fiction.)

In honor of it being -25 DEGREES CELCIUS today (that's -13 F!?!), I think it's high time that I talk about the cold and the snow.  I was reading about average temperatures in Helsinki yesterday to try to understand when it will warm up, and I was surprised to see that it's been about 10 degrees colder than the average since I've been here.  I confronted my boss/client about that today, and he said, "Oh yeah...this is like the coldest winter in Helsinki, well, in my lifetime." 

Great.

Actually, I've adjusted better than I thought I would.  (Which isn't saying much because I expected instant hypothermic death when I stepped outside.)  Obviously I'm used to Texas weather where there are only a few super-cold and/or snowy days per year.  The snow is an exciting and rare event in Texas.  Here in Helsinki, it's a daily reality.

Sidewalks
All the sidewalks are completely snowed over, and have been for months.  I can't tell you how much snow is there, but it's enough that it's difficult to visually distinguish where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.  Someone goes around town and scrapes all the sidewalks, and then sprinkles them with gravel and/or sand and/or salt to make them safer for walking.  The snow gets pretty hard-packed, and when you walk on it in rubber soled boots, it makes the weirdest sound.  I've struggled to define the sound which is something between a "crunch" and a "squeak", and the best I can come up with is "squoonch."  (And yes, I did double-check that "squoonch" wasn't in urbandictionary.com before I published this.)

As long as it stays below freezing, all is well.  It's been very weird to learn and accept the fact that it getting above freezing is a BAD thing.  Below is good because all the streets and sidewalks just stay snowy.  If it thaws, it will freeze again then you have to walk on black ice instead of white powdery snow.


Bus/Tram Stops
Every time I walk up to my tram stop, I immediately get annoyed because I see that everyone around the stop is smoking, and that I'm going to have to stand in the middle of all that stinky cigarette smoke while I wait for my ride. Then I realize no one is smoking, it's just their breath!

Streets

Pretty pristine white snow + dirty cars = volcanic ash snow nastiness. 











Cars
When I first arrived, my dad was very worried about me not having a car here.  Dad, I don't want a car here.  See Exhibit A at left.











Piles of Scraped Snow
All that scraped snow from the streets and sidewalks has to go somewhere.  And it usually ends up on random street corners in a huge pile.  This one you see behind the white car is a small one.  Many of them are the height of two cars stacked on top of each other.










Drifts and Sparkles
One of the wonderful things about Helsinki is that even though it's very urban, there are still lots of areas within the city that have little pockets of nature.  When I walk to my bus stop from the office, I walk through a semi-wooded area where there are pure untouched, unstomped snowdrifts.  And when it's dusk (which is usually), the streetlights catch all the little sparkles in the snow and it seriously is so pretty it just takes your breath away.  Unfortunately there is no way to capture that in a photograph.  I think it's probably more magical and accurate if you just imagine it, anyway.

And speaking of beautiful snowy, icy nature...


Trees

















In conclusion, Helsinki is coooooooold.  But you know what?  Even though there are definitely moments when I'm completely freezingly miserable (i.e. can't feel my appendages, having chapped lips/nose/eyes, lungs burning from the arctic air, slipping on ice and falling), when I look around at the landscape, it's pretty amazingly beautiful.  So beautiful, in fact, that it makes me forget how cold I am...

This post is pretty outdated, since the events contained here actually happened weeks ago.  Oops.  You'll understand momentarily, because I was obviously in no shape to write in the day(s) after it all happened, and then I've been out of town for the past week.

So the only friends I've really made so far are the girls from the office.  Unfortunately, it's not the office I actually go to every day since I sit at the client's office and not with the other agency people, so it's a real treat when I get to hang out with them.  The day after the sauna, the office girls (heretofore to be referred to as The Wundergirls) invited me out for drinks.  It was a Thursday.  In Helsinki, that can mean only one thing:  you are going to Kaarle to drink cheap sparkling wine and dance on tables.

My new American-friend-in-Finland Joe explains:

"It is a typically Finnish metastasized after-work party in which 30-50 year olds act like they just discovered this amazing new substance, alcohol, that makes you act crazy.  It is really funny how in Finland at every age people act like frat boys when you pump them with beer, and the Finnish definition of going out for a beer implies that you will not remember how you got home.  I have Finnish friends who are married with kids and go out once a month or something, and if they can remember how they got home or if they do not have a mind-numbing hangover the next day they get mad at themselves for not drinking enough!"

