Candy Chang is a designer, urban planner and artist in Helsinki. She likes to make
the city more accessible and engaging through research, design, and the creative use
of public space.
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.
We’re living in Berea and we need to go back and forth to Diepsloot so we rent a bakkie for the month. Who knows what animals and objects and animal-objects were once in the back of this truck, but for one month it was me and thirteen other people with a good attitude.
We’re sitting in the back in the dark and the exhaust pipe is pumping out fumes right by the door so we develop a knock system to keep in contact with the guys driving. Two knocks: still alive. Four knocks: pull over. No response: really pull over. It’s a 40-minute drive and the bakkie stalls at every few traffic stops and the ignition and motor are so loud we can’t hear what’s going on up front. At the beginning we sing camp songs and by the end we hold scarves and sweatshirts over our faces to filter out the fumes and just keep it together. Belinda is the smallest so we treat her like the canary in the cave.
When we arrive in Diepsloot everyone laughs at us, Bongani thinks we’re nuts, and no one needs to say we’re on a budget. When we jump out of the back we look like a misfit swat team or a muted clown car. When we go out at night we don’t worry about the car getting stolen. Our only concern is breathing and making the wheels go, and that equation breaks down on one of the last nights when Mark, Crighton and I are driving back from Melville. The bakkie stalls at a traffic light and no pumping-and-turning sequences can make it start again. A tow-truck-driver tugs us to the nearest gas station…
where he checks under the hood and says it belongs in a museum…
and I, being Asian, take a picture…
and Matthew and Ricky come out and help push the beast all the way home…
and the next day a guy comes and replaces it with this bad boy. Same same? R.I.P. Bakkie.
Finding old projects is always fun, or at the very least entertaining. While digging through an old external hard drive I found this one which takes me back to a time when I was consumed with kneeling on my apartment floor groping toys into the late hours of the night. This is what happens when design students don’t go to class ha… In 2001, James Reeves, Steve Baker and I holed up and made this stop-motion animation for the fun of it. Construction workers and spacemen build a space station, send faxes, and find friendship, all to a very soupy electronic soundtrack. After all these years this low-fi copy is the only surviving version, but the fuzziness probably adds to its janky charm. Direct YouTube link here.
Driving etiquette turned around – trucks and autorickshaws in India actually ask drivers to honk at them with some pretty elaborate bumper signs. It’s the lazy man’s driving strategy – “Ima keep driving like this. If you have a problem with it then toot.” You can imagine what kind of ruckus this causes in traffic and the things they’ve tried to stop it, like No Honking Day. But how do you tell the driver in front of you to stop honking…
After Helsinki’s first big snow, the City sprinkles pebbles on the sidewalks to give pedestrians grip over the ice. How many pounds or kilograms of pebbles they must have, I’m not sure, but they continue to add more after each snowfall until the Spring (who am I kidding, Summer) when they sweep it, store it, and use it again next year. This means no contamination of the groundwater and desertification from salt. This also means that many winter walks involve you, your thoughts, and one tiny pebble caught in your shoe.
Some storefront windows in Johor Bahru, Malaysia feature surveillance video shots of shoplifters as a warning to others and a form of public shame. Makes me wonder about the upshots of surveillance and if Helsinki can do the same for all the drunk people who pee on the streets…
