How to bathe or not to?

Friday, was a Friday the 13^th, I was trying to blog but had computer trouble all day, and as a matter of fact almost the whole weekend went to getting it working again. I really don’t know what was a miss, but that is life from time to time, so here I am now, pretending this is last Friday, and blogging about the things that I was on about.

The Sauna world championship was held for the 12^th time in Heinola during the first weekend of August. The competition ended in tragic, both finalists crashed in the sauna and were rushed into hospital, one of the seriously injured, the other one dying.

The city of Heinola announced on its’ website that this will be the end of the Sauna World Championships, but just days after the statement a known Finnish merchant announced his intentions to arrange it next year. From the beginning the police did not suspect any foul play, but now they are investigating the case closer.

I like it steaming hot, the sauna I mean, but I stay only for short periods of time, go out for a while, cool down having a cool drink followed by a dip in the lake, or a roll in the snow during the winter, when given the occasion. Even with hot temps, my time spent in the sauna is never long but still, for me it is a place to relax so I think it is a stupid thing to compete about. I know people who spend hours and hours in the sauna, but then the temperature must be quite modest, for one to endure. Actually, I have noticed that spending time in the sauna on a hot summer day makes you think the hot weather is cooler than it really is when you come out. Sounds strange, but it really works!

Anyway, the kindergarten next door opened after the summer vacations, the kids outdoors blocked the noise so I did not even notice the first sign of fall, the swallows disappearing all of a sudden. The swallows moved despite the fact that we still had hot weather here in southern Finland during the weekend. I still wonder about what makes them disappear and re-appear every year.

Gold medal in cooking

The Culinary Olympics founded in 1896, is one of the oldest and most prestigious international cooking competitions in the world. And this year the gold medal was won by the Finnish team in Erfurt, Germany, with participating teams from 40 other countries.

So, what does this mean for Finnish cuisine after years of bad mouthed comments from leaders of other European countries, have they been wrong or has the Finns improved their cooking skills?

I am quite sure there were teams present from the countries with leaders who think they have the best culinary skills in their country and I doubt any drastic change has been taken place in the Finnish cuisine, so i guess these famous politicians must have been wrong. And maybe not for the first time as I has been all across the European tabloids.

Anyway, to my own disappointment, the menu served, did not consist of any Finnish specialities, but I guess the ingredients were chosen before hand, as in most renowned cooking competitions.The Finnish winning menu consisted a three-course meal consisting of salmon and lobster with spinach for starters, veal with sweetbread sausages for main, followed by an orange-yoghurt cake and strawberry-chocolate mousse.

Sounds yummy!

Lock and key

In Finland there is one big lock manufacturing company whose locks are in estimated 90% of all doors in the country.

Now this company has for two years been scrutinized by the Finnish Competition Authority as they have been accused of charging higher prices as punishment of lock-smiths who have has other products manufacturer’s products on display in addition to their brand. Some so called copy-protected keys sold by the manufacturer now turns out not to be copy-protected after all, and locksmiths certified by the company in question have not been allowed to copy keys of which the copy protection have already expired. As a matter of fact the keys are not in any way protected from copying and the patent runs out in five years and that it then apparently can been copied without any key coder, which is the general consumer is not informed about.

Anyway, a very close and dear friend of mine has for some time been terminally ill and he has now developed multi-organ failure and it is now only a matter of days or maybe weeks if lucky at most and increasing his life quality and making his last moments in life remains the on thing that still can be done for him so he is currently saying his goodbyes to his family and life itself.

I know there is a time to say goodbye, in many ways during our lives, people divorcing, moving away but death is absolutely definitive, there is no more. No chance you might accidentally ever bump into some long time lost friend as he will be dead and gone.

Loosing our dear and near ones is always sad and I will especially much miss this dear friend, as he is one of them who has been there for me through thick and thin for decades, which I can unfortunately not say for all of my “old” friends. Some good friends we seem to miss along the course of time.

This friend of mine has been there for me when he has been needed even now that we live in different countries and the distance is long, and our friendship has lasted undisturbed through ex-wives, ex-fiancés, husbands and even one current very suspicious and extremely jealous wife.

By the way, is he living abroad or am I living abroad?!?