We ate at a Tex-Mex place (irony duly noted), and then headed to Kaarle early so we wouldn't have to wait in line to get in.  I'm sure I've complained about how expensive everything here is, but there is one thing that is dirt cheap: those dang bottles of sparkling wine!  If you know me, you know that I am not supposed to have alcoholic beverages with bubbles.  I'm certainly not supposed to have a bottle and a half's worth of alcoholic beverages with bubbles.

Needless to say, I don't remember the second half of the evening.  Here are the scattered memories I do have:

• Hearing the Finnish version of "Is This the Way to Amarillo?"  (Irony duly noted AGAIN.)
  
  
• Going to the bathroom and realizing halfway through that I hadn't bothered to shut the stall door.
  
  
• Standing on the booth seat and dancing like I was in a Scandal video being chased by The Warrior.
  
  
• Practicing my pronunciation of "Pohjoinen Hesperiankatu."
  
  
• Being walked down to the entry way by one of the Wundergirls, and having her help me put my coat on and putting me in a cab.  I don't remember deciding to leave or wanting to leave, I think it was decided on my behalf.
  
  
• Riding in the cab, and suddenly throwing up in my own mouth.  I was terrified of getting anything anywhere in the cab, so I just held it.  Then the cab driver asked me something, I forgot about what was in my mouth, and so I answered him and got puke all over my knee.
  

Now that that's explained, today in an email one of the Wundergirls addressed me as "Vomit Stain Lady" to which Leslie suggested I start going by "VSL".  And that looks like "YSL" aka "Yves Saint Laurent", which makes me laugh so hard that it went from something so nasty to so classy!  I will get to work monogramming everything immediately.

So the story starts like this: A Finnish girl, a German girl, and an American girl walk into a sauna...

I finally got invited to my very first sauna, which if you didn't know, is about the most authentic Finnish experience you could ever hope for. Finns invented the sauna. "Sauna" is one of the precious few words in the English language that actually came from Finnish. (Only we say it wrong. It should be "SOW-na" and not "SAW-na.") These people have personal saunas in their homes, it is a totally integral part of their culture. (Reminder, it is below freezing here for a huge percentage of the year. These people need to stay warm somehow!)

One of my agency colleagues knew I was new to Finland, so she invited me to join her and a German colleague who is in town for the week. (I am not completely convinced she invited me out of 100% niceness...I'm sure part of it was for her own entertainment to see how hard a prudish American would squirm at all the nudity.)  She instructed me to bring a "towel, shampoo, and washing things." I stressed. "What kind of towel? Big towel, or little towel? Should I try to bring a classic white towel? Shoot, I don't have a white towel, I'm going to look like an idiot! Well, I'll bring a big blue one and a big brown one, and decide which one to use when I get there when I see what colors of towels other people have. Oh, and I'll bring this small orange microfiber quickdry towel, too, just in case." I think I was hyper-focusing on the towel situation to take my mind off the other more pressing issue: THE IMPENDING PUBLIC NUDITY.

Here's how it works:

Step 1 - Drink beforehand, and buy more beers to take to the sauna, as it's BYOB.

Step 2 - Walk up to the front door of the sauna building, past all the people sitting out front in zero-degree weather wearing nothing but towels, and try not to freak out at how cold it is and how they are all naked underneath those towels. This public sauna place that we went to is in a working class neighborhood, and it's very old-school. It was built in the 1920s, and is one of the few wood-burning saunas in town:



Step 3 - Open the door of the building, and immediately get hit in the nose with the smell of sweat. Clean sweat, but sweat.

Step 4 - Pay the nice man €10. Give him a few extra if you want the birch whip thingie. (More on that in a minute.)

Step 5 - Go upstairs, and open the door to the women's changing area. (Yes, men and women's saunas are separate.) Try not to laugh and/or freak out when you open the door to find a buck naked 10 year old boy, jumping up and down, shouting "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!"

Step 6 - Quickly ask where the toilet is so you can go collect yourself and give yourself a pep talk, and quietly allow yourself a quick freakout at all the boobies you just saw on the way in.

Step 7 - Come back, find a locker, just start stripping your clothes off, and pretend it's not a big deal. ALL your clothes. (It is considered unsanitary to wear a bathing suit in the sauna.)

