Travel 28/5/13-2/6/13: Tampere, Finland part 1

This was my first trip to Finland. Some 20 years ago, I flew Finnair to go to China, and did stop over in Helsinki airport for an hour, but airplanes and airports are not the soil of that country so don’t count.

You can’t even say you have met the people because airline stewards and stewardesses are but a tiny percentage of the population of that country. And not fully representative, as a rule. The stewards and stewardesses on that flight 20 years ago all looked like 1970s porn stars. Even down to the fact that all the men had 70s porn-star moustaches. It may be that everyone in Finland looked like a porn star 20 years ago. But I’m not sure that’s the case.

Finnair cabin staff don’t look like porn stars these days. But then porn stars don’t look like porn stars these days.

The flight to Helsinki was pretty easy and the plane had the best new plane feature I’d seen for a while – video feed from outside the plane during takeoff and landing. During takeoff it was from a video at the front of the plane and once it was off the ground it was from looking down at the receding Earth. That was awesome. Because I prefer an aisle seat because I have legs, I only see the takeoff from the side through that part of the window that isn’t obscured by up to three other people. And it’s never as exciting as seeing pretty much what the pilot sees.

During the flight, they threw some sandwiches at us to keep us quiet. Because people always prefer either brown or white bread, the Finns had an interesting solution, biracial sandwiches. It’s not nearly as pornographic as it sounds. It was that the sandwich was made with one slice of white bread and one of brown. Everybody’s happy, right? Except those people who absolutely hate the other sort of bread.

The sandwich came in a package that, after you’d eaten the contents, gave you instructions on how to fold it up. It was a flat-pack sandwich box. A kind of reverse Ikea principal. (Yes, I know Ikea is not Finnish.)

The second leg of the trip was on a propeller plane. It’s so rare for many of us to go on propellered planes that we get excited when we do. They somehow feel less safe, even though their principle of propulsion is based on creating a pressure difference so that the air pushes the plane forward rather than a jet which simply causes backwards-facing explosions.

Scene from Casablanca

The in-flight tourist and duty-free magazines reminded us that Finland is most widely known for it’s bringing to the world, two giants of popular animated culture. The first, the Moomins are basically affable, pale hippos who had lots of fairytale-like adventures.

Haunting 1980s Moomin Theme

90s Moomin theme from around the world

The second? Angry Birds: the story of an aggressive, avian terrorist cell, hell-bent on destroying the pig way of life.

Theme park sign. Finally see the evil kid behind the Angry Birds and how canine bureaucracy is powerless to stop them.

 

Part 2 follows soon.

19/9/08: Travel – London Day 2

Because it was one of those classy hotels with foreign staff, we got a free newspaper. I don't remember which one, but as I remember being in a good mood, it was certainly not the Daily Malice.

I must have been in a good mood as we went shopping. And to prove that even the Gods were smiling down on us that day, as we shopped, we encountered a small camp where some young, attractive things thrust Wii controllers in our hands and commanded that we play a few games of Wii Sports. Not only that, but, if our fumbling yielded the high score of the day, we would win a Wii of our own. And because Odin was very pleased with the shelves he'd made that day, we did get high scores. However, this was quite early morning, long before lunching kids came by and no doubt trampled all over our high scores. Tsk, kids today. Trashing their elders and betters' computer game scores. When I was a young'un... oh, yeah, I used to do the same.

We had lunch at "Eat," one of those mid-market sandwich chains. The mildly pretentious order of a name made me yearn for a bar called "Drink!" an escort service called "Girls!" and an Irish Brothel called, "Feck!"

Eat's wares were very good and reminded me how great the competition is for sandwiches in London. People don't think of the sandwich as a typical London food, but sandwich places probably outnumber all other types of eatery. I have no statistics to back up this claim, but this is a blog not an encyclopaedia. If you do demand information to back up what I say, I'll have you know all relevant data is available in the only source I know and trust, More's Uncyclopaedia.

The area of our hotel is one where Japanese restaurants are locked in some kind of monumental battle. Each restaurant tries to out-psych the other by having a name that sounds most like a martial art. Nobu, Roka, Umu, Zuma. Actually, that makes no sense as, given my ignorance, most Japanese words sound like a martial art. Sushi. Teriyaki. Sake. Any one of these would beat me in a fight. I can see the proponents standing before me taking poses and naming them. "Raw Fish Roll." "Soy Sauce Cow." "Liquid Alcohol Rice."

The reason we were in London this weekend was for a wedding. Friends and former flatmates of mine were tying the knot after years of living in and around sin (and before that, East Acton).

