A belly full on facebook?

Social media makes the world go backwards or something. Things only happen once they are documented online. And so it seems a bit odd to be writing about Helsinki’s Restaurant Day on a blog when the internet is awash with glowing testimonials already. Some excellent high-quality photographs too.

When a city has to be an event, it better be one that looks good on a very small screen too, no?

But for those Helsinkians for whom life takes place offline August has always been especially lively. The city is full of people just back from long holidays, the sun shines a lot (as it does in the Finnish summer anyway, and that’s a fact), the stress hasn’t begun yet, most Finns look tanned and healthy, and on a few evenings it’s warm and dark at the same time (how Southern European!)

But enough wittering and certainly no twittering. Just a few photos from the last few days to remind ourselves what this all was.

Street partying in Rööperi, for people who like to push their baby-buggies in the street, not transport them inside the car. Tent sauna for the desperate.

Next, the restaurant stuff.

Delicious food and enough of it! Later the sun came out in full splendour.

By that time we were browsing the flea market offer in Vallila. It’s an area with a lot of the workers’ housing. One of the biggest buildings was built for workers of the Kone & Silta company. It was designed by Armas Lindgren, Bertel Liljeqvist and Elisabeth Koch as a vast perimeter block around a garden with staircases from A to P. To an outsider the garden-suburbesque aesthetic appears to reflect a still existing ethic of sharing and caring. Residents numbered 700 in the 1920s, today about 250, but from what we could see they still share.

Some stunning bicycles.

Later Regatta beckoned and offered a joke I’d not seen before.

And then, after my camera battery fell, exhausted, into well-earned slumber, we took in a bit of Art Goes Kapakka.

The news? Bringing the Guggenheim brand to Helsinki is still high on some folks’ priorities but the culture minister is mildly enthusiastic at best. Meanwhile, the financial markets may be putting everyone else on a long-term diet. Who knows what that will do to the built environment. And who knows, the social media boom and all this blogging silliness might become really old-fashioned too.

Cool and authentic

Well it finally is cool.

At the end of another ridiculously hot summer, Helsinki and its residents are beginning to return to something akin to normal. It being the second week of August, traffic jams are back and terrace bars/waterside cafes/Helsinki streets are heaving.

Helsinkians also have to learn how to share the city with those other urban residents, the dreaded and well-fed  Helsinki seagulls. It is they, by the way, who are behind such high sales of fishing line in contemporary Helsinki.

Apart from the stringing up of anti-sea-gull devices, there are many, many other recurrent events which come with the seasons. We aren’t suggesting anything to do with autumn yet, merely that the summer has reached a new phase. It’s now crayfish season, raspberry season and pull-pea season (anyone who knows where to buy “vetoherne” please let us know), and athletics season.

We are horribly aware that there is something akin to looting season going on in the UK. So-called high-street shops but also independent shops into which individual and collaborative effort has no doubt been poured over years, perhaps decades, is being smashed up in a frenzy of, well, disaffection and despair among other things.

“Get a job”, people are saying about the looters and rioters. Alas, not many jobs around (see our previous post).

Meanwhile, though storm clouds have been seen (and heard! were you here last night?!) here in Helsinki the looting is just on a screen in two (at most) dimensions. In fact, Helsinki’s enterprising types appear to have revved up the energy-levels over the summer. Everywhere you look there’s a new shop being built!

Interestingly, it’s marketing folks who seem to be behind some of this stuff, like the Aitokauppa in Ullanlinna.

Also, rumour has it, public money is involved. Sitra is actually bankrolling this future “chain”. So whereas the delightful Laivurin Valinta at the other end of the street remains a genuine independent, the idea of the good folks of Ullanlinna becoming the beneficiaries of state-supported access to good, real food as some kind of human right. Well …

How much do we care? Not sure. With such schemes at least Helsinki’s often dead streets have some hope of being brought back to a life they had in the 1960s, the glory days of Finnish retail.

The Aitokauppa is a pun. From (m)aitokauppa which people of my generation still remember, “milk shop” or ordinary shop, but Aito means authentic so it’ll be more real, say, than chain store stuff.

It was once a  Siwa. Ex-co-op movement they may be, but so ugly are they that I can’t say I’d ever miss one of them. Their branding people want the cheap look and think this is achieved by being seriously ugly. So ugly in fact that I will not have JHJ defaced with an image of them! Instead, a gratuitous if seasonally apt image of a K-shop.

(You ever tried cooking live crayfish?!)