Step 8 - Proceed to the next chamber, which is a shower room, and bring your towels and shampoo and soap and stuff. Take a shower out in the open, wondering if there is a peephole somewhere like on Porky's. Wash your hair, scrub your arms and legs and everywheres. This shower is not for your benefit, it is for the sauna to keep it clean. Look out for the naked toddler boy who is going around trying to steal everyone's shampoo.

Step 9 - Wrap yourself in your big towel and grab your small towel to sit on inside the sauna. Then have your Finnish friend laugh at you for wrapping yourself in the big towel, reminding you that "it's going to be quite warm in there, you really don't need it." Realize that you were already just naked in front of these two strangers for the past 5 minutes while showering, and it wasn't that big of a deal. Take a deep breath, quit being so uptight, and shimmy out of your big towel.

Step 10 - Proceed to the sauna chamber:



Step 11 - If you want to be hardcore about it, go to the top row where it's the hottest. Otherwise, pick a place further down. There are these little wooden seat thingies that you put down so you're not sitting directly on the hot stone steps. And you either sit on your towel, or use a disposable sauna mat. Sit and relax, taking deep breaths, basking in the heat, and enjoy. After a few minutes, you forget you're naked. After a few more minutes, you can tell how good your circulation is, and blood is getting to every faraway appendage. After a few more minutes, you're covered in sweat and condensation. After a few more minutes, going outside starts to sound appealing.

Step 12 - Go find your big towel, wrap up in it, grab your beers and head outside! This is actually fairly tame, because if you go to the saunas out in the countryside, they follow up the sauna by jumping into an icy lake!?

Step 13 - Sip your beers and laugh at all the steam coming off your body and head.

Step 14 - Go back to the shower, wash off again, and head back into the sauna. If you want to have the fully Finnish experience, you take this little bouquet of birch branches ("vihtas") that have been soaking in water, and you basically whip yourself with them. I've read about this many times and thought it sounded completely retarded. But it wasn't. The birch smells really good, and whipping yourself is kind of like exfoliating. (My Finnish friend said it's a really good cure for cellulite.) After you do it, your skin feels all good and tingly and moisturized.

Step 15 - Repeat steps 8-13 as many times as you please.

Step 16 - Go home in a woozy relaxed daze, and have the best night's sleep you've had in ages.

It was the nicest, most relaxing, most enjoyable evening. The nudity thing which had initially stressed me out so much turned out to be no big deal at all. Once you're in there and it becomes obvious that no one else cares about what your body looks like, and nobody gives a second thought to being naked in front of strangers, you kinda forget that you think it's weird, too. I will totally go again. There are a couple of other places in Helsinki that are a swimming hall/sauna combo, so I think I'd like to try that out, too.

There are lots of Finnish sayings around the sauna, but I think I like this one best: "All men are equal, and more so in the sauna."

Officially, I have been homeless since August 31st.  I am very very happy to report that I am 100% completely moved in and settled into my new permanent apartment in Helsinki.  I no longer live out of suitcases.  I have a kitchen where I can cook meals for myself.  I have a bed with my sheets and blankets on it. 

For such a homebody, it has been a very trying two months to not have a place to call home.

Would you like to meet my new home?  No?  Too bad.

The name of my new street is Pohjoinen Hesperiankatu, which means North Hesperian Street.  Hesperiankatu also has a south version on the opposite side of a park that is just outside my door.  Middle picture is the front door of my building:







Here is the outside of the building, along with my cutesy little address cube:







You can either take the creepy curvy stairs up to the third floor, or the even more creepy tiny/terrifying elevator, then voila!  My door!  With my name on it!







When you first enter the unit, you're basically in the kitchen if you step in and take about a half step to the right.  It's small, but does have lots of good counter space and decent storage.  Storage includes those rad shelves that serve double-duty as a dish drying rack, just like at the other place.  (This must be standard here?)  I didn't bring much kitchen stuff with me, but luckily the place is pretty well stocked, including these dishes?  With grapes on them?  And peaches?  I miss my green Crazy Daisy Corelle dishes, but these will do, I guess.