Still my fond memories of our nightly phone conversations going on for hours over the years will remain with me for as long as I live. The two of us have celebrated many things and life in general together with hundreds of kilometres apart with the aid of one spectacularly innovative invention, the phone with the aid of some wine to make the occasion even more festive. And as our phone calls have been free of charge now for some time with the ever so useful Internet they have been able to go on for much longer than they used to when either of us still had to pay for them.

It is sad that I can not be there with him, to see him one more last time now, but we have already said our goodbyes some time ago but I still feel very sad as this is a definitive one, one goodbye for ever long.

I can’t say I won’t be sad when the time finally arrives, nor that I won’t cry, and a lot if I know myself at all but at least I am as prepared as I can possibly be for the inevitable thing.

Dear friend of mine, I will miss you and our long conversations…

Tough races

Kimi Räikkönen has become the third Finn to win the Formula One World Championship after Keke Rosberg in 1982 and Mika Häkkinen twice in the years 1998 and 1999.

Räikkönen won his championship in the in the last race of the season yesterday, the Brazilian Grand Prix by a long-shot chance at the title as he was seven points behind the season leader and his victory has been well celebrated through out the country.

The Helsinki Horse Show is the biggest indoor sports event in Finland and this year it was held for the 23^rd time throughout Thursday until Sunday. More than 40.000 people visit the show at Hartwall Arena annually with 40 top international riders this time, the best home riders and around 100 super horses participating. In this years suspense killing highlight the Rolex FEI World Cup in Helsinki, only three horses out of 39 went clear on the course and nine horses just had one fence down as the course was very technical and especially the combinations were said to be highly challenging. Especially happy news was that for two Finns on 7^th and 11^th place, with of course the horses doing most of the work, having for the first time got World Cup points in the same class.

Surprise visits are not always pleasant ones but all the same surprising, things you could not plan ahead and they have begun to occur more and more frequently these days. Friends you have not heard from for years all of a sudden turn up on your footstep as they are visiting town in business from abroad. One family even came during their summer vacation but unfortunately as we were not at home at the time we did not hear about it until later when they had returned back home after their holidays. A pleasant visit we just missed.

Well how to prepare yourself? Stuff the freezer full with goodies you can just whip up into a three course dinner with wine in no time at all, replace the offspring to their respective friends for the night and enjoy the moment, in best case. What if the person that turns up uninvited is someone you would rather not see? I guess you just abide your time and try to survive, make the best of it and try to make your guest understand you have previous appointments you can not cancel, at least not this late time anymore. Well, this particular visit was actually planned in the near future, just turned up one day earlier which actually was better as it suited our timetable as there was a concert yesterday evening that was not to be missed, at least according to my dear spouse.

Gold medal

Finland won a gold medal in javelin in Osaka world championships in the weekend and Finland also won the first Eurovision dancing contest on Saturday. Finland was one among 16 countries to compete in the dancing contest and won for the first time as the competition was held for the first time ever.

But one thing for sure Finland will not get a gold medal or win a competition in is customer care as

Customer care and customer service is one thing that most of the times seem non-existent in this country, even in so called customer care profession.

There are of course exceptions but they are scarcely rare, sometimes I wonder how anyone gets anything sold or done in this country. The son of a friend being in his late teens went to buy himself a new suit, not his first but another one as he happens to be from a quite wealthy background. He walks into a posh and renowned men’s outfitter in town and began his look around the suits. Time went by and the salesmen were not at all interested in this young boy and after a while he got fed up with not being seen and went straight up to one of the salesmen asking him: “Do you know who I am?” with the confused man answering with an obvious:”No, I’m afraid don’t.” followed by his curious question of: “Who are you then?” expecting the young man to be someone famous he should know about.

My friends’ son answering to this by saying that he is a customer and that he wants to buy a new suit and could he please get some help. This quite accurately describes the situations you end up in sadly enough all too often for it to be good for the national economy of Finland and currently I am in just the same situation right now. The situation gets even trickier as there only is one supplier available for the service in question and as there are no one else to compete with there is no need to take care of your customers, is there? At least that is how it seems.

