I spent the weekend doing some international drinking in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.  Everything's a lot cheaper in this former soviet republic, so I purchased a sleeping bag and actually ate in some restaurants for a change.  Trip highlights included a tour of the old stone-wall enclosed city, a mediaeval restaurant, some time at the beach, and a large beer festival.  And since we had at least 100 beers to choose from, my group's first selection was... Corona?  Well, at least it felt like home.

The other main highlight of the trip was Estonia's neverending supply of leggy blondes, most especially the Girl in the White Pants at the first night club of my last night in town.  She was definitely looking at me for a while, then she deployed her friends for a strategic approach, and finally started dancing toward my general area when her date returned from the bar.  Ah well.

In this same nightclub, perhaps an hour later, Ereek spotted some hot girls dancing in a circle with a few nobody guys, and he motioned for Kimmo Sabe and me to follow his lead.  However, while we were hovering on the perimeter, one of the scrubs came out and offered Eric a few choice words.  They were Russian words, and he didn't respond to English or French, so Kimmo offered some Therapy in Finnish and a bit of Estonian.  This didn't work either, though I think our Russian friend was definitely impressed with Kimmo's rampant metrosexualism.  Anyway, our comrade was fuming for some reason and started making calls on his cell phone while we continued to hover on the perimeter asking each other what his problem was.  Then an empty beer glass dropped on the floor.  It didn't break, which was pathetic.  This tiny guy wasn't the least bit intimidating, and I was trying not to laugh noticeably when Kimmo suggested we should go.

What I hadn't considered was that this guy might be one of those Russian mafia types who gets angry without provocation and calls up friends on a cell phone who can actually break a beer glass.  This would also explain why he had all these hot girls dancing emotionlessly in his circle.  None of us wanted to hang around to find out for sure, especially in a club with no ventilation that occasionally interrupted the anthemic, hypnotic dance techno for the theme song from Grease.  So we found another place not too far away that played melodic, trance-inducing techno without interruption for the rest of the night.

Last weekend the International Drinking Club, Helsinki met up with the IDS, Tampere and a Scandinavian exchange club (whom I'll just call NordicTrack) to celebrate the Midsummer holiday.  Midsummer occurs the weekend on or after the solstice, which I always thought was the official beginning of summer.  The Finns especially like this holiday because it signifies that it's only one week until their month-long July vacation, and is there a better way to get ready for that than a 3-day weekend?  Anywa y, we enjoyed a few days of revelry in the unfortunately-named  Hogsara Island.  There's no legend to support this, but I think Sara actually got all the gents and adopted the nickname just to throw people off her scent.  Which smelled a little bit like bacon, a policeman, or a cop eating a BLT and wondering whether it should be considered cannibalism.  Let's just say she smelled.  But she was still hot.

There are a lot of Midsummer traditions derived from pagan rituals, and almost all of them include drinking alcohol to ward off evil spirits.  We sang a lot of dirty drinking songs, though the one about Yogi Bear was ruined by a group of people (not including the unfortunately-named Slutko) who didn't know when to say enough is enough.  We held a Boot Throwing Competition.  And we had a Wife Carrying Competition.  As a quick note, the last thing I saw on TV before leaving the states was a news segment about the World Championship Wife Carrying Competition to be held in Finland in early July.  Apparently former professional basketball player and current professional weirdo Dennis Rodman intends to participate (and is looking around for a wife for just this purpose).  Anyway, we had perhaps a 30-meter course with a few ropes to duck under or jump over, and since my team had 8 girls and 2 guys, my "wife" was a 60 kg Asian guy from Vancouver who attends UBC.  (Let's just call him little Dickolas Wang.)  Strangely enough, the guys carrying the girls finished last among the 5 pairs.

Speaking of wives, there's some Midsummer tradition that girls are supposed to put 7-9 flowers under their pillows to reveal the identity of their future husband in a dream.  Oddly enough, several days earlier I had a dream in which I was back in high school enrichment class and received some sort of gift bag in the mail from a Sarah Gellar.  The context seemed to involve my relatives trying to set me up with her through Thomas Friedman, the supposedly liberal but suspiciously willing to parrot right-wing talking points op-ed columnist and occasional blowhard for the New York Times.  So maybe Ms. Gellar is my future wife.  All I know is that she sent a very nice bag of candy and chocolate, and apparently she took a high school senior picture with her violin.  Of course, it didn't dawn on me until a week later that this Sarah Gellar could be movie star Sarah Michelle Gellar.  I literally didn't make the connection until I tried a Google search just now. 

