Moving in....

I moved into my new apartment six days ago. It's about ~50 square meters, one bedroom (well, one bed without much room other than the bed) with a large living room and kitchen/dining room combo. The apartment is on the sixth floor of a wonderful vintage building with an elevator that looks as if it were one of the very first ever batch of elevators made in Finland (or anywhere). It is an iron cage which moves slowly but very smoothly. So far my biggest concern is making sure I open the inner cage door without getting my fingers squeezed off through the grate.

I love having a real place to live here in Helsinki. Though hotel life is nice a few days a week (and is something you just get used to as a consultant) the room service/housekeeping/cable tv/etc... just doesn't make up for the freedom of being able to really unpack, cook, and just know that there won't be someone coming in every day between 10am and 2pm to pick up after you and potentially look through all your things.

The apartment is so conveniently located to downtown and work that I felt guilty even buying (or using) a pass for the tram, though I'm sure that will change once it gets COLD and DARK DARK DARK. It only takes 15 minutes to walk all the way in to work, even carrying the dreaded laptop bag and wearing the dreaded work shoes.

Other problem: Remembering the name of the street I live on. You try it. Caloniuksenkatu. Try it again: Ca-lo-ni-uk-sen-katu. Sheesh!

Anyway, enough rambling. There are pictures of the apartment below. It really does look surprisingly this nice (well, it did before I moved my 100+ kg of crap in!) but apparently the pictures were taken for some architectural magazine in which the apartment was featured. It's always nice to be reminded that other people have such much better taste than us normal folks...

First weekend in Helsinki

(too lazy on the first weekend to write this entry, so it's now the second weekend)

I spent my first weekend in Helsinki trying to get comfortable with my surroundings. I mostly did this by walking around the same shopping district I had walked around during the week (because it's also where my office is), but this time without an enormous laptop bag and with much more comfortable shoes.

Selected views from my weekend:


A street hockey league had some kind of championship right outside my hotel. Isn't this normally played with some kind of skates?

There is a lovely park on the street where I work (Pohjoisesplanadi), with a number of Spanish sculptures parading down the center of the park. It also seems to be a serious tourist haven, and, as noted by "The Lonely Planet" is also the most expensive shopping street in Finland!

That weekend also turned out to be the running of the Helsinki Marathon, the largest marathon in Finland. It felt a little decadent to be eating an enormous scoop of Rum Raisin ice cream while watching these poor saps on mile 20+ of their ordeal, but I managed...

...though to be fair, the runners had a classy cheering section not typically seen in the U.S.

And to continue the anti-healthy-marathoning spirit, there is a wide variety of ice cream available here -- including a very familiar brand from home!

And below, some random images of people in Helsinki. They do love their cafes during the (short, few) summer months...

Welcome to Helsinki!

Well, I'm here! After a 14-hour travel ordeal across two flights, I have now been in Finland for approximately 29 hours. Summary: so far, I love it. More details: read below.

Getting here certainly wasn't easy. Lessons learned to date:

1. Avoid Heathrow at all costs. While the shopping is good, you're forced into constant alertness during your layover (rather than vegging out in a haze on one of the uncomfortable seats) because they won't tell you your gate until 30 minutes before the flight. Also, the new 'one carry-on bag only' rule resulted in my starting a fight at security between the nice security guards who wanted to let my oversized bag squeeze by and the nasty mean security guard who wanted me to go ALL THE WAY back out to the main entrance to check it. It's a bad sign when your first experience in Europe makes you long for US airports. Fortunately, my team (the nice guards) won.
   
2. They don't tip in Finland. I only found this out about 20 hours after the airport shuttle driver gave me a long befuddled look when I tried to give him 10% for his trouble lugging my 200 pounds of luggage into and out of his van.
3. Go ahead and pack boring comfortable shoes when you come to Finland. Unlike many other European countries I have been to, which all made me feel like some kind of peasant girl due to my unsophisticated clothing and strictly basic sense of shoe style, Finns dress for style and comfort, and the majority of women appear to be wearing flats. Sure, flats are in right now, but still. I love this country already.

That covers my impressions up through my first hour in the country. Everything after that has basically been a fight between me and jet lag. I managed a nice workout in the hotel gym (which appears to be approximately 1/3 the size of the nearby saunas), then took a short walk around the city.

Finns really do want to live it up during these days of mild weather. Every cafe and restaurant seems to have outdoor seating filled with people happily laughing and eating as if the days of 21-hours-of-darkness aren't fast approaching.

My walk did reveal a few cultural differences:

• Design of common household items is sassier. Check out this knife block found in a store next to my hotel:
  
• Some foods here have interesting ingredients, such as "mojo". I thought "mojo" meant sex drive or sex appeal, a la Austin Powers, but then what is "mojo gratin"? Maybe everything is better with cheese...
  
  
  
  

Finally, I started work in the Helsinki office early this morning, where I was laughingly admonished for coming in early (8:30am!) Most or all of the ~30 consultants and ~5 staff came over to personally introduce themselves to me, and in the afternoon they held a coffee and cake (mmmm...cake!) to welcome me. Incredibly nice people. Also, stylish, as evidenced by my sleek new black desk (abutting two other desks -- no cubes or offices for lowly consultants here) and the gorgeous flowers they placed on my desk. It would all be enough to make me look forward to going to work tomorrow...if I weren't so darn sleepy.