Oh, what a night ...

My wife is here in Helsinki for the weekend and we have just got back from an amazing evening.

We started with dinner at Luomo, a restaurant just around the corner from my apartment.  It has been getting high praise on eat.fi, a site I contribute to (as finn-mark) and have now reviewed 45 restaurants in the last two years, suprisingly putting me among the top 5% of their users.  Without doubt, tonight's meal was not just my best in Finland, but the best ever.

We didn't even see the menu before we were offered a selection of amuses-bouche; a pork and bacon sampler on a bayleaf, chicken and foie-gras ball rolled in vegetable muesli, pumpkin shreds with a blue cheese cream and a small glass of carrot and blood orange juice topped with blood orange foam.

Luomo's full menu offered a seven course meal, comprising three starters, two entrees and two desserts. We chose a more modest five courses, together with matching wines.

The first starter was a tuna tartare, served with wasabe, soy sauce cream, mango and partnered with an Austrian riesling.

Our second starter was called "deer and forest", a combination of rare venison served cold with fruits of the forest and mushrooms, including some freeze-dried berries and a herb cream. This was partnered with a German blanc-de-noirs, a white wine made from Pinot Noir grapes not left on the skins to ferment.  Mushroom bread and home churned butter was served on the side with this dish.

Before the main course, we were served a home made drink, produced from Cola nuts imported from Africa, which is the origin of the more sugary and artificial cola drinks to be had elsewhere.

Their main course was duck, "sweet and/or sour". To the left of the beautifully cooked wild duck was a sour braised red cabbage, to the right a sweet onion cream.  The maitre-d had paired this very well with an Italian Chianti Classico and another bread, olive foccacia, arrived with this course.

Before the first dessert, another palate cleanser arrived in the form of a tiny cone filled with lemon verbena cream.

A glass of a fruity, slightly sparkling Italian red wine was poured before the first dessert, a marriage of fresh and freeze dried raspberries, pistachio ice cream and a pistachio nut cake.

Finally, a French dessert wine accompanied the final dessert of chocolate and Porcini - a mushroom flavoured chocolate brownie topped with a chocolate ice cream, Porcini cream and a wonderfully tart, orange, Sea-Buckthorn ice cream.

The portions were sufficient to enjoy the meal without feeling bloated and I have never had such well matched wines for each dish.  My only regret is that we didn't take all 7 courses, and so missed the third starter (a goat's cheese and beetroot combination) and the second entree (a bouillabaisse).  We will definitely be returning - they change their menu every six weeks or so.

After two and a half hours in the restaurant, we were ready for a walk, so headed to the Svenska Teattern (Swedish Theatre) to catch the late showing of Pink Noise by Fork, a four-piece acapella band, who I saw perform last month at the Nokia World party in Stuttgart.  They put on a great show, which rounded off a wonderful evening.  And the weekend has only just started, as tomorrow (well, later today) we are off to the Hartwall Areena for the second time in two weeks, this time to see Elton John and his Red Piano.  I can't wait.

Living in a material world ...

You can't live in Helsinki for long without noticing the UFF shops.  One of my Finnish friends is a big fan, regularly scouring the branch on Kalevankatu after a coffee at Gran Delicato.  But I hadn't picked up on their supply chain until this weekend.

Back home, we have a lot of charity shops, run by organisations such as Oxfam, Sue Ryder and the like. Each relies on donations brought to the store.  In addition, groups such as the Salvation Army or my own local favourite, the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Air Ambulance, have collecting bins in public places; the latter has one in the car park of our village hall.

But here in Finland, UFF has an end to end approach.  This morning, after a wet Sunday spent sorting through the wardrobe, I took a bag of clothes to a collecting container, one block away, having checked on their website for my nearest site.

According to the UFF website, they have these in about 131 municipalities in southern Finland. In total there are over 600 container sites. In 2008 UFF Finland collected and recycled 7.6 million kilos of clothes.

In addition to reselling used winter clothes wholesale to other European countries, they also have 8 second hand shops in the largest cities in Finland: 6 shops in the capital Helsinki, one in Tampere and one in Turku. In 2008, a total of 400,000 paying customers (or one person in 13 in Finland) visited the UFF shops.

UFF (more fully, U-landshjälp från Folk till Folk i Finland rf) was founded more than 20 years ago as an independent non-profit non-governmental humanitarian organization. In 2008 they supported 19 development projects in Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Zambia and India.

This country has a very enlightened approach to recycling generally.  But I am pleased to think that my few items donated will have a positive impact on those less fortunate elsewhere in the world.

Comedy, the international language ...

Wednesday saw a global comedy performance at the Kultuuritalo, celebrating five years of comedy production from Laugh Riot. They put on a show with a good selection of comedians, some local and others from around the world, all performing (mostly) in English.

It was a fun evening. Two of the local guys, Tomi Walamies and Ismo Leikola, did a very nice job of overturning the Finnish male sterotype. Yannis Pappas from the US (no, really) and Steve Hughes from Australia were also very funny, but for me the highlight of the show was Nina Conti, the only woman and the only Brit on the bill. She was the last act and the funniest ventriloquist I have seen. If you don't believe me, check out her performances on YouTube.

It was only after I got home and looked her up on wikipedia that I realised that she is not only the daughter of British actor Tom Conti, but also a graduate of the University of East Anglia, my alma mater. If only I had known, she could have been the seventh drinker at our reunion the previous evening!

Pub night with a difference ...

Last night was a Global Pub Reunion for the University of East Anglia, where I studied half a lifetime ago for my BSc in Biological Sciences.

The UEA is celebrating its 46th anniversary this year and the alumni association decided it would be good to organise groups of graduates to share a drink and a few memories around the world. I volunteered to host the Helsinki event, at my almost-local, Molly Malone's Irish Bar.

Apparently, there are more than 35 UEA graduates in Finland, the association had email addresses for five in Helsinki. So, I was delighted that we had a turnout of six former students, though most of the others hadn't even started school at the time I graduated.

Their talk of computer labs with several PCs sharing one printer compared with my half-unit of computer programming, done in Fortran on punched cards and and run in two batches a day on an ICL George 4 mainframe. The mobile phone I use every day now has significantly more computing power than that device, but it was that first exposure to computing that changed the direction of my career, away from being a research scientist and towards the world of IT.

We also learned a little about the university today, through a quiz supplied by the alumni association. UEA is ranked amongst the top three for student satisfaction according to the first National Student Survey and in the top 20 in the UK by the Sunday Times. It also came top of the most recent research effectiveness league table published by Research Fortnight. We are among some 85,000 alumni, united by the university's motto, "do different". I believe I have lived up to that since and continue to be grateful for my time at UEA and the impact it has had on my life. So cheers to the other 84,994 or so who were with us in spirit last night!