Oh yes, we also had an egg toss.  Every egg toss always ends with someone else making a bad throw, me trying to save the day, and a splattering of yolk after I make a heroic running shoestring catch but smash the egg in the process.  I don't know why I thought this one would turn out any differently.  After I washed off my shoes and jeans, I started asking around to see if any of the girls brought a hair dryer so I could put my pants back on.  None of them did, but I guess you can always depend on an Italian guy when you need these sorts of things.  (A hair dryer.  Not help putting your pants back on.)

But to get to the subject of this post, Kimmo Therapy managed to collect every used beer bottle and can from the weekend.  (Finland grocery stores pay 10 cents per returned bottle, though I hear you can get 15 cents if you drive a US Post Office truck full of them to Michigan.)  Apparently 89 people managed to drink upwards of 1,000 bottles of beer, to say nothing of the cans, or the shots of harder stuff they were passing around at dinner.  And you wonder why we were singing dirty drinking songs about Yogi Bear.

This is probably the longest amount of time that I've been surrounded by alien English speakers.  And I've got to hand it to all these ESL kids -- to say nothing of the  ETL, EFoL, EFiL, and probably ESiL people out there -- they speaks some good 'glish.  They just have trouble with the fusion of slang, idioms, acronyms, and allegories that come naturally to the natives.  This is not unexpected, but sometimes I don't just have trouble explaining the origins of one of my many expressions, but also in trying to show that these figures of speech have great communicative power.  An aphorism like let sleeping dogs lie, once understood, is, well, an aphorism.  But I regretted using the turn of phrase damning with faint praise when it took 4 people an excuciating 10 minutes to half-explain it.

To get to my point, I wonder if Americans spend all the time that others put into learning foreign languages on remixing English with all these colloquialisms.  Which could mean that English is becoming a richer, more expressive language than the others.  I have no good way to answer that question besides generalizing wildly from my own experience.  Perhaps some of you linguists out there can provide some insight.

Meanwhile, the international drinking club coordinator Kimmo (Kee-mo) asked me the other night when he should use the word bathroom as opposed to gent's room or something else.  I told Kimmo Therapy that no one ever calls it the gent's room, and that restroom was a bit more polite (but often no more accurate) than bathroom.  Then I went on to explain that you could also call it a washroom, the john, the cat's box, our other way out, the crappa, the punch bowl, or the Little Admiral's room.  Kimmosabe especially liked the last one, which can be retrofitted to just about any profession or common group characteristic depending on the context.

So there you have it.  Other people can tell you stories about language inconsistencies: a girl named Mia could say Soy Mia and a Spanish literalist would interpret this as I am mine.  Meanwhile, I can probably come up with a hundred ways to tell you I need to go to the bathroom.

Today my roommate Miguel departs Finland for his native Spain.  Francesco left a few days after I arrived, so I'll have the whole 3-bedroom apartment to myself for the rest of June.  Since I don't have one of those all-encompassing short stories to tell about Miguel that will reveal all his personality traits, I'll simply copy the text of the sign he placed in our apartment's bathroom:

Flush the bloody toilet, meatbag!
Vittu vedä vessa!
Spûl, du Drecksau!
Tira quel cazzo di sciacquone!
Tira de la Cadena Cabron!

"Meatbag" is of course a hollow and possibly dated insult in English, but this can be forgiven for a non-native speaker.  I guess my question is whether meatbag is actually an effective insult in other languages.  If so, then take that, coffee can!  You got served, cookie jar!  Yeah, I'm thinking No Food Containers is a good rule of thumb.

All this talk of foreign languages and non-native speakers has reminded me of the one anecdote I can share about Miguel.  A few weeks ago I had just returned from my first Pub Night with the International Drinking Club.  I told Miguel that I had met a number of people who live in our building, including our next-door neighbors.  Miguel said he knew these girls, describing two of them as nice and the other, whom he knew a bit better, with a "she's good".

The great but also frustrating thing about English is how dependent it is on tone, context, and point of view.  "Good" is a, well, gooreat example of this.  Miguel could have meant "good" to mean OK (as in Hot, but not Hot Pants), promising (Hot goes shopping), or awesome (both Hot and Hot Pants).  Depending on how it's stated, it could be used dismissively, genially, or even to suggest attraction.  I'm sure there are plenty of other connotations.