 





You can tell from the picture that the kitchen is kind of a hallway, and at the end of the hallway is the bathroom.  Or maybe I should call it a "bath closet." It was really tough to take photos because it's so cramped in there.  The bathroom is my least favorite part of this apartment.  There is absolutely zero storage, not one shelf or cabinet other than than tiny one under the vanity mirror.  The floor tiles aren't heated like in the other apartment.  There is no towel warmer.  And the whole room utterly reeks of cologne.  (I kind of wish the landlords hadn't told me that an Italian guy lived here before me, because now I just obsess about that cologne smell and how there is probably chest hair embedded in all the furniture.)

I included a picture of the washing machine, so you can see how weird it is.  I showed it to my sister Staci over video Skype, and she said, "What IS that?  A cheese grater??" It's the washing machine chamber, and you have to un-hinge it and it's so weird and small and I'm going to have to do laundry every other day, dangit. And then have all my wet clothes strewn across the apartment.







When you walk in the front door, if you keep walking about 5 steps forward instead of turning right into the kitchen, you are in the living area.  It has a sofa, a weird section of the wall framed around the sofa that has inexplicably been painted mustard yellow, two green sitting chairs, a table with a jambox and a candle on it, a TV and DVD player, and a small green bugle-bottomed dining table.  I was shocked to learn this morning that the DVD player actually plays Region 1/US DVDs!?  Yay!








And finally, the bedroom.  When you're sitting on the sofa in the living room, you're staring directly across through some French doors to see the bed in the bedroom.  There is also a big desk in there, and the little orange bugle-bottomed chair matches all the orange lights and buttons on my laptop and gets me all giddy.  The bed is very weird, it is literally just two twin beds smushed together.  And each mattress is only about 4 inches thick!  However, it is very comfortable and I love having the little booklights right above my head.





And that is that!  Even though it's a lot smaller than my Seattle apartment, it feels bigger since there is so much open space.  With the bed that can easily be dissected into two, the couch, and the air mattresses I will buy soon...I am ready for visitors.  Come see me!

When I first arrived, I stayed at a little temporary apartment.  I wanted to post pictures of it before now, but it was so small (300 square feet, aka 28 square meters) that it was impossible to tidy up because there was no storage space for all my crap.  But I got all of my stuff out of there this morning and moved into my permanent apartment, so I took some photos of the old place to share with you...

Street sign - This is the name of the street I was living on, pronounced "Tur-lurn-KAA-tu."  All the street signs (even in the busy parts of downtown) are posted on the sides of the buildings nearest the corner.  I can't imagine driving here, because these signs are very small and pretty hard to see...definitely no intense green hanging over the street all in your face with reflective lettering in size 13,389 font.  Every sign (street or otherwise) is listed in both Finnish (Töölönkatu) and Swedish (Tölögatan):





Apartment Building - This the entire apartment building, and then a closeup of the doorway.  I love the little cubes with the address numbers on them, they're like that everywhere.  Like dice!  Something interesting that I learned the hard way is that just because it's 26 on this side of the street, don't expect 25 and 27 to be directly across the street.  They don't skip numbers for extra wide buildings, they always go in sequence so it could happen that you could be in 26 on the west side of the street and be directly across from 33 on the east side of the street.





Stairs to unit - I was on the second floor (if you'll remember from the UPS fiasco), so these are the stairs leading up to the higher floors:





Door to unit - This is the door to my little unit.  And me unlocking the door to my little unit.  And a close up of the strange European keys.  So medieval-looking:





Living room - this is basically what you see right when you walk in the front door.  No, that's a lie.  The thing directly across from the door is the toilet in the bathroom, which is an odd way to welcome someone.  But if you sidestep that and look left, you see the living area:





Living room/bedroom - This is just another angle of the living room, taken from the doorway of the kitchenette.  This gives you an idea of how very, very small the place is.  That red thing on the left side of the living room is not another sofa, it's the bed:





Living room/kitchenette - Another angle of the living room taking from standing on the bed, and now you can see where the kitchenette fits into the layout. 





Kitchenette - Small, but functional.  That's a refrigerator/freezer closest to you on the right, then a small stove range and oven behind that.  On the left is a microwave.  And check out the cabinets above the sink, I am so impressed with how clever this is...the shelves above the sink are wire racks!  So you can dry your dishes, yet still have them out of sight!





