How do you feel comfortable in a city? For me, part of it is knowing what direction I’m facing. This was an easy thing to do in NYC where I was always aware I was walking north on Mott or west on Spring. As one of the first planned cities, Helsinki actually has a grid too, but they decided to make it hard and rotate it 45 degrees in a major part of downtown:

I live all up in the angle so I’m directionally-challenged out the door. What I imagined as west-ish is other people’s north-ish, and the calculated person’s northwest. It’s not so easy to give directions this way – add a few northeasts, southwests, and street names like Ruoholahdenkatu, and it turns into soup real fast. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s interesting theory on why Asians are good at math (from his book Outliers) – Chinese number words are so brief and can be said so quickly that a Chinese person is almost always likely to quickly remember a sequence like 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 while an English-speaking person only gets it right half the time. And numbers beyond 10 are all logical (12 is literally ten-two) so math is made easy while English-speakers need a split second more to translate “twelve” in their mind.

So here, like in other places, landmarks and geography come more into play – go “away from Kamppi” or “towards the water,” which reminds me of Shawshank Redemption when Tim Robbins tells Morgan Freeman to find the funny rock in the stone wall near a big oak tree that looks like something out of a Robert Frost poem. Maybe this will make for a more poetic understanding. Or just more glancing at my mobile phone map.

Helsinki, signs, urban planning