Many, many moons ago, myself and a young trekkie called Norm joined forces with a couple of lasses who we'd met through improv and moved in together. It is the stuff that makes sitcoms. It also makes dramas. And occasionally horror stories. This was something of all three made into a musical and directed by Richard Curtis and David Lynch. Well, amidst the clutter and fallings in and out, romance bloomed for two of the household. And I don't mean myself and Crash Bandicoot, although me and that guy... we shared some times.

The wedding, like all good weddings, was a chance to meet up with people you hadn't seen for millennia. In fact many of people at the wedding I knew, it was almost like wedding in my own family.

Mitsubishi. Sanyo. Honda. "Off-Road Bike." "Wide-Screen, Surround-Sound Display." "Four-Door Family Hatchback."

I'd met Norm through a guy called Dave who ran something not unlike facebook, but way before that. This was before the web. Possibly even before the internet. As I recall it, messages were carried by young street urchins for a shilling a packet. Well, Dave started one of the longest-running internet communities on a thing called Mono. It was one of the first places I let stuff I'd written leak out. The fact that the crazy people there liked it helped me form the belief I'm not bad at it and kept me from being the greatest IT consultant the world has ever seen.

Back at the wedding, there was great food, cake, antipodean balloon artists, many, many old friends and a band that played covers. (Although they played them a lot more faithfully than I like my covers. To me covers, should be ironic or played in a completely different style to the original. But then, I'm wrong on quite a few things.) Cath and I hung out with those who refused to leave until the band had to pack up and the inflatable dingos started deflating.

Sayonara. "One Hand Wave."

Travel 20/7/08 – Nice Painting

It was another peaceful day high on the hills above the French Riviera. Even the noises that broke the silence, actually seemed to add to the peace. The constant cricket, the bird with a chirp that sounded like it was sneezing, the occasional jet and the odd child.

First and only port of call was St. Paul de Vence, a village on and almost behind the next hill, famed for being a haunt of artists. Nowadays it's a place for tourists and all the artists who live there, and plenty of others, have little shops. There are certainly some great places there for perusing art. And the town itself is a beautiful, old, walled affair and is particularly enchanting in the streets off the main tourist arteries. The latter are quite choked with international cholesterol.

After wandering around, we all met up for bieres et Oranginas at a large café next to a boules-playing area (pétanquerie?). Here we watched local characters demonstrate their skill at France's national sport. Chuck Norris and Deadly Pipe-Smoking Woman seemed to be thrashing the local mafia.

The trip inspired even more of us to do paintings. Our unimaginably generous host had bought a huge order of canvases of various sizes and invited us to perform art on them. It was one of those exercises that really shows you that putting paint on something and getting a pleasing result is not so difficult. Getting something great, is another matter, of course, but some of us succeeded. Us, not meaning me. Although I was pleased with my red background, that became a Rothko hommage.

Final game of the day was the name game, where names of famous people have to be described to members of your team.

For pictures see: Flickr

Travel 19/7/08 – Nice Sailing

We all got off to an early start, although nobody as early as Ben who had slept in the treehouse and was awoken by the cracking of dawn which seems to crack in the treehouse long before it cracks anywhere else. Coffee was nabbed and then a taxi arrived to ferry us to the harbour town of Antibes.

French taxi drivers are consistent in that every single one will try to rip you off. It's part of their code. Like the code of black cabs in London which is to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city and political views somewhere to the right of Goebbels; and the code of mini cabs everywhere which is to only rob and murder you when absolutely necessary.

At Antibes, we hired two boats, as one wasn't enough for all of us. We even hired a captain. The larger boat left first and made its way to the bay of billionaires. Here, and elsewhere along the coast, were the houses of the very rich and the very famous. Many of these houses are surprisingly ugly, but all had a great view of the sea. These were the houses of the Heinekens and the BMW's of this world. Further along there were the houses of the Abramovich's and the Madonna.

The bay was a calm, clear area and a few of us jumped in to swim, watching out for the jellyfish that were then plaguing certain areas. In fact there was a lot of talk of these jellyfish, and their status had grown to that of some kind of alien invasion force. In the end a couple of loose ones were spotted, but not the floating mass many were expecting and certainly not the giant, laser-squirting mother-jellyfish I had been expecting.

We had quite a wait for the other, smaller boat as the first one didn't work and they had to get a second. When they eventually arrived, beer and champagne were ferried across by swimmer. After we'd had enough of being surrounded by the houses of the filthy rich, we moved along the coast past the mock Roman pile of Roman Abramovich. The house was the first one we saw with obvious security guards around. According to our captain, who has a story for every boat and building, Abramovich has a policy of only employing security guards who do not speak Russian. Which says a lot about who his enemies are. Our captain also had a Naomi Campbell story, and apparently she really is a bitchy diva, which was a little disappointing.