Bathroom - Okay, so this is really what you see when you first walk in.  Man, this bathroom spoiled me.  It was spotlessly clean.  It had lots of nice cabinet space and good mirrors.  The floor was made of heated tiles.  It had a huge towel warmer.  I miss that bathroom already...  Anyway, it is very common for the washing machine to be in the bathroom, and they are little teeny tiny washing machines as you'll see below to the right of the shower.  (No dryers.)  And the outtake hose of the washing machine just dumps straight into the shower drain!




And that's it.  It's going to take me a while to get the new place photo ready, but I'll do a similar entry when I have this place in a little better shape.  Spoiler...two pieces of bugle-bottomed furniture!!

So I mentioned that the apartment wasn't really ready for me, and last night the landlords met me there to give me a little orientation to the building and talk about my complaints.  I hoped this meant they would talk about when it would be convenient for a professional cleaner to come in...but that didn't happen.  I'm going to have to clean the place myself, but I'm not irate about it because they were the sweetest.

They are a cute little Finnish couple named Eero and Anja, probably in their 50s.  He spoke passable English, she could only throw out a few words here and there...but her English was certainly light years ahead of my Finnish!  When they rang the doorbell, they came bearing gifts:

1. A new big rug for the main room, which is awesome because the other rugs are skinny little runners.  And they are dirty.  And the vacuum cleaner is a piece of crap and I can't get them clean.  So this new rug means I can lay on the floor in front of the TV like I like, and get back into my Diamond Dallas Page Yoga for Regular Guys (BANG!) regimen.
   
   
2. A big storage bin for me to put all the extraneous crap in that is in my way.
   
   
3. Future gift: the bedroom has one of those pull-down shades, but it doesn't go down all the way.  Not a big deal now, but in the summer it will be essential, so they're replacing that for me.
   
   
4. A shiny new nameplate for the door with my name on it.  The previous tenant was some Italian guy named "Occhipin", which is violently close to being an anagram for "Pinocchio."
   
   
5. The offer to come over for dinner.  So cute!

Then they gave me a little tour of the building.  Goodness, it's a pretty cool building.  They took me up to the roof, where there is a HUGE communal balcony that stretches across the whole length of the building and faces downtown.  That should be totally amazing in spring and summer.  Then they took me to the top floor, which was a maze of weird/creepy storage spaces and where I can park all that crap I don't want inside the apartment.  (Note: no sauna.)  There is also a little garbage building out back that has regular garbage, paper recycling, all other recycling...and compost!  So efficiently and charmingly European!  And there are lots of big grassy areas behind the building.  Helsinki is awesome like that.  They manage to keep lots of nature spots, even in the middle of a big urban area.

So once I get the apartment all wiped down and aired out (it smells pretty musty because I think it's been vacant for some time), I will get all my stuff in there and take pictures for a future post. 

At some point this whole "Day X in Helsinki" thing will have to drop off.  Maybe today would have been a good day seeing as I skipped Day 6.  Day 6 wasn't terribly eventful, it was my first day going to the real office where I'll be sitting for the next year.  Observations of a European office:

• Some people wear suits and stuff.  Luckily, my boss wears jeans and sneakers so hopefully I can start dressing crappier after the first few weeks.
  
  
• People sit on each other's laps, practically.  My boss/client showed me to my cube, which was pretty spacious...and then moved all his stuff over to sit right next to me.  And then informed me that next week, there will be three of us in there.  Permanently!
  
  
• There isn't one big bathroom with many stalls per floor.  There are little nooks about every 20-30 meters, which have a coat rack and one men's bathroom and one women's bathroom.  You have to go through two doors (and lock them) to get to the one toilet.  And I think I'm catching on that it is poor etiquette to hang your coat over the back of your chair, because those coat closets are all over the place.
  
  
• Everyone eats at the cafeteria.  And the food is super hearty and yummy and they change it up every day.  And Finns like to eat lunch at about 11am, so I am fitting in just fine.
  
  
• People unapologetically wear their badges around their neck like a backstage pass.  Here's mine:
  
  
  
• It's quiet.  So, so politely quiet.  I may go crazy.

In other news, I signed a lease on an apartment and picked up the keys yesterday.  Unfortunately, the rental agency didn't bother to tell the landlords that, so the place was totally not ready for me.  It still needs to be cleaned, and they need to haul a bunch of stuff off.  I'm meeting them tomorrow night, and can hopefully start moving in for real on Wednesday or Thursday.

