School's out!

School finished on Saturday, about 2.500 of these fail to pass to the next grade if they do not decide to compensate their studies during the summer or decide to not take the exams in the fall and attend to the same class the following semesters once again. Every year about 30.000 pupils in Finland finish their nine years of the compulsory comprehensive school and about 300 of these fail to graduate and leave school without their basic education diplomas.

Anyway, finishing school was celebrated thoroughly all over the country and in some places it was compatible to the celebrations at Vappu and the pilot of a new TV-show making fun if the Finnish gipsies or Romanis as they are called was shown on TV.

According to the director of the show in question “even Africans are taken more seriously than Romanis”. Fact is that the Romanis have a culture of their own that differs quite a lot from the Finnish and they tend to keep just among themselves and according to the prevailing prejudices and caricatures they are lazy, do not cope in school so quite a lot of them should be among the 3oo that finish school without their diplomas. They avoid working and live off social welfare; they are thieves and originally conniving horse salesmen that nowadays are cheating people in car sales.

The director and writer of the script was interviewed on morning TV and told the show is made by Romanis in order to diminish racial prejudice. Well, we will see what happens, but I thought the show was no good and lacked good taste, but maybe that is what is needed.

A new bird species was last week spotted in Salo here in Finland and about 500 bird watchers gathered together on the spot during the weekend for the biggest bird watch event ever to try and spot a new and rare bird. The night bird that originally is from North America was sadly not seen more after the first sighting earlier in the week.

Well now I am off to see the parliamentary house as steps leading up to it have been covered in a sea of blooming flowers, gerberas. Guess there will be no sightings of any night birds during full daylight and not in the middle of the capital anyway just flowers in pots on stairs, might even get a few photos of it.