Anyway, when Miguel said this girl was Good, I asked him what he meant.  "You know, good."  No, I didn't know.  "Maybe the word doesn't translate well."  I asked him to say what he meant in Spanish.  Buena chica.  In other words, just plain ol' vanilla good, with no hidden spumoni meanings.

You know, I had no idea how racist America still is until I got to Finland.  It's not so overt anymore, as most of the truly hateful people have died out, but the institutional memory of the peculiar institution still has its fingerprints all over U.S. culture.  You see signs of it in people's body language, when you measure your tone of voice to avoid offending others, and especially in the at-best token diversity you see in just about every workplace.  Finland just doesn't have that feel to it.  Or if it does, it's not something I've been able to pick up on as an outsider.

So you can imagine I found it very curious that the grocery store a block from my apartment has a big sign that says "KKK Supermarket".  (I have a picture but no place to post it.)  Most Finns have never heard of the Ku Klux Klan, so how should they know if this grocery store is secretly funneling money to them?  As corroborating evidence, the store sells a bag of corn chips with a Native American Chief caricature of a logo.  How politically incorrect and offensive to Finland's Native American population.  (OK, I couldn't find any Finnish Native Americans on Google.)

I asked a Finnish girl about the grocery store name the other night.  It turns out the chain is really called K Market (check out that huge fish!), and each store is assigned between one and four K's to indicate its size.

But I still think they're secretly racist.

Day 1:  After a pleasant day of doing nothing at work, I heard a bird screeching on my way to the bus stop.  I ignored it, as I generally ignore birds in public.  Then it screeched again, and I did a double-take when I realized this sea gull was flying right at me in kamikaze fashion.  It stopped about 3 meters from my head, hovering with a menacing swoop of its wings.  Then it circled around and tried to dive-bomb me from behind, with similar results.  Then a third time from the front, and on the 4th approach from behind, this bird tried to poop on me.  It failed miserably, but I gunned it out of there nonetheless.

Day 2:  A similar story, sans the pooping.  Also, a gang of sea gulls perched on top of a building squawked at me.  It sounded kind of like laughter.  I felt sort of like Harold from Harold and Kumar before he learned that it was OK to bitch-slap people who deserved it.  These birds were skateboard punks just waiting to kayak down the all-hydrogenated oil aisle of a local Kwiki-Mart, after which they would pop in Extreme Mix #2 and started singing Bonnie Tyler in their off-road vehicle.  On a scale of one to ten, with one being not so extreme and ten being extremely extreme, I think they rated this a 9.5!

Day 3:  I contemplated violence against the ringleader.  I even carried a handful of the smallest rocks I could find.  But the birds were not there.

Day 4:  Again the birds were not there.  They were over near the bus stop bugging someone else.  I began to grow indignant.

Day 5:  No birds in sight.  My feelings of aggression softened a touch.

Today:  I turned away from violence and tried walking on the sidewalk across the street from the birds' perch on the building.  I came unarmed, and I was followed.  The bird tried its familiar dive-bomb and hover approach.  I waited until it was really close.. until I could see the black of its eyes.. and I roared ferociously in a voice I didn't realize I had.  This must have been hilarious to anyone within earshot.  But it worked.  The sea gull froze in its tracks for a moment.  Regaining its confidence, the bird circled around and tried again, but this time I bellowed even louder.  After one more attempt, my opponent flew away to a near-by light pole, defeated for today.

I've only been here for a long weekend so far, but I've already noticed that the main difference between Finland and the US is the relative price of stuff.  As far as I can tell, Finland makes a priority of giving people the bare necessities at a low price.  Including utilities, my rent is probably 1/3 of what I will pay in the Bay Area next year.  Groceries, clothing, and public transit are relatively inexpensive.  The library (and apparently its selection of musical instruments and recording studios!!!) is free, and of course there's socialized health care for citizens and lowly-but-approv ed residents like me.  Even the one homeless guy I've seen so far found a warm glass elevator to sleep in.

On the other hand, the frills don't come cheap.  Public restrooms cost 50 cents or 1 euro.  Grocery bags cost 20 cents.  (A cent is 1/100 of a dollar and 1/100 of a euro, and yet a dollar isn't worth as much as a euro.  Puzzling.  And euro cents don't have Abe Lincoln's mug on them.  Or anyone's mug, for that matter, because they don't make currency in anything smaller than 5 cents.)  A McDonalds extra value meal costs 6 euros, or roughly 3-4 dollars more than back home.  And I haven't seen a sit-down restaurant with an entree in the single digit euro price range.  I miss my full Chinese meal for $3.50 plus tax and tip at TC Garden.  So while my rent increases by a factor of 3 in the US, the restaurants in Finland charge a similar mark-up.