We passed other harbour towns and then sailed to a small bay between two islands where there is no current and the water awesomely clear. It's basically a parking lot for yachts. Million-, billion- and squillionaires park their boats in a small crowded area of water and show off their engineeringly-enhanced craft and cosmetically-enhanced wives. It's the ultra-rich equivalent of the car park on Skegness seafront. If your boat is not quite up to scratch, the water police come by and tell you it's too crowded and you have to move on. However, even if you have a huge yacht the size of Malta, if it looks okay, there will always be space.

After a little bit of sun bathing amongst the big boats, swimming in the Elysian waters and ogling the bellies of the rich, we moved on. The smaller boat went off for a bit of water skiing and we went to go round a couple of old sailing boats and the dock in another bay for more swimming.

The waters were pretty calm that day, which is good as I am not a great sailor, despite what some people might say. I was only a little queasy a couple of times. The kids faired a little worse.

After returning the boats, we grabbed ice creams and then a couple of taxis to rip us off back home. That night we played Werewolf until fatigue took us all to our various beds.

Travel 18/7/08 – Nice Rest

The "dungeon" area where I was sleeping was devoid of windows and had nothing that could tell you what time it was. At the height of the day it gets no light or heat from outside and it is just as dark as it is in the middle of the night. It would be easy to spend half the day there thinking it was the wee small hours and emerge for breakfast only to find that dinner was being served. Fortunately, my body clock doesn't really like too much sleep and if I get more than I need I tend to feel worse than if I had got much less than I need. So I didn't emerge too late at all.

Mornings for me are pretty much as they were for my prehistoric cousins – who I am convinced lived in either Kenya or Columbia – foraging for coffee. Fortunately for me, things are easier now and I don't have to fight off caffeine-addicted monkeys to be able to pick, crush the beans and then spend four hours fetching water and building a fire. There are machines. Machines that not only, at the press of a button, crush the beans and find and boil the water, but also, I suspect, would fight off caffeine-addicted monkeys, if needed. And what's more I didn't even have to go and find and milk a cow – there was milk in the fridge.

It was a day for taking things easy. In fact, it wouldn't have mattered if I had had to do the monkey fighting, bean crushing and cow milking myself, there was time. And it was remarkable how in the warm bits of France breakfast almost merges into lunch into mid afternoon snack and into dinner. Between food and wine, people swam, painted, read and consumed sun. There was much getting to know our host's kids who are very hands-on and enjoy nothing better than climbing all over you or becoming a fast-flying "bommetje" heading for the water near you.

Soon it was time for a barbeque – one of the best ways to feed lots of people. In fact barbeques can always feed lots more people than you have. Once again the last event of the day was a game. Tonight, Apples to Apples in the palatial treehouse.

Travel 17/7/08 – Nice Trip

For the last few years, there has been an abundance of cheap flights to the south and middle of France from the UK. Recently the Netherlands has been starting down that route with its own cut-rate airline, Transavia. Transavia is very much in the easyjet vein, where the stewards and stewardesses are less and less waiters and waitresses but check-out assistants using the flight not to throw you a cubist meal, but to sell you train-station snacks.

There were five of us travelling together and we met up with two more at the airport. Two cars arrived to pick us up, driven by our hostess and an early-arriver. We were whisked out of Nice and into the nearby hills. Well, some people were whisked there. The sportscar went ahead with Jochem's hair blowing in the wind like a millionaire's moll, but the people carrier the rest of us were in decided to over take the sports car just as it turned off the motorway. Consequence was we missed the turning. We went on and on and on until the next turning. We paid the toll and came off; decided it was too complex to try to get there from this exit and got back on in the other direction. After driving all the way back to where the previous exit was, we discovered that due to one of those quirks that the French love to throw into their road systems, there was no exit on the other side of the payage (tolled motorway), so we had to go on to the next exit - pretty much just before the airport. We paid the toll drove round and came back on the other side. This time we drove somewhat less impatiently and took the right turning, paid the toll, and headed off towards the hills.

Obviously, we arrived much later than the occupants of the sports car, and they were already on the champagne, laid on for our arrival by our insanely generous host. Said host is the owner of said villa in said hill, which is a prime piece of real estate overlooking the coast and St. Paul de Vence. Even in the dark, the clear sky allowed us to look down and see the twinkles of lights that hinted of the playground of the rich and famous that is Nice.

As a side note, our flabbergastingly generous host had just been in Paris a day after Cath and I had (see previous entries). He had been there for the Bastille Day celebrations. The ones that we hadn't known about until we'd arrived and consequently missed.