Because I started talking about work, I almost finished this by saying "Thanks!" like I always do on my work emails.

Thanks!

So after averaging about 3-4 hours of sleep a night since I arrived, I finally found the recipe for how to get some sound sleep:

1. I finally opened up my UPS shipment box which had some of my blankets in it, and banished these weird heavy/skinny duvet covers from the bed and used my fuzzy blankie instead.
   
   
2. I put on that Scientologist documentary about Jason Beghe which although interesting, is not edited very excitingly.  It's basically just him in a chair in front of a window talking for two straight hours about how he got involved with Scientology, and ultimately abandoned it, and is littered with the 8,389 Scientology acronyms that make me feel like I'm in a Microsoft meeting: SP, PTS, COB, OT, etc.  And other than the occasional husky dog who walks by in the backyard, that's it.  Zzzz...
   

So I slept for 12 hours straight last night, and totally needed it.  Much better.

Then I decided to go for a walk around my neighborhood.  Looking at the map, it looked like the waterfront was not too far from here so I wanted to check it out.  Along the way, I found several things to be excited about:

• A mini-golf course a few short blocks away
• A beach
  
• Some cute turtle sitting stones
• A coffee shop/cafe/bar/sauna/laundromat...all in one
  
• A tennis complex!  Complete with a bunch of indoor courts and one outdoor clay court!

Oh, and a word about the weather which I am surprised I haven't commented on.  Um, yeah, it's cold.  Today when I was walking around, it was 2°C.  (That's 35.6°F.)  It wasn't actively drizzling, but it has been so the ground was all wet.  And you know what?  It wasn't that bad.  You definitely have to rug up and I need more sensible boots, but since I've arrived I haven't yet felt like I was going to die.  It helps that it's only cold outside.  Once you're inside (buses, shops, offices, apartments) everything is incredibly well-heated and insulated.  Double paned windows, double doors, heated floors in the bathrooms, towel warmers...I think it's going to be okay.

There wasn't much going on yesterday, I honestly was just trying to catch up on sleep and catch everyone on Skype.  But I did meet Juha (my new co-worker) for lunch at a pizza joint downtown.  He amuses me...he seems so buttoned up and incapable of dressing very casually.  So we're meeting for pizza on the weekend, and he still shows up in a sweater vest, button down Facconable shirt, and polished dress shoes.  (So much for keeping your designation as the Finnish John Morley!  Until you can wear some jeans, a white tshirt, and black Chucks, your Finnish John Morley status is hereby revoked.)

I had leftovers and took the tram back to my apartment, and since it was Saturday the tram was very very crowded.  When I got to my stop, I had to elbow my way to the door and it started to close on me.  Now, most automatic doors in my experience have some sort of safety function where they will pop back open if you apply any pressure to them.  Well...not so with Helsinki city trams, apparently.  I stuck my arm holding the styrofoam food box out first to push the door back open, and suddenly the doors starting closing and did NOT bounce back, and crushed my lunch box and ate a piece of the styrofoam and spit it out into the street.  And bit my arm, too.  Luckily some lady hit the stop-call button which caused the doors to pop back open, so I was able to escape...but not with much dignity.

Another mixed bag of a day.  Another night of waking up at 2am, and not being able to fall back asleep until 6am, only to be woken up by hammering at 8am.  Sigh...

I got up and worked from home for most of the morning, and about 5 minutes before I headed out to do some errands, the UPS guy called and said he would be arriving in 15 minutes.  Yay!!  This was excellent news because it meant that my shipment didn't have to be delivered to the office, which meant I didn't have to haul an 80 pound box across the city!

He was nice enough to bring the huge-ass box inside for me, and I put him and the box inside the elevator...and froze.  I had no idea what floor I was on, there were no numbers and I couldn't remember if Finland was one of those places where the 1st floor is really the "ground floor" and the second floor is the "first floor," etc.  I knew I had to go up one flight of stairs to get to my unit, so second floor, right?  I pushed two and told him I would take the stairs and meet him upstairs since there wasn't room for both of us and the box inside the elevator.  I ran to my door, and heard the elevator doors open somewhere not in front of me.  He called out, "Where are you?"  I panicked, realized my apartment number was 3 and not 2 and said, "Oops, I think up one more?"  So he went up another floor.  The doors opened somewhere not in front of me and he called out, "Where are you?"  I panicked and noticed the door of the elevator where I was standing said "4 Henkilöa" and said, "Aha!  Maybe up one more on 4?"  The doors opened somewhere not in front of me, I was getting super embarrassed and I said, "Okay, hold on...I'll just call the elevator back to me, sorry!" 