My best guess as to why this occurs is the cost of labor.  I'm generalizing wildly here, but I'm pretty sure that all Finish workers receive a true living wage, and the increased costs probably result in much higher restaurant prices and stores closing earlier to cut costs.  In America, of course, it's all about convenience for the customer at the expense of the laborers.  For now, I'll reserve judgment on which way works better until I've had more time to observe the interworkings of life in Finland.

Update:  I've been informed that the usual rent in Leppävaara skyrockets up to levels close to that of the Bay Area.  It's only cheap in the summer because university students go home for the summer and, generally, people in Finland go on vacation for all of July.  So I guess it's just plain expensive to live here.  My entire blog entry is ruined.

I woke up at 03:30 this morning.  The previous two days it was 05:30.  Jet lag is a problem, sure, but those who know me know I'm more likely to go to sleep at these times than wake up for the day.  The sun seems to rise at about 3 am and set at 11 each night.  Lately I've been collapsing right after dinner.  It's not just that I'm waking up unfathomably early -- it's also a touch of boredom.  The shopping center seems to close at 6 pm.  I had a hard time finding an open restaurant at 9 pm last Thursday.  (I'll give my explanation in the next post.)  And I'm wishing I'd brought my laptop, since no one's awake for online chat during my work hours.  But yeah, I don't quite know what to do with myself after a 6 am second breakfast.  For the first time in my life, instead of feeling nervous that I won't wake up for work (first day's tomorrow), I'm actually worried that I'll conk out after lunch.

Welcome to my new Summer 2005 blog.  I'm calling it Dave's Enclave because I usually make my blog titles rhyme and, given that I'm living out of a suitcase all summer, the word enclave seems appropriate.  I'm coming to you live from a public library in Helsinki, Finland.  I'm spending June and July working an internship at the Helsinki University of Technology Power Electronics Laboratory.  My job was supposed to involve some low-level computer work for a professor.  However, he decided to let me play consulting statistician on the project.  I'm not going to complain about doing some work in my field... or being relieved of my computer programming responsibilities.

So why Finland?  Hey, I don't know.  The job opportunity was there.  I wanted to travel, but I didn't want one of those typical American-in-Europe summers, where you hole up in some tourist trap like London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome and spend the whole time finding other Americans to drink with while you write home about what a unique European experience you're having.  Not that I'm not planning to spend 2-3 weeks in July/August doing exactly that.  And I wanted to cash in two years of service to IAESTE, my international exchange club for science and engineering students.  It also serves as something of an International Drinking Club, and that's how I'm going to refer to it from here on out.  I think I ended that sentence with two prepositions.

So I'm here in Finland for the next 8 weeks. I'm actually living in the Leppävaara (pronunciation still uncertain after 3 days.  update:  "LEP-pah-vah-rah") district of Espoo (Ess-poh), which is the St. Paul to Helsinki's Minneapolis.  In spite of the name, the university is on the Espoo side.  I live in a village of apartment buildings surrounding a moderately sized shopping center, which in turn surrounds a bus depot, which itself surrounds a train station in Russian doll fashion.

My complete travel plan for the summer is as follows:  The end of May saw 5 days in Florida visiting my aunt, grandma, and great uncle; a 2-day cruise to the Bahamas with my immediate family, 2 days in New Jersey with my brother (and a brief visit to see an aunt, uncle, cousin, and White Castle), and 1 day in New York visiting friends from college.  On May 31 I flew from New York to London.  The next day I flew to Stockholm.  The next day I arrived by ferry in Helsinki.  I'm staying in Finland for June and July.  Then I have until August 16th to do as I please in Europe.  (I'm still accepting applications for Travel Buddies; your call will be answered in the order it was received.)  Then I'm flying back to New York.  I'm planning to drive out to Ohio with my brother to complete the relatives circuit, and I'll probably spend more time in NYC before I finally return to California for yet another year in my tour of Bay Area higher education.

So that's about it for now.  I have a few short entries in my email from the previous few weeks to post-date, though I'm waiting on a certain scanned copy of the Pirate Photo before I do that.  I'll update this site regularly, so check back soon.