Babel

Week one has flown by, largely due to the fact that I got staffed on a quite hectic case about 3 hours into my first day in the office. It’s meant some late nights and a lot of catching up but it’s been a great way to get to know the office and to make Helsinki feel a bit more like home. (Going to work makes the move feel much more permanent!)

Although my case has kept me very busy, I have been able to get a bit better settled in my new home. The BCG office here helped me get someone in to make some repairs to the apartment, I finally have new sheets after 3 hours of looking (turns out they only use duvets here so finding a sheet for the mattress was quite a mission), and I even rigged up my bathroom so that I can blow dry my hair there instead of in the living room with no mirror. You may remember there was no outlet in the bathroom from my last post…there actually is an outlet but it’s on the other side of a long skinny bathroom and the washer / dryer is plugged into it. Not having many other options, I got an extension cord and strung it along the wall, wound it through the nearby towel rack so it would stay in place, and now I just have to decide what to plug in on any given day and then crawl back in the corner and switch the cords. It’s not ideal but neither is going outside with a wet head in 10°F! So, things are coming along and I’m learning to adjust a bit.

I also used my washer and dryer for the first time this week and, despite thinking that washing your clothes is neither a cultural experience nor a topic of interest about which to write, I can tell you that you may think differently after spending 45 minutes translating enough instructions from the manual to limp by! I was quite proud of myself once the first load of towels was done! Besides many funny looking and completely unintelligible pictures on the machines, there was nothing but a long list of buttons, timers, and lights to guide me. Of course, the instruction manual is written in five languages (Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and German – very helpful!) which I didn’t notice for about the first 20 minutes during which I was looking up Norwegian words with a Finnish translator. This was not very successful as you might imagine and I was getting increasingly frustrated. I finally figured out my mistake and spent the next while translating what each button name / description from Finnish to English. My favorite was the dryer setting that translated to “wrangling dry.” I can tell you that I was very close to wrangling something at the point at which I got to this translation so, I still don’t know what it means, but it gave me a good laugh. Won’t be drying my clothes on that one though….

I have quickly gotten over my shyness in the stores as well now that I know that I will only search in vain for an English translation, and that everyone standing around me can speak with me in English just fine if asked. I was looking to buy ground beef to make spaghetti Bolognese earlier this week and couldn’t quite figure out which beef was leanest. I stared at the packages for a while and just looked for numbers and percentages but there were too many and I decided to ask someone for help. There was a man standing there next to me so I looked at him and said, “Hi! Can I ask you a quick question?” He looked at me, paused, and said very deliberately, “Yes.” I pointed to the package and said, “Does this mean that this meat has 5% fat content?” He looked at me, paused, looked at the package, paused, looked back at me, paused, and said very deliberately, “Yes.” Then he paused again, turned around, and walked away. Welcome to Finnish culture, my friends! I had heard that the Finns were quiet and only said what was necessary and no more but WOW. (And for those of you who are thinking, “How different can this language really be anyway? Did she really need to ask?” Well, the word in Finnish for fat content is rasvapitoisuus. I rest my case. Finnish is not an easy, or intuitive, language!)

Besides figuring out how to use the washer / dryer units, my other major accomplishment this week was finding a gym. I was going stir crazy being inside for a few days with no good way to work out. You would think that running outside would be an option, and I actually came prepared to do that but in addition to being painfully cold there is a decent amount of snow here right now and there is no snow removal; it’s more like snow “push around.” They basically just move it around and pack it down so now, because it has been so consistently cold and there has been no opportunity for melting, there is a packed hard layer of very slick snow and ice most places which is covered by a dirty, brown snow layer that has been pushed around for a few weeks. The city puts dirt out to make it less slick but I haven’t seen any salt or anything to actually melt what is on the sidewalks (and dirt doesn’t do anything but make the snow dirty!). After a few acrobatic acts on the ice this week, I have thought about paying for the salt needed for my ~1 mile walk each day just so I don’t bust my teeth out on the way to work. If I have a gap in my smile next time you see me you will know what happened! At any rate, I realized outside running wasn’t happening for a few months so I was in desperate need of a treadmill!

On the recommendation of some people at work, I went to what they called the “fancy pants” gym a few blocks down the road. I guess “fancy pants” means “expensive with strange, old equipment” because that was my main takeaway when I visited. The gym is actually fine although it is very expensive and, I have to say, I’ve seen a lot of different indoor cycling bikes over the years and the ones in this gym seem to be the prototype of the model of the first generation of indoor cycling bikes…ever. And, they are bright robin egg blue. (Color doesn’t impact their performance of course but still, who made that decision?!) I took a look at the schedule of group fitness classes and there are four categories translated for me as, 1) Easy and efficient, 2) Choreographically-based, 3) Light and Easy, and 4) Body & Mind. Spin is in category 1, “Easy and Efficient.” Yikes, what kind of gym advertises easy classes? This is not from the Andrea school of fitness as many of you know.

