en Finlandia

1 & 2 Finnish Euro-cent coins

Tuesday June 15th, 2010. 10:11 AM. Published under Finland culture. 3 Comments.

2 years ago, we were in Barcelona for a touristic visit. A couple of days visiting the typical highlights: Sagrada Familia, Ramblas, shops in Avenida Diagonal, Raval, Gaudí and finally also Montjuic. There we stopped in a terrace to have a break. The waiter was nice and later on she asked where we were from (yes, many times they considered me also foreigner). When we said she was from Finland, she couldn’t avoid to get excited:

- Yeah? Could be that you have some Finnish cents coins? 1 and 2 cents of euros, that are the only ones that I’m missing to complete my collection.

And no, we didn’t have.

Finland doesn’t have 1 and 2 cents coins. In Finland (and later Netherlands), they thought it didn’t have too much sense to have them, because it costs more to produce them than their value and usefulness. So they use the Swedish rounding system: 1,2 cents are round down to 0, and 3 and 4 cents round up to 5.

Sometimes it happened that I had 1 and 2 cents coins from Spain and I when I tried to use them in Finland they have accept them, but they told me that the rule is that can accept them, but not return these kind of coins.

And if that Barcelona waiter would want, it’s possible to buy these kind of Finnish coins for collectionists.

Karhu, one litre can beer

Wednesday March 24th, 2010. 12:49 PM. Published under Finland culture, Funny, Photos. 10 Comments.

Beginning this year Karhu (bear in Finnish) had started to sell in Finland 1 litre-cans.

You can see a normal size can next to it. And also a taller 0.5l format.

Like my friend Stefan already told me, perfect to make jokes with sentences that include “Only one beer and…”

Limpieza de tejados durante el invierno en Laponia

Sunday March 21st, 2010. 03:16 AM. Published under Finland culture, Photos, Winter. No Comments.

Sorry, this entry is only available in español.

Google Street Views in Finland

Monday February 15th, 2010. 02:31 PM. Published under Finland culture, Photos, Summer, Tampere. 2 Comments.

Look this picture from Tampere’s lake Näsijärvi.

Professional photographer? Nop, it’s from one of the cars of Google Street View. (click over the picture)

It’s so easy to take good pics in Finland, specially in summer. Everything looks perfect. I love that little summer clouds that always are there in Finnish summer

Google Street View Service just started last week? in Finland. They have covered many little towns of Finland, not only big cities. It seems they did it during summer 2009 when Finland looks at its best.

Try yourself. Go to Google Maps, type a place and drag the yellow little man. It will show you blue streets in the map when Street View is available.

At same time they launch Google Street View in Norway and you can see in one of the streets a couple of Scuba Divers attacking the car.WTF? XDD

With Google Street View, Bing Bird’s View and 360º Cities, you can really have a good virtual visit to Helsinki from your sofa.

Helsinki transport & Finnish Punctuality

Monday November 23rd, 2009. 12:39 PM. Published under Finland culture, Music, Photos, Videos, helsinki. 4 Comments.

Finnish people are punctual. If they say 11 o’clock, is 11′oclock. Even between friends more than 10-15 minutes delay is considered rude. In Spain… how could I say… we take time in a more relaxed way generally

This photo is the bus schedule from a City Bus in center of Helsinki. 3 main sections: Ma-Pe (Monday-Friday), La (Saturday), Su (Sunday). First row (in bold) you see the hour (18 for example), and the column under represents the minutes (18:10, 18:24, etc.)

Besides of the strange way of representing the timetable, it amazes me its accuracy . If it says there that the bus number 20 is going to be at 18:52 in that stop… it will be there (90% of times). Spanish urban buses timetables normally only say tells frequency (for example “every 15 minutes”).

In Helsinki every year is sent to home a small book containing all routes and timetables of urban transport (bus, metro, tram).

All this is nice, but in the end is paper, very 20th century thing. Is it not supposed to be Finland a high-technology country? (more…)

Benchmarking IT 2009 by The Economist

Tuesday November 3rd, 2009. 02:51 PM. Published under Computer stuff, Finland culture. 3 Comments.

IT Industry 2009 at glance thanks to this report of  The Economist [.pdf Sept 2009] (via Martín  Pérez blog)

More interesting points of the research, who compares 66 countries in the IT industry field.

• With economic global recession even bigger IT firms are cutting back investments in R&D

• USA remains the world’s most conducive environment for the development and growth of IT firms, despite a tougher business environment and the emergence of protectionist impulses. Canada and west European countries such as Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands are also prominent in the index top tier, owing to their robust IT infrastructure and strong support for technology R&D, among other factors.

• Broadband    networks    are    becoming    increasingly    essential    to    IT    firms’    competitiveness.    Broadband’s importance will grow as more IT services and applications are delivered over the Internet. Technology producers in broadband-rich countries in western Europe, North America and developed Asia are clearly at an advantage in this respect. Conversely, the slow march of broadband in emerging markets, including those with large IT sectors such as India, Brazil and Russia, could impede their IT firms’ growth.

• Finland has risen to 2nd in the index based mainly on its strong performance in the R&D environment category, particularly patents, and improvement in its overall business environment.

• Spain with  score  47.4 went down 2 positions, from 25 to 23 respect last year.

