Riffing off the ground signage dividing bikes and pedestrians in Helsinki…
a more nuanced edit by anonymous on my block on Uudenmaankatu…
And another thing about signs
Knowing What People Did By What They Shouldn’t Anymore
Grenoble
Bangalore
Genoa
Johannesburg
Singapore. No durian fruit, a.k.a. the stinkbomb.
Immigration Graffiti
The tables tell the story in Finland’s immigration office in Malmi: Chechnya 09, Espana, Israel, Be cool, Kosova, Moskova, 30.9.2008 Today, Kurdistan PKK, Kill Bill, Estonia, Turkey, Ahmad 2010-1-13, Iran, Unite, Somali, Vive la France, Hello Everybody!
How The Other Half Sings
The screen says “SEXY. Give me a dime so I can phone my mother” and we’re singing Every Breath You Take for the third time because I can’t figure out how to work the remote. Someone knocks the balloons from the ceiling. A man stumbles in with a bottle of whiskey. Someone offers me money to have a threesome. It’s easy to see how things can get carried away.
There are the KTVs where teenagers (mostly girls) go for wholesome fun at the mall after school. And then there are the KTVs where adults (mostly guys) go for “entertainment plus.” We walk passed a strobed-out dance floor and secure one of the private rooms in the back. The room is lined with couches and in the center is a coffee table with an ash tray and a box of tissues. A waiter holds the flashlight in his mouth as he serves us drinks in the dark. If you want additional company, hired club girls are brought in and lined up for the choosing. What happens after that is less formal.
When a Britney Spears video comes up, her cleavage is blurred out. Muslim practices trump others in Malaysia and nudity and sex is censored in all movies. One girl gushes about the scenes she and her friends missed in Titanic but found later on YouTube – him painting her naked, them “making love.” One guy tells me he was shocked when he saw the uncensored version of Basic Instinct. I’m wondering how short the censored version must have been. At the same time as Britney’s bosom crease is blurred on the screen, the guy with the bottle of whiskey is offering me coke, which I politely decline. The Asian in me wants to get best value for this room, so John, Michiel and I stay to the end and sing increasingly ridiculous songs until four in the morning. But it doesn’t end so well for others – earlier that day a guy at a cafe tells me about the seedier side of KTVs and just how dark it can get. “Just last week, in the club upstairs, a Chinese national girl was offered 2000 ringgit to snort a line of coke seven feet long. She did. And then she died.”
And another thing about Asia
The Long Nail
“Why do you have a long thumbnail?”
“Hahaha…”
ear-cleaner, nose-picker, status-symbol (non-menial-job-worker), cigarette-wrapper-opener, screw-driver, coke-scooper, roach-clip-replacer, luck-bringer…
With Great Safety Comes Great Drunkenness
It’s Josephine’s birthday and we’re dancing at Siltanen and sometime in the a.m. we decide to move the party to Redrum. Some people take taxis (although nothing in Helsinki is far) and some people bike. Andreea and I walk and one of the first things we see is a drunk guy on the other side of the street – and not just swervy-drunk, but zig-zag-bumping-and-holding-onto-the-building-drunk. Girls and guys are equally spotted stumbling in near-black-out-mode during the late hours in Helsinki. In any other city they’d be a target. Here they regularly pass out on the sidewalk and others politely walk around them. Is there such a thing as feeling too safe?
For a city as big as Helsinki, the public trust is off the charts. Babies in baby strollers are left outside of stores. Bikes are left unlocked in front of supermarkets. Laptops, cameras and bags are left on cafe tables unattended. Beyond high employment rates and no desperation to steal, some think it’s the homogenous culture and some think it’s a behavior maintained after a tipping point. There’s an unspoken camaraderie in the cafe if the guy next to you leaves his camera unattended and you later do in kind with your bag. When people give you the benefit of the doubt, you want to give them the benefit of the doubt back. Something happens when you come back and see that nothing happened.
But Helsinki is so safe that people think they can get shit-faced and publicly swerve home without worries. Should anyone ever think their city is that safe? Does a hint of danger increase sobriety? Andreea and I see a shape on the sidewalk. As we get closer we see books, blood, and a man slumped on his side. “Oh my god are you ok?” He wakes up. He’s trashed. “Ya ya..” “Oh my god what happened?” “Nothing nothing…” His face is punched in and he says something about his keys. Andreea calls the police. I gather up gruesome things from the sidewalk – book pages are stuck together with blood, his glasses are broken, his keys are red and sticky. He won’t tell us what happened but he has enough memory to say he lives here so we walk him in to the building. “I’m not a Nazi… Who are you?… You are angels…” The key fits into the apartment door and it opens up to a giant and tidy home with a diplomat-worthy dining room and two bathrooms. “Please stay, what are your names…” We tell him he really needs to rest and we put his things on the table and leave and wonder if he’ll remember any of this tomorrow.
Fix Everything My Ass
When I was working on a criminal justice project in New Orleans in 2006, there were still houses on top of cars. And this was one year after Hurricane Katrina…
Last month Sean and Carolina show us around their neighborhood in the Marigny, where restored shotgun houses and abandoned shells sit side-by-side and a mardi gras store doubles as a local grocery. The population is over 330,000 and counting, blighted houses are down to one-third, and a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, was just elected by a landslide. Things are definitely on the up and up and here’s to exciting new times for a city that someone once told me “has more heart than a shitload of hearts.”
Expat for Beginners
I’m watching Google Translate re-calibrate in real time as I enter Finnish into the text box, and it’s making government mail kind of exciting:
“In order… In order to fall… In order to continue to be on Social Security… In order to include the Social Security system you must submit a new oleskelulupanne…”
By the end it falls apart (”If you do not ask the time limits by asking clarification, video tracks will be settled between us”), but this is what you get for being an expat. Learn the language or enjoy creative cooking instructions like “pour into a mature pasta strainer” and “catapult the water.” When I first arrived I was pumped to learn Finnish. A year later the extent of my vocabulary still sits around hei (hi), kiitos (thanks), miten menee (how are you), mahtava (awesome!), kippis (cheers!), and hei läskiperse (hey fat ass!). Since most Finns speak English and work at Nokia is in English, the experience has been more like Expat for Beginners, and even Finns admit the language is complicated and hard on the eyes. I feel most immigrant-y when I get my mail or go to the grocery store. Typing words like “haltuunottotodistuksen” into Google Translate isn’t easy and I bring the serious-looking stuff to my Finnish co-workers for help. I only translate mail that looks like I might get deported. I’ll wait for a point-and-shoot translator gun for the rest.
Despite appearances, appelsiini is in fact not apple juice but orange juice (apple juice is omenamehun); leipäjuusto is Finland’s tasty mozzarella-like “squeaky cheese”; and that’s about as advanced as I get with food words. I treat the grocery store as a sensory experience and pick what feels right. I believe the milk in the lighter blue packaging means it has less fat. I pick the mystery meat slices that look most delicious. I choose the salad dressing that’s not too orange and not too yellow. I try the bread in the green packaging this time and the orange packaging next time. I have no idea what this is but I like the design of the label. I go by the pictures. I know what it’s like to be illiterate. This has actually encouraged me to linger longer around the fresh produce, which feels familiar without effort (I know you, banana), but winging it also means you end up buying a zucchini when you meant to buy a cucumber.