Despite the funny bikes and the promise of easy, light, and mediocre, I tried out a spinning class there this week… instructed in all Finnish. It’s actually quite amazing how easy it is to tune someone out (on a microphone, no less!) when you can’t understand a single word, or really differentiate a single sound. The class used mostly American music…with a twist. We started with a classical instrumental rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” before moving on to a techno version of Lynyrd Skynyrd and then a Green Day-style 80’s love song remake. It was nice to be back on a bike, even a baby blue one, and I enjoyed all the surprises of the playlist (and ignoring the instructor). I don’t know if I’ll be able to teach here yet but I did email the woman in charge of staffing the classes at my new gym. One of my favorite spin participants in SF tried to prepare me for teaching here before I left, sending me this Finnish sentence to learn, “Tämä ei ole taukoa!” which translates to, “This is NOT a break!”, one of the phrases I am well known for in my classes at home. I hope I get the chance to use it here!

No crying this week (thank goodness!) and only one real disaster. I wrote last week about the fun I had getting my baggage from my flights. This week, I received my four shipped boxes and had to get them home. The first three arrived late last week so were waiting for me in the office when I arrived. I’m not sure what exactly goes on with international air freight which doesn’t happen with domestic air freight but the boxes I sent were brand new and taped within an inch of their lives, and the boxes I received looked like they had been through battle. The corners were beat in, tape coming off, some rips in the sides, etc. But hey, what can you do? You have to take what you get at that point! I called a cab and then had to get these boxes (~50lbs each) down four floors. I was leaving the office fairly late and no one was really around to help me (and I wasn’t willing to introduce myself to the strangers who were there and immediately ask them to carry big boxes for me) so I had to do this myself. The boxes were beat up to begin with but I think they might have gotten a bit more so after I was done with them. No exaggeration, there are six doors from the outside of my office building to inside the actual office and each of them has to be unlocked and/or opened (no push-through). This meant I had to carry a 50lb box (in a dress and heels no less – stupid!) to each door, set the box down, unlock and/or open the door, somehow prop or hold it open as I picked the box back up and moved through, and then repeat this process for 5 doors. This was just for one box. By the last one, I was kind of kicking the thing across the floor between a couple doors, and the “setting down” became “dropping.”

After missing the first taxi because it was taking me so long to get everything downstairs, I finally got all the boxes down and the next taxi driver helped me get them into his van. By some miracle, the driver was able to understand my street name as pronounced by me and we took off. I knew it would be a bit of a pain again once I got to my building but I was in the homestretch so was feeling good. First, I couldn’t remember exactly where to stop for my building (give me a break – it was pitch black and snowing so I couldn’t see much!) so we went 50 yards too far but only after the driver had unloaded one of the boxes did I realize my mistake. The driver very graciously put the box back in the van and turned around. We got back to my building and he started unloading boxes and putting them inside the gate. Well, when he had initially loaded them, I had noticed that he had sort of flopped one of the boxes into the van on it’s top, and that the tape was looking very loose. I figured I could tell him when we got to that box and we could tip it back over carefully and it would be fine. I could have done this but I had wrongly assumed that the driver would speak English so when I started telling him this he neither understood, nor did he slow down, and he grabbed the box and pulled it up straight up at which point the tape gave way and the entire contents of the box went everywhere….25 pairs of shoes and some random kitchen tools, to be more precise (it seemed reasonable to pack these things together at the time). I was holding the gate open and I think I just stared blankly. The driver, well, he hardly reacted at all. He just grabbed the empty box, turned it over right-side up, kind of reshaped the thing, and put it on top of the other boxes inside the gate. He then proceeded to make about 12 trips to and from the van, carrying about 4 shoes and one spatula at a time. I just shook my head and said, “Thank you!” and “I’m sorry!” every time he dropped off a load. Poor guy! What makes it worse is that I didn’t (and still don’t) have a single Euro to my name so couldn’t even try to tip him. They don’t tip here for anything but I felt that this constituted a bit of an extreme case. I don’t think he could understand anything I said to him because when he left I shouted, “Thank you!” again from the gate and he shouted back, “Thank you!” which cannot have been what he was thinking. Now I know someone out there is thinking that this was poetic justice for the girl who found it necessary to bring 25 pairs of shoes to Finland (more actually, these were just in that one box!). All I can ask for is a little bit of compassion. Is it not punishment enough that I won’t be able to wear most of them until May, and then only until August?

I’m nearly over the jet lag (it is said that you need a day for every hour time zone difference – I’m 10 hours ahead of Pacific Time here and am finishing day 8 in Helsinki) and am feeling more comfortable by the day in my new city. I miss the sun and being able to be outside without 30 lbs of gear on but am really enjoying the newness of everything here. There’s a lot of inconvenience but also a lot of very interesting things to experience and see. Next weekend I’m heading to Tallinn, Estonia (across the Gulf of Finland, part of the Baltic Sea, from Helsinki) with a friend from LA who is living in Paris this year. I’m very excited and hope to have many new pictures to share then. It is supposed to be a very beautiful old castle-y looking city and I’m looking forward to the first of many fun trips I hope to take this year. Asti, halaukset helsinkiläinen!