Hello-sinki! (Or: At Least the Internet is Free and Fast)
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
June 9, 2011 at 9:57am
The most interesting thing about Helsinki--I say this after several hours of careful inspection--is that it may well be the most boring city I've ever seen. World-record-setting boring. Gold medal boring. The International Capitol of Excellence in Boringness.
I have been looking all over for anything that might be of interest to Ricochet readers. This is the best I can do so far:
- Finns are even blonder than Estonians. I had no idea people could be so blonde. Imperialists came to this land long ago and seized all the local melanin resources, I guess, and they just never recovered.
- On first inspection, I'd guess the Finnish birth rate is quite healthy. I'm not seeing many Finns--the streets are dead empty--but of those I do see, a high percentage are (unbelievably blonde) little kids. They're all protected from every conceivable hazard, too, with advanced Finnish bike helmets, advanced Finnish sun visors, and advanced-looking wheels on their advanced Finnish baby carriages. These kids, clearly, are all going to make it to adulthood.
- Some linguists believe Finnish and Turkish to be part of the same Ural-Altaic language family. That hypothesis is a bit controversial, as controversies among linguists go. Let me settle it right now: No, Finnish has nothing in common with Turkish. That's just nuts.
- Supposedly, there are 5,000 Turkish immigrants in Finland. I've spent the morning looking for one. No luck so far. In fact, I've yet to see anyone who looks like an immigrant. I must be walking through the wrong neighborhoods.
- I don't think the Helsinki events coordinator on the Crystal Serenity has ever before been asked by a passenger where to find the cheap kebab stands. She looked even more perplexed when I tested the hypothesis that Finnish and Turkish might be mutually intelligible.
- I reckon after that exchange I'm now known as the ship weirdo. One on every cruise, I suppose.
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Jun '10
Re: Hello-sinki! (Or: At Least the Internet is Free and Fast)
Claire Berlinski, Ed.: You know, everyone, I don't think you're considering what I wrote quite carefully enough.
This is the most boring city I've ever seen. That actually does make it incredibly interesting--I'm not kidding about that. Think about the Chinese curse--"May you live in interesting times."
Why is Finland so blessed, precisely? Why is the birth rate high, why are the people cheerful and sober, why is there no news whatsoever to report from Helsinki?
I had a business lunch with a Russian in St. Petersburg who had to go to Helsinki a lot for her job. She complained in the same way about how boring the city is. I couldn't help but think, "Oh yeah, Russia is so much better, the revolutions, famine, collectivization, poverty, mass murder, Communism, corruption, backwardness. What a sacrifice the Finns have made to be boring."
Nov '10
Re: Hello-sinki! (Or: At Least the Internet is Free and Fast)
Crow's Nest:
But Finnland. Finnland. Despite bordering Russia and Sweden, has a COMPLETELY different language than either, and is not intelligible to native speakers of either. It is also a very difficult language for foreigners to learn.
Apparently Finnish and Estonian are pretty close. My mom, as an American who wasn't so good with the Finnish (most Finns knew at least basic English, so she didn't get as much practice as you'd think, living in Finland for 15 months), said that Estonian was almost understandable.
Re: Hello-sinki! (Or: At Least the Internet is Free and Fast)
I like Helsinki a lot. It is not exactly the party town that is, oh, Zagreb. But I'd move to Finland, though they probably wouldn't let me. As I understand it, Finland actually has and enforces immigration laws, and never felt the need to be ostentatiously magnanimous with “asylum seekers,” so they really don’t have large unassimilated communities of foreigners.
Nov '10
Re: Hello-sinki! (Or: At Least the Internet is Free and Fast)
There are, to the best of my knowledge, four language families in Europe: Maltese is Semitic, Basque is completely unrelated to any other language in the world (no, seriously,) Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian belong to the Uralic family, and everything else belongs to the Indo-European family.
Turkish belongs to the Altaic family (which includes the myriad Turkic languages as well as Mongolian, Manchurian, and possibly Korean and Japanese.) Ural-Altaic is a proposed super-family, which you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss: If you didn't know what to look for, you'd never guess that the Greek "hippos," the Sanskrit "ashva," and the Latin "equus" all came from a common ancestor.