I have now been trying to get contact with this one guy in the company in question for two weeks, I have spoken with him on the phone twice but as he has not been where he should have been to read my e-mail concerning the items I am to order, he has been non-committal about it all. My problem now is that I have promised to do this as a favour to a friend who has to get it done but has not the artistic gift to go through with it together with lack of sufficient language skills but time is now running out as the items have to be ready for the occasion, and we are here talking about hundreds, not a single one, with hundreds more to come if it all works properly and is delivered in time.

I can’t promise a good deal in the future as this deal seems to have to be moved abroad in order to get it done in and the company in question’s name getting a real bad reputation among many people and missing the opportunity to do some easy business. So no gold medals in customer care to be expected to in this country for a long, long time.

World record in karaoke

World record in continuously singing karaoke was on Tuesday night done karaoke singer in a bar in Kouvola Finland. They broke the previous record from China of 145 hours late Tuesday night and The Karaoke Club of Kouvola is still going strong keeping on going until Sunday if only possible having clocked 240 hours singing!

I sure hope they sing better than some contenders in song contests but guess here it is a mere question of voicing out words aloud and not the quality or standards of the singing that counts, as it is the length of the performance that is at stake here.

What more can I say, this is definitively the country of odd world records and world championships.

Anyway, most of today has been spent once again choosing the photos that have turned out well and discarding the bad ones from my harddrive, quite convenient to do that when you have the time, just chuck them in your PC and leaving them be until time and not having to develop anything right away before the film gets bad or something. Weather has been nice so it is a bit shame to waste the good weather but you can not stand more sun than you can support and I think I have had my share for the time being.

Speeding

There are several ongoing sports events in southern Finland, the Kalevan kisat which is the annual Finnish sport championships, a trotting event and the Finnish Neste Oil rally world championship race causing problems in the traffic as people are getting to and from the different locations. The strangest thing is that always when it is the time for the Finnish Neste Oil race more people than the average day get caught speeding.

And to tell you the truth jokes have been made already for years that there is a Mika Häkkinen, or Marcus Grönholm for that matter, living in every single Finnish man and this seems to be one of the times he steps out and takes control of the driving.

So far this weekend, and the race is still not over which probably means more are to speed today, at least 200 drivers got caught getting tickets for speeding with dozens of drivers having their licenses confiscated for having driven almost 100 kms more than the allowed speed limit on 100 kms.

The rally has also given the environmentalist something to do as yesterday demonstrators barricaded a street in the city of Jyväskylä to protest against the ongoing rally, even though the race itself was not even near the city at the time.

Now is also the beginning of the high season of mushroom picking and quite a lot of mushrooms exported to Italy as the Italians are very fond of their Porcini mushrooms, as I think they are called, and truck loads of them are actually picked in Finland and shipped to Italy to be sold and eaten there. So husband already went off to see about the Chanterelles so I probably have some mushroom cleaning to do later in the afternoon. And by the look in the woods yesterday when walking aournd the lake I want to get out and get some of these Porcinis as they are also delicious but for the time being our car is staying put parked.

Tents going up and down

The world championship in beach volleyball has its’ first tournament in Gstaad, an old ski resort in the Swiss Alps. Where’s the beach…skiing slopes…maybe rained that much that there now is a beach, along the river? Somehow I always have thought if beach volleyball played on the beach in seaside resorts, but hey, they just recently played beach volleyball in the middle of Tampere City square here in Finland, and there is no beach there even though it is in the vicinity of the Tammerkoski rapids.

Summer is a very strange season here in Finland, during the winter people are more withdrawn and stay indoors most of the time but with the sun showing in the spring it changes completely. People are more open and go out a lot more and there are all these festivities celebrating different things, open air concerts in the middle of town squares and annually recurring musical festivals around the country.

It is a strange occurrence to see various tents go up on the town square, and then become taken down just in time for another tent for a second festival of some kind. Why not just use the same tent all summer along instead of tearing them down and being replaced by each other? I wonder how many times the same tents turn up on the same town square during the same summer?

I guess the weather has not been as favourable as last summer for all the festivals but at least there can be no complaints about the water levels sinking this year as the previous ones with hardly any rain at all. Even if electricity is less expensive at present than during the winter I guess that is nothing that will be noticeable in consumer pricing of the power we use anyway.