Turns out I was on 1, the only floor in the building we didn't try.  But I was confused and said, "If it's 1, why does the door of the elevator say 4?"  He shook his head at me disapprovingly and said "'Henkilöa' means 'persons'.  That means that only 4 persons can fit inside elevator."

So after that fail, I went to the agency office for an orientation meeting with the HR guy Pertti, and my two new colleagues Juha and Antonio.  There wasn't too much to be oriented on, because the three of us will be sitting at the client's office and not at the agency, but the HR guy seems to be very concerned about getting us set up with "lunch coupons."  (Which he pronounces "lunch coupongs.")  These are apparently pre-paid coupons that are good at just about every restaurant in the city, including the cafeteria at Nokia House where I will be eating.  Each coupon is worth €8, but the agency will pay for 25% of it, so seems like a good deal.

After our orientation, I had planned to head home, but as I left the building one of the agency guys was having a smoke outside and mentioned a few people were staying late that night to play Wii.  I decided to stick around.  They had wine and beer at the office, and fired up the Beatles Rock Band, followed by an intense Wii bowling tournament where I learned all sorts of good Finnish cuss words.  It was all good fun, and the people were so very nice and friendly and funny.  Later I caught the tram home, and saw one of the guys walking in the street and he waved at me.  It was the smallest little thing, but that little wave made me happy because it meant there was one less stranger in town, and made Helsinki seem a little smaller...

Today was all about the errands.  I had a few appointments around the city (tax consultants, apartment viewings, etc.) so I went ahead and jumped into figuring out the public transit system.  Luckily where I needed to go first thing this morning was the end of the line on a tram route, making it virtually impossible for me to screw it up.  So I trammed it down to the waterfront, and I met with the tax consultants and interrogated them about pretty much everything except taxes, and then went the office of our sister agency.  This is where the HR guy works who has been helping me out so much. 

It was a very cool Euro-style office, right on the water.  Pertti walked me around and introduced me to every single person at the agency individually, which was about 20 people.  Names are going to be a problem.  Pertti, Tomi, Kiirsi, Jaako, Jarkko, Janko...they are all such new names and they roll their R's very hard so it covers up the rest of the word so I can't hear it to begin with, much less to remember it.  They struggle with my name, too. They tend to say "HALL-aye".  Last week I had asked one of my new Finnish coworkers if I should start spelling my name as "Hejli" so people would pronounce it correctly.  He recommended "Heli" instead.  I learned today that he was totally pranking me, because "Heli" is basically like calling someone "honey" or "sweetie," and I think he wanted me to go around introducing myself as "Honey Sweetie Kotara." 

I had lunch with the crew from the sister agency, and everyone was super nice and friendly.  Then the HR guy Pertti took me on a tour of city centre, taught me how to ride the subway, took me to get my bus pass, showed me where to buy a tennis racket, bought me tea, etc.  That guy has been entirely too nice.  Then I left him to go meet up with the real estate lady and look at two apartments.  I think I might have a winner!  I looked at:

1. City Centre (Kamppi) - It was a relatively large place (and when I say relatively large I mean 550 square feet instead of the 300 square feet I'm living in now...and to try to further your metric education those are 51 and 28 square meters, respectively) right in the middle of the central part of town and a very very short walk to the bus tunnel where I'll catch the bus to work.  And a clothes dryer, which is unheard of here. But...that area has tons of bars and the apartment faces the street, so I think it will be loud and annoying at night.  And the dealbreaker: it doesn't have an oven!?
   
   
2. Quieter, Older Area by Lake (Töölö) - This is literally around the corner from where I'm staying now.  It will mean a longer commute and no clothes dryer, but at least the kitchen has all the basic amenities, including a teeny tiny cute little dishwasher.  And rent includes electricity, water, TV, and internet, which makes it a pretty good deal.  The bathroom is really small and this place is not super special or amazing, but it's totally fine and I'm anxious to get my permanent place set up, so I asked the real estate lady to go ahead and draw up the contract!
   

