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!

Finnish exports ...

I've just got back from my first ever "unconference", the Nokia IdeasCamp held at Asilomar on Monterey Bay in California (the picture shows the view of the ocean from my room.

It was an interesting experience, mixing work colleagues with some of the great and the good from Silicon Valley. In addition to the workshops organized by attendees, after hours activities included "Midnight Cooking Madness" in which a dozen or so of us cooked for the rest (I made hummus for 70 or so people and was very pleased with the feedback!). We also had a talent show drawn from those present and had a bonfire on the beach, under strict supervision, given California's current problems with fires.

The organisers had tried to bring some Finnish customs to those present. Part of this involved me importing 144 pieces of Finnish Ruisleipä (rye bread), which added 6.6Kg to the weight of my suitcase! Meatballs and pea soup were served during the weekend, together with some more traditional American fare (I guess that's what it was).

But I think my favourite experience was trying a sauna tent for the first time. A very portable piece of equipment, apparently popular with hunters, campers and the like, this was a very welcome end to the day. The experience was completed by a large paddling pool to get the cold plunge after the heat. I may have to investigate shipping one to the UK!

Those crazy Finns ...

The BBC has reported on Finland's love for crazy contests. Click to see the full article, but I've pasted a few excerpts here as I think this is very much in the spirit of cultural education which was one of the reasons I started this blog.

"The mobile phone throwing world championship in Finland on Saturday is just one of many crazy contests on the country's summer diary. Helsingin Sanomat columnist Perttu Hakkinen asks why Finns have such a fondness for these wacky pursuits.

Finland is well-known for several reasons: mass-produced mobiles phones, lakes - 190,000 of them - and boiling hot saunas. Also, for Santa Claus and the Eurovision monsterman, Lordi.

Finnish summer sports and pastimes owe something to all of these things. The telecoms industry, the natural environment - and the country's gimmicky eccentric side. The list includes boot throwing, wife carrying, mosquito slapping, mobile-phone throwing, sauna endurance contests... and many more.

The most popular summer sport in Finland, however, is not wife carrying or boot throwing, but swamp soccer (SS). The SS World Championships can attract over 30,000 enthusiasts and 300 teams to the tiny northern village of Hyrynsalmi (population 2,895), travelling all the way from the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Russia and Iceland. The game is basically just like normal soccer, but it's played on a wet, marshy swamp."

The article concludes with a quote from Harri Kinnunen, two-time organiser of the Boot Throwing World Championships. "Yeah, I know what the foreigners think," Kinnunen laughs. "Those crazy Finns!"

Hmmm.

Summer holiday part deux ...

It seems amazing to think I've been back working for a week already and returned to the office in Helsinki today.

After our return from the mökki, we visited Helsinki's zoo on Friday and then flew on Sunday to Edinburgh, via Heathrow. We started with a couple of nights in Edinburgh, staying at the Haymarket area, in easy walk to the city centre. We packed in a lot - an open top bus tour, visit to the Edinburgh Dungeon, some shopping on Prince's Street, a craft market and a walk through Grassmarket and around the castle area. We didn't manage to get tickets to any of the fringe comedy festival but picked up the buzz around the city.

We then crossed the Forth Road Bridge and travelled to Stirling Castle, thence to Perth (shown on the picture) for an overnight stay and a visit the following day to Scone Palace, the original home of the stone of destiny.

From there, we visited Scotland's oldest working distillery at Glenturret, which dates back to 1775. Unlike the visits recently to Guinness and Jameson in Dublin, this place is still preparing the water of life (the word whisky is derived from the Scottish Gaelic words of that meaning, uisge beatha) in a process virtually unchanged in more than 200 years. Glenturret single malt is one of the whiskies that go into the Famous Grouse, so we had the tour and were pretty impressed.