From urban unpredictability to tulipmania

URBAN GRIT, 2010

According to writers like Sharon Zukin, the contemporary metropolis is suffering a crisis of authenticity. One dimension of this crisis is the way urbanites both love and fear the unexpected. They want the authentic feel of a real, lived city and they turn up their noses at the macdonaldsization of urban space. Not this sanitised commercialism, they proclaim, we want the real thing, urban grit. But do they really?

Let’s take Helsinki’s Kallio, for instance (beautiful photos of it here). Kallio is one of very few densely populated and evidently diverse neighbourhoods in the whole of Finland. Lots of people say they love the vibe there.

But it also has a visible contingent of people who have drug and alcohol-related problems. Their behaviour is by definition sometimes a bit hard to predict. And so quite a few people like the idea of Kallio and like to hang out there, but are more than happy to live somewhere else. Somewhere less unpredictable.

Then again, as Ulrich Beck wrote back in the 1980s (the original that came out in German), the whole world is a bit of a risk society. Beck was interested at the time in environmental and technological risk. Anyone with a bank account will recently have become acquainted with another pervasive type of risk, financial risk.

In fact, a person these days could be forgiven for thinking that our whole way of life is premised on risk-taking and lack of predictability. Aren’t big salaries in finance to do with the valued capacity to work out how any kind of risk can be exploited, divided up, avoided, shifted into the future or onto someone else’s shoulders and so on?

We digressed. Again.

We were going to comment simply on the rather lovely element of predictability that survives in Helsinki. There’s something about the seasonality that you just can’t escape in this part of the world. Perhaps it’s the slowly but surely changing environment here that makes people come up with ways to mark the passing of time, and to enjoy whatever time/weather (temps, vous voyez…) they happen to be stuck in.

Soon we will be seeing Runeberg tarts in the shops. Then marzipan-filled buns to mark Mardi Gras. We will go and work off the calories afterwards in Helsinki’s parks with our toboggans and our children.

Already the tulip season is in full swing. Compared to many other flowers at this time of year they are relatively inexpensive in Finland. Here are some we were fortunate enough to be given.

Nothing wrong with predictability in this sense. Though tulips were perhaps the start of all this madness in the first place…

What Helsinki has time for

Marinas of all kinds and all levels of luxury pepper this city. Clearly people have time on their hands to use their boats, to sail into the sunset and, perhaps, motor their way back to port after the wind dies down. Still in the sunset, since it lasts for hours even if you don’t live facing north or where the water reflects the rays, like here, in Katajanokka (photo taken in Tervasaari).

And here’s Helsingin Moottorivenekerho with Tervasaari behind. It’s all really easy to miss if you drive along Pohjoisranta in a rush to get to the burbs or the airport.

And here’s a church boat crew training or just enjoying themselves. It’s the small thing in the water, in front of the harbour cranes.

And should you want to get involved in this pastime, we believe that Soutumiehet, located on the other side of the peninsula, on Merikannontie, across the water from the rowing stadium, have the kit and the organisational skills and what have you. Like time.

Should you not have time you might like to find our more about this lot: “Time research institute, 2nd floor. Only by securing time”. Which translates, obviously, as “by appointment only”. If anyone knows anything about them, do let us know.

Sorry folks, that’s all we have time for.

Good night.

First day of summer

It’s the first of June, and horror of horrors, children are still going to school.

Not when I was a child! School finished on the last day of May. Always. And then we went off into the countryside to help our parents with all the agricultural work and pose for Suomi Filmi camera crews. (This, kind of, was what I was taught at a “good” school in the UK in the early 1970s.)

Meanwhile, in 2010, who could fail to be in love with this city? The buildings reflecting the sun make the idea of going home to bed just ludicrous. Anyway, it’s not dark yet. So I had another beer. (Fortunately they import the stuff these days.)

On the way home I was reminded, however, that there’s a price for the cushy Finnish way of life. 200 million kg of plastic waste are produced by us 5 million Finns a year! This clearly demonstrated in a bit of street art, of sorts, in Narinkka Square in front of Kamppi, in an installation by Kaisa J. Salmi (pdf of their poster downloadable here). Rubbish on rubbish, I thought, but then realised that the real rubbish had been left on the steps rising out of the square. It really is remarkable, how this square just seems to suck up people who leave papers and cans and food wrappings in large quantities, to fly around and catch on the steps.

But catching the view past Lasipalatsi, thought again that some things sometimes are done just right. To catch just that right angle of the setting sun.