• Without a good supply of local talent, countries are unlikely ever to develop competitive IT sectors. For all the IT graduates being churned out of Asian economies, there are still concerns that education systems in the region put too much focus on pure IT skills and not enough on IT in a business context. Top schools in the US and Europe do better in this area. On the other hand, the US and Europe each face long-term challenges in cultivating the science and technical engineering skills of its younger students.

• As more applications move off individual sites and into the “cloud”. The efficiency gains that will result from this development could benefit entire economies, but countries—and national IT sectors—that lack the broadband infrastructure needed to access these services will be left behind.

Bonus.This is related to broadband infrastructure in the world. It’s a world map of the cost of broadband Internet connection. The whole image here.

El País in Finland

Tuesday October 20th, 2009. 11:13 AM. Published under Finland culture, Spain, helsinki. 1 Comment.

El País (in English: The Country) is the most widely-circulated daily newspaper in Spain. Price in Spain: 1.20 €, Price in Helsinki: 2.75.

BTW. You can check the most important today’s front pages in the world in Kiosko.net and even more (838 newspapers in the world) in Newseum. From Finland only Iltälehti.

Iltalehti is a tabloid newspaper (sensational newspaper) and it translates directly as “Evening paper”. And ¿What? Wikipedia says that Iltalehti.fi is the most popular website in Finland as of November 2008. 0_o I didn’t expect this.

Sustainable forest management in Finland

Saturday August 15th, 2009. 01:37 AM. Published under Finland culture, Music. 1 Comment.

Yesterday I fund the article “Most sustainable forest of the world” in El País (main newspaper in Spain), where they talk mainly about 3 topics:

1. Forest in Finland: 85% of Finland is forest (23 millions of hectares), of wich:

• 95% of them have sustainable certificate (they are social, economically and environmental equilibrated)
• 60% of them is private.
• All of them is under the concept of EveryMan’s Right, I talked other day.

Compared with Spain, only 7% of Spanish forest (1.123.000 hectares) has this certificate of sustainable, but it’s growing.

2. Modern machines for cutting/preparing trees. Monsters capable of prepare a tree in 1 minute. In the right sidebar of the article there is a video showing this machine, but of course in youtube you can find more videos about this machines.

3. Process to make a forest sustainable: 30 years minimum of waiting for cutting again, re-foresting, etc. and also is important that companies who purchase paper or wood should demand the certificate of sustainable to the provider, as spanish comany Zara, or Tetra Pack.

If you visit/live in Helsinki city, probably you won’t see this wood industry, but going inside of the country and you will see different samples of this industry everywhere, like this photo in Pirkanmaa region:

Berrys in summer

Friday August 7th, 2009. 12:46 PM. Published under Finland culture, Photos, Summer. 5 Comments.

[This last week I was transfering the web from Dreamhost to HostGator and domain to GoDaddy, sorry if there was problems accesing some parts of the web. It seems everything is ok now, tell me if you see that something doesn't work. Thanks]

It’s time of berrys! 1 month ago you could see already peas in the market but know it’s already also berrys season. I thought it will be more difficult to find them in the nature, but they are almost everywhere in the forest and even parks. I’m a little lazy and it’s very slow to pick one by one, so if you are like me, better buy them in the market square at 3-5 euros a box of 400 gr.

In Spain, aside of the strawberrys, and blackberrys (moras) the rest are not so well known, and many times we group them as “Frutas del bosque” (fruits of the forest), to describe the taste in yogurts, ice-creams, juices.,etc.

Some photos of berry’s around Pyynikki in Tampere:

In Finland and Spain people knows that Vitamin C is good against the flu, but… Finnish people relates Vitamin C more to the berry’s and Spain we link Vitamin C with oranges & citrics in general, not to berrys. For me it’s funny that there is a lot of Finnish people that never have seen a lemon tree in real, the same way than for them is surprising that I had never seen before snowing until I arrived to Finland a couple of years ago.

(Lemontrees in Málaga, Spain)

I have taste some berrys this month for the first time. Wild strawberrys are small but really tasty. Rest of the berrys I have tasted in the forest were fine but a little sour compared with the berry’s in the shop.

It’s quite common to see people during July-Agoust picking berrys in the forest and it’s great that Finland have the concept Everyman’s right, that allows to the people to access freely to the nature even it is private property, always respecting the nature of course and being careful. So practically you can go everywhere in Finland to pick up berrys and enjoy the nature, the mosquitos and the lakes without worrying about legal matters of who owns the land.

If someday you come to pickup berry’s or mushrooms, there are some tips in this web and more information. If you, like me, can’t difference the names & kinds of berrys, this web will be helpful too.

Humor: Kummeli - Heikki Silvennoinen

Thursday July 30th, 2009. 10:46 AM. Published under Finland culture, Funny. No Comments.

Nice Finnish humor from Tampere. Kummeli is a Finnish comedy crew that are famous in Finland mostly because of their TV show between 1991 and 1995. (more in Wikipedia)

I still don’t know so good Finnish to understand the jokes, so I put a couple of clips that are internationally funny, i.e. without dialogs. In these ones appears the musician & actor Heikki Silvennoinen, part of Kummeli and a celebrity in Finland.

The first one: Krapula (hang over)

And Effect sounds!