Once the diffusion off to bed had started, a select few climbed up through the vineyard to the treehouse, which was larger than several flats I've lived in, to play perudo. The night was pleasant and there was talk of sleeping up there. But in the end everyone slept in their allotted places – including Ben and I in the "dungeon" in the bowels of the house - mainly because it involved only one trip.

OuterCyperspace

In case people think I have lost touch with the youth, I have not. I'm right behind them. I have my myspace space, I have my Hyves account, and I even have an avatar on Second Life.

For those of you who don't know hyves, it's a social networking thing like myspace, except without the spam and the sex. It's quite popular in the Netherlands, possibly more so than myspace. One difference is that in myspace most of your 'friends' are people you don't know: bands who want to look popular, hot chicks who want to sell you t-shirts and hot chicks who want you to sign up to their web site to see their titties. On Hyves pretty much all of your 'friends' are people you know. Consequently I have very few friends on Hyves compared to myspace. I always feel relatively popular on myspace. Although not compared to the hot chicks with t-shirts or tittie-sites who have thousands and thousands of friends: alot of whom are other hot chicks with tittie-sites.

It is on Second Life that I feel I have achieved more. Second Life for those of you still very much concerned with the first one is a 3D-representation of the real world where you control an 'avatar' or human graphic and explore the world. It's very much like the real modern world in that it's chock full of advertising, most of the places seem to be concerned with getting money from you and when you really want to go and do something it's frustratingly slow. I am, however, proud that in my short time in this alternative advertising reality I have managed to make money. Real money, because there is an exchange rate between First Life US Dollars and Second Life Linden Dollars that you spend on things like face-lifts and property in Second Life. (It is currently 250 Linden Dollars to 1 US Dollar.) I have earned, for ten minutes dancing, 3 Linden Dollars. It may not sound like much, but it's a lot of money to be paid for dancing when you're a short, over-weight man with a beard.

The trouble now is to find something that costs as little as 3 Linden Dollars to spend it on.

Wii all play together

Wii, the latest computer game sensation promises to go supermassivenova, I am sure. It's got a lot going for it. The name, which is pronounced "wee" has all the amusing connotations in English, Scottish, French, etc which means a lot of people are talking about it and easily remember the name. Then there is the interactive portion. Instead of using the control stick like a buttony-joystick thing as with all the other game stations, you use it exactly like the object it imitates. Thus, when you play tennis, you hold it and swing it like a tennis racquet. No doubt there will be a cricket game where you hold it like a cricket bat. There have already been a whole load of Wii-related accidents, often caused by things like 4 people playing mixed doubles tennis in a room the size of a table-tennis table and with resultant smacks in the head, etc with the controller. This will only increase as the number and diversity of games increases.

Five Wii games I would like to see all having new uses for the stick:

1. Wii Rugby (or American football) where the stick is used as the ball.
2. Wii Hide and Seek.
3. Wii Wee-Wee Wizard.
4. Wii Monkey Spanker.
5. Wii Gay Porn Star.

Completely wrong. Diary now says

SAT WC P OFF = DEPORT
SUN WC FIN FIT

What my diary says for next few days...

4/7 WC GIT
5/7 WC FRAPORT
Pred:
SAT WC P OFF FRIT
SUN WC DEPORT

On Me 'Ead, Son!

During the World Cup, the whole world gets turned on its head. Ordinary womenfolk not only develop an interest in football, but suddenly can also talk endlessly about the subject. My greater half, who is American and therefore grew up thinking "football" was that wussy version of rugby they play in the states, has now registered her Fantasy World Cup football team on the official FIFA site. Personally I am not sure how happy I feel about my girlfriend listing 11 athletes in some fantasy list on a public website, but as I said, during the World Cup, the whole world gets turned on its head.

The other thing that happens at this time is that things change in the toilet corridor. All of a sudden there is a huge queue for the men's and the girls go straight in their door without delay. Can football really be reversing traditional gender roles like this? Huh! I'm so annoyed I could cry.

Wereld Kampionschap

I am becoming a little more Dutch. I have taken to using WK as shorthand for the World Cup in my agenda (appointments diary). In English, we don’t have an abbreviation for World Cup because we don’t need one. World Cup is only two syllables. In Dutch they do need one as WK (Vay Kay) is only 2 syllables where as We-rel-d kam-pi-on-schap is about ten.

The other reason we don’t have one is that the abbreviation would be WC. (Which in English is actually 4 syllables.) Using this, my diary would have entries such as “WC: S&M Ho” and “WC: Bra Aus.”