Came accross this jewel in Dan’s blog, and couldn’t help but comment on it. With cringe-worthy photography, design that even I could do better and racist references to “African medicine men” and “Greedy Ahmed” it became one of our inside jokes on Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong, I find the idea of an advertising agency focused on SMEs appealing. I find it difficult to believe that it can’t be better executed.
Lately I’ve been meditating quite a lot on why some of my friends have not been able to fit here in Finland and left, while I am still here, going on with my life and generally happy with it. Since some of them actually had a Finnish (or half-Finnish background) but spend their formative years abroad, I think we can safely assume that in their cases it was not due to lack of exposure to the language and culture.
I’ve also been thinking about the immigration debate in Finland, and how the desired state of all commentators (and I’d assume more than a few immigrants) is that newcomers should successfully integrate to Finnish society. However, the question then becomes what does integration actually mean, and how is it achieved. With that in mind, I started to go over my own process while living here, and I have sketched a model for it with 3 different (and grossly oversimplified) stages.
Based purely on my own observations (and taking into consideration that I am no social scientist) I am starting to believe that the biggest challenge is making the leap between adaptation and integration. Letting go of your expectations while at the same time holding a grip on your possibilities while understanding your environment better seems to be quite hard. Coming to terms with a language that might be very different, and values and behaviours that might not always correspond to your own, and both learn from and accept such differences requires a certain strength and a support network that not all of us have.
This is of course not helped by the fact that the phenomenon is quite new for the host society as well, which is still coming to terms with it itself.
I grew up playing SimCity, as I’m sure some of you did. The appeal of simulating how a city would grow and try to create something that would reflect my own choices was definitely very strong. The last version of the franchise SimCity 4 was released in 2004, and its publisher (EA) has pretty much discontinued support for the game and stopped any sequels.
Imagine my surprise when I found Simtropolis.com, an online community of SimCity players. Not only do they have City blogs and chat, but a huge archive or user-generated content to improve your experience of the game. Over the years, the users have created maps (so that you can build your city in the site of Helsinki, for example), landmarks (like the Angel of Independence from Mexico City or the Atomium from Brussels) that you can use in the city you build and other general improvements to the game that the designers hadn’t originally thought of, an example of which you can find below.
It is amazing how much people can do, when you give them means to do it. A community of devoted fans is all you need.
The main event of the end of the summer in Finland is the Helsinki Festival, whose highlight is the Night of the Arts. This year they had a beautiful performance in the Senate Square as you can see (photos here).
Over the years I’ve learned to accept as normal the many differences and quirks Finnish has for someone learning it as a second language. Some of the most hilarious I’ve seen or heard from others below:
Olen iloinen = I’m happy
Olen loinen = I’m a parasite
Minä välitän sinusta = I care about you
Minä valitan sinusta = I (will) complain about you
Minun kieli on turvonnut = My tongue is swollen
Minun kulli on turvonnut = My dick is swollen (happened to a guy who had just gotten a tongue piercing)
kolari = car crash
Kolari= town in Finnish Lapland where snow (or something like it) fell this week
Seen in the streets of Helsinki: shoulder pads, huge plastic sunglasses, leggings and this.
A small town in the Finnish archipielago, Nauvo/Nagu has beautiful natural scenery.
One thing that I couldn’t quite understand before I moved to Finland was the sheer amount of berries in these parts. You can pick them from the forests, from the hills and sometimes from the sides of the roads, and depending on the time of summer you will see different ones available.
The funniest thing about it all is that I’ve learned their names in Finnish, so I needed to check in Wikipedia what were their Spanish names and lo and behold, most of them were fruits I already knew, but didn’t know what their appearance was. Some examples below:
Grosella = Redcurrant = Punaviinimarja/Punaherukka
Frambuesa = Raspberry = Vadelma
Mora azul= Blueberry = Mustikka
What do you guys think of this new avatar?