Then I came back home and decided to go on my first adventure to the grocery market.  The goal was to walk around undetected so that no one would know I wasn't Finnish.  I think I blew it when I had to pull out my Finnish/English dictionary within 30 seconds of arriving just to make sure that what I thought was laundry washing powder was actually washing powder and not pure bleach.  So I am now running my very first ever load of Finnish laundry.  Where the outtake hose dumps into the shower.  And where I will have to hang my wet clothes all over the apartment.  So the post with pictures of the apartment will have to wait until all my unmentionables are dry and put away, because this isn't that kind of blog. 




 

Well, I finally made it!  After 6 weeks of waiting and homelessness, I arrived in Helsinki yesterday.  For the most part, the trip was totally fine but there were definitely plenty of stupid / frustrating / confusing moments.  I'll skip the parts where it went smoothly, because that's boring.  I'll focus in on the embarrassing parts for your entertainment:

• I didn't sleep well on the Seattle to Reykjavik leg, and was very very tired on that last leg to Helsinki.  I sat by a nice Finnish couple and promptly fell asleep.  I'm usually a very quiet sleeper, but I guess my head was tilted back and I had some weird dream that startled me...so I did one of those snort-snores.  Real sudden-like.  And loud.  The kind where you wake yourself up.  And everybody around my row laughed at me.  :(
  
  
• When I landed in Helsinki, it was really confusing because the screens that displayed the baggage claim numbers of all the incoming flights didn't have my exact flight number listed.  So I just found the one that was from Stockholm that arrived when I did, and made my way down there.  It was a relatively hefty walk to a whole separate terminal, and I waited by the Stockholm carousel all by my lonesome for about 15 minutes.  It was weird that none of my flightmates were in sight, so I panicked.  As it turns out, I was supposed to stay in the original terminal.  So I had to walk all the way back and beg security to let me back in the arrivals hall, where my three blue bags were just spinning around and round, all alone.
  
  
• I went to the service desk who were holding my apartment keys for me, and found a nice taxi driver who had a station wagon big enough to fit all my luggage.  We headed off for the neighborhood of Töölö, which is a nice little lakey area and is impossible to pronounce.  When we arrived, I asked him to wait there with my big bags while I came upstairs to find the actual unit, and that I would come back down to get the rest.  That little sweetheart didn't listen to me (or didn't understand) and he dragged both of those huge 50+ pound bags upstairs when I wasn't looking.  I love you, taxi man!
  
  
• So yay!  Finally...a home!  (I will post pictures later.)  My first order of business was to boot my computer up so I could email my family and friends that I had arrived safely.  I got the computer power cord out, and barely even touched the prongs to the outlet and POP#%$#SPARK(darkness)!!!  Shit.  I totally blew the breaker.  Before you say "dummy, there is a voltage difference" let me assure you that I did a very thorough audit of all my electronics months ago (I can show you the spreadsheet) to make sure I only brought things with me that wouldn't need a voltage converter, only a plug adapter.  So I tried to call the apartment office, but I couldn't get the call to go through from my dumb Finnish cell phone.  I tried every variation, and kept getting a message from a mean Finnish lady, or an error beep. I thankfully got a hold of my colleague at work (Pertti) who has been helping me, and he got me in touch with the apartment people.  Now, before you say "dummy, why didn't you just find the breaker box yourself and flip the switch" let me assure you that I did look for the breaker box, and there was nothing breaker-box-like in this joint.  And when I spoke with the apartment guy, he said it was an old building and the fuse box was probably in the hallway.  Maintenance showed up (a lady with a fanny pack), and it turns out the fuse box WAS inside, but I never in a million years would have recognized it.  She found the box, and inside were actual fuse bulbs.  I didn't even know those existed.  If I had thought to open the door on that box above the door, I would have thought I had found the control panel for a nuclear reactor.  Look! 
  
  
  
  Anyway, she got me all fixed up before the sun went down and I would have had to sit here in the dark, and all is fine now.
  
  
• Later I learned that that "error beep" on the phone is actually the European sound for the phone ringing on the other end.  Sigh...
  
  

So to summarize, I snorted at a plane full of people, got totally lost in the airport, exploded the breaker box 15 minutes after arriving at the apartment, and I am not competent enough to use a phone.  Here's hoping tomorrow is a little less humbling!