After this, a couple of days of chilling out were called for. We stayed in Drymen, on the shores (or is that the bonnie, bonnie banks) of Loch Lomond. Though all of the scenery we saw in Scotland was beautiful (helped, of course, by the sunshine), this was perhaps the most spectacular, the largest body of freshwater in the UK (by surface area, Loch Ness is smaller but has more volume).

We flew home on the Friday, after a visit to Hopetoun House, Scotland's finest stately home, then went to Ladies Day at Newbury Races on Saturday with friends. Unusually, we came out ahead of the bookies on that occasion, a very enjoyable day.

So now it is back to work. Hopefully when I feel stressed, a look at the photos will remind me of the tranquility of the Scottish countryside and reduce my blood pressure a little.

Summer holiday part 1 ...

This week saw the first part of our family holiday. Horrified at the prices quoted for Tuscany, I had persuaded the family to take a cottage in the Finnish countryside.

I've written before about the mökki thing - Finland has around half a million of them, for a population slightly less than eleven times that number. Escaping from the cities to a cottage during the summer months is considered a normal thing to do.

Regular readers will know that I have a strong affection for this country and its people, so I apologise in advance to any Finnish friends who feel my reporting has taken a more negative turn. I'm afraid our experiences this week mean it is rather unlikely that the kesamökki will become a regular fixture on this family's calendar.

I booked our cottage via a website (http://www.lomarengas.fi/, ours was number 8238 and the company's service was excellent). The details suggested that the town of Perniö, only 5km away, offered restaurants and other amenities and we would not be too far from Salo, a larger town and an hour or so from Turku, one of Finland's major cities.

Things did not look promising from the beginning. As we drove to the cottage on Finnish road #1 (European route E18), the heavens opened and the rain fell so hard that even the wipers on double speed had trouble clearing the screen. The few tunnels en route gave temporary respite but confused the GPS, already struggling for a signal because of the millions of litres of water in the air between the satellites and my phone.

Having followed the (very accurate) driving directions, we spent the last 3km driving down barely surfaced roads, finally ending up in the yard of a farm, in whose grounds our cottage was. The cottage was well equipped, warm and clean and we unpacked, before heading back to Perniö for supplies. We had plenty of choice at least, with K-Market, S-Market and Siwa all represented (first stop, though, was Alko, for the most essential provisions).

At the only bar in the town, which doubled as its only restaurant, we chatted with our waitress who was recently returned to Finland after 11 years spent studying and then working around Birmingham, the first Finn I've met with a brummie accent in English! She explained that the next day, Saturday, was the annual market in the town, worth experiencing.

So, we returned to see more of Perniö, which we concluded in rough translation means "one horse town but the horse is on vacation". We did make it that day to Fiskars, once home of the eponymous manufacturer of knives and related items but now a cute village of craft workshops and sales outlets.

Sunday saw rain, so we stayed at the cottage, swam briefly in the 21°C lake during a gap in the clouds, took a sauna and played Mah Jongg.

On Monday we ventured to Turku to see the castle, billed in my tour guide as one of Finland's most popular tourist attractions. It was shut, despite information to the contrary in my guidebook and online. The rest of the city appeared to be similarly disinterested in visitors and we returned home rather disappointed.

Tuesday gave us a warm day, ideal for chilling out by the lake (or in it) and some barbecue, so that was OK.

On Wednesday, seduced by further tourist literature found in the cottage, we visited Hanko, described as a pretty little town by the sea. It seems to have been caught in a time warp since the 1950s, though it did give me an opportunity to paddle in what I was told was the most southerly seawater in Finland (the picture at the top of this post shows the proof). We at least had found the Finnish equivalent of Littlehampton.

Today, we decided to return to Helsinki a day early, stopping in Salo for the market and a very pleasant lunch. It was the hottest day of the holiday so far, at 24.5°C, so sitting at a pavement table felt almost Mediterranean!

Now we have a couple of days before the next part of our holiday, 6 days touring in Scotland. Stay tuned for the next instalment