Have you ever tried smoked pike? If you have the chance do so, it is a delicacy I have never come across previously and I have not seen it sold anywhere, but we just received some as a gift from the fishing colleague of my husband’s. Being a bit prejudiced I have always thought that you should only smoke fish with high fatty levels, not dry as pike but it turns out really delicious and now I know of one more delicate way to prepare pike.

Ice-cream or no ice-cream?

The Eurovision song contest is held on May 12th and already some of the contestants are arriving in Finland already today.

A lot of public events are going to be held in Helsinki to entertain the audience, same thing that was done for the world championships that were held on the Helsinki stadium a couple of years ago. Which I think is good advertising for this country as it has a great deal to offer. Finland is just unfortunate to be so unknown, maybe this will improve things.

I seem to just be preoccupied with ads for the time being in one way or another.

The latest ones being the ice-cream ads. I do not get the idea of how eating and ice-cream is sexually connected and I think the ads they make for this one particular ice-cream have been distasteful for years, if not even pornographic.

I do not want MTV into my ice-cream, I just want to eat it. Plain and simple.
And as it happens it is my favourite ice-cream, and with a bad ad I usually avoid buying the product in question.

Well this has caused me problems for some years now as I enjoy an ice-cream basking in the sun in the summers and this year there are varieties with dark chocolate, my absolute favourite and I can not decide if to try one or not to. There are so many difficult questions in life to make up our minds; we always seem to get back to the “to be or not to be?” that Shakespeare’s Hamlet contemplated already centuries ago.

Which in my case happens to be "Ice-cream or no ice-cream? That is the question."

Sponsoring

New Finnish companies have become sponsors to F1 racing teams, quite surprisingly a energy drink manufacturer, hardly known but locally in Turku here in Finland, but known in the US. They are going to sponsor Renault and a brewery and manufacturer of soda-drinks also has an energy drink they want to make more known sponsoring Williams. Maybe another Finnish energy-drink can sponsor Ferrari? How much energy can the world need to drink or this what is going to replace the cigarette advertising that is going to be banned, at least in the EU.

Maybe some of the Finnish paper manufacturers could become sponsors too. And Nokia, or is Nokia already sponsoring any of the teams? At least they do manufacture tyres.

Is this the land of World championships?

This hot summer has been filled with various peculiar events, competitions and World championships. How about World championship in wife-carrying or mobile-phone-throwing? And sauna-bathing ? People come from all around the world to participate in these competitions.

But the World championship in Marsh-football was not a great success this year.. because of the dry summer. The marsh was too dry and reminded more of an ordinary football-field and the fun went missing. Imagine grown up people running around in a swampy marsh after a ball. Like an English football field in the middle of winter, just the rain and sleet missing.

Well, at least the Finns know how to have fun and are proud enough to advertise about it world widely.

The heat is on!

The celebrations of the annual graduations and schools finishing their work for the summer took place in hardly summery weather in beginning of June, and now the happy youngsters are granted sunny and hot weather up to round 30 degrees C. The Government are planning to establish a special office for warning of exceptionally hot weather. I wonder what good that will do?!?

I mean talking about heat-wave warnings, maybe a good idea but what good will it do in this country, where they hold the hottest world-championship competition in the world?!?

Can you already guess what I am talking about here?
Of course not.

Imagine, sauna, hot-hot-hot. Summer heat-wave hot-hot-hot.
And then you combine them together and there you go!

The World championships in sauna-bathing!

There actually is an annual World championship competition in sauna-bathing. It takes place here in Finland, of course, and takes place in the summer, of course. This year they are holding the 8th world-championships in beginning of august. I mean, this is taking things to the extremes again, sitting as long as possible in a very hot sauna in the summer…people are completely steaming hot and red when they come out!

Okay, here’s the funny part, it is actually not as stupid as it sounds, well maybe sitting for hours in the sauna to see who sits longest and stands most heat is, but having a steaming hot sauna-bath when it is hot is not such a stupid idea after all. I mean, you are in hotter air in the sauna than outside, so you feel like it is cooler when coming out of the sauna because of the heat you were in!
Same thing as having hot drinks in the sun actually makes you feel cooler, instead of drinking something icy cold and feeling even more hot and awkward afterwards.

So hey, the heat is on. We go sauna-bathing…You should try it too!