Posts from — October 2007

After having a lazy day yesterday, I decided to have a more productive day today. I woke up early so I could leave to the city with Saara. She was going to a big sale for some big department store. This department store has these sales once every year and supposedly people stand in line before opening hours to be the first to get in. Normally I would have said no, but since I’m experiencing different cultures I decided to tag along.

It was indeed absurdly busy for a Wednesday morning at 9 am! Saara wanted to go there with a specific target: buying a birthday gift for Grant since next Sunday would be his birthday. We went in and straight to where we needed to be. We got what we wanted and found a cash register that didn’t have a mile long queue in front of it (as opposed to the other cash registers ).

After getting out, Saara had to go to uni and I was going to walk around the city. There was a castle that I wanted to visit. Before going there however, I needed to get some breakfast. Saara had suggested me to go to a place called Kauppahalla, which is basically an indoor market. You find a lot of these places here, simply because it gets too cold in the winter. I went there and bought some salmon salad which I eat in a mall just down the street somewhere (it’s warmer inside than outside where it was almost freezing).

I decided to finally print out the pictures for benny that I had promised him. I passed by some photo shop and printed them out there. After doing that, I went into the mall nextdoor to take a nap. Then I went to the post office to mail the pictures to Benny. After doing that, I was finally ready to start walking around.

I walked to a hill that I saw on the map. I walked around some park, saw a swimming pool, a football stadium and an athletics track but no castle. Afetr wondering around I decided to walk down on the other side of the hill and make my way back to the city. Since I didn’t exactly know where I was, I decided to go to a bus stop to figure that out (tip: in most countries, bus stops have good detailed city maps in them!).

When I got there, I felt very stupid: I saw on the map that I was in the wrong part of the city! What happened was that I only took a brief look at the city map that morning, and thought I had seen the castle being located on this side of the river. In combination with that, Saara had told me to walk along the river until I saw the castle. I did walk along the river and although I didn’t see the castle itself, I did see a big rocky hill that if it would’ve been my choice, I would have built the castle on

Anyway, big fuckup but luckily it turned out that I was quite close to the real location of the castle so I decided to go take a look after all. I found it quite easily (now that I was looking in the right place ), but it turned out to be closed. Well, there was a man there but he would reply no to any question I would ask him and the gate that separated me and the castle and security guard was closed so I figured that was a good sign the castle was closed.

I took the bus back to the city and sat down at a random café in a shopping mall. And of course there was an open network there, so I could catch up on mail and other stuff. This country has a very high internet coverage, there is internet literally everywhere, even on busses (!). Sidenote: that can lead to some serious trouble though: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia

Anyway, I sat there until six and then headed back to Grant and Saara’s place. When I arrived, we made homemade pizza (delicious!) and had some nice conversations. After dinner we watched a british comedy show called extra which was pretty funny. Even though it was funny, I fell asleep halfway through (surprise, surprise!).

When I woke up a bit later, Grant and Saara had gone to bed. This kind of thing makes you really feel at home, which is very nice from time to time when you’re traveling for a longer time. I watched some tv and updated my list of blog bullet points (that way I still know what I did whenever I finally get to writing the blog entries themselves ). After watching some shows on my laptop I went to bed around 1:30.

I woke up when Grant got up to go to his work. The school he teaches at is located quite close to the place they live in, so he can walk there. Saara also had to get up early to go to school fro a long day of classes.

I decided to have a lazy day and stayed in bed for a couple of more hours. After a while I decided to drag myself out of bed, get a shower and get dressed. I didn’t feel like going to the city center, so I decided to go to the shopping mall closeby to find some breakfast. Grant and Saara had offered me a bike to ride the 6 km to the city center. I decided to try it out on my way to the mall. I’m glad I did, because it didn’t really feel solid enough to carry my weight for a longer bike ride.

I walked around the whole mall (it’s reasonably small) to see what kind of shops they had. Since it was already 2pm I decided to eat at a kebab place. I had one of those rullakebabs Duke had introduced me to back in Tampere and it was pretty good (and it was a _lot_ of food for very little money.

While I was sitting in the kebab place I noticed the library right across the street. Since I remembered someone told me that internet at libraries is free, so I decided to take my chances and go and ask if they happened to have any wireless there (since Grant and Saara’s place didn’t). Before I knew it, the librarian was making me a library card for all libraries in the city of Turku . After he made it it turned out that he hadn’t quite understood what I was asking, since he pointed me at 4 wired computers downstairs. Since I was there and I had the card anyway, I decided to sit there and do some stuff (this place was the same as Grant and Saara’s if I couldn’t use my laptop anyway).

After a while I decided to head back to the apartment and see if Grant was back yet (it is quite common to give your host some time for him/herself after coming home, that way they will feel better about your presence). He was there and we decided that I would cook chilli. It turned out that all the ingredients were there and we only needed to buy some small things. Grant and I went to the supermarket and got what we needed (including some beers). I offered to pay but was a bit surprised when the bill turned out to be 35€, which is even more than my budget for a day. Even so, I decided not to say anything and just pay the bill (I don’t like coming back to my decisions )

We went back to the apartment and I cooked Chilli. This was gonna be a good one, as Grant and Saara had a fridge full of vegetables! It all worked out perfectly and just when it was done Saara came home from her day at school. Perfect!

We had some dinner, talked a bit and watched tv a bit. Grant and Saara went to bed early again because Grant was tired from work and Saara had to read a book for her studies. I was up late watching tv shows, programming and sleeping on and off. A nice and relaxing day!

The next morning I started to wake duke up by making coffee and some ricecakes. This seems to be the best way to wake my buddy up! He _really_ needed to go to the embassy and I needed to get out of Helsinki.

The day before I realized that I was forgetting one thing: I had hosted a lot of people from this part of Europe and it would be a lot of fun to visit some of them. In fact, one of the couples that I had the most fun with was living in Turku. Saara is a Finnish girl and Grant is an Aussie. They met down under and fell in love. Now they are living together in Turku. So, my choices for getting out of Helsinki were either to take a ferry to Estonia or to go visit Grant and Saara.

I decided to send Grant and Saara both a text message on their mobile to see if they would be available. Within 5 minutes I had an enthousiastic reply back from Saara saying that I could come and stay as long as I wanted! You can imagine it didn’t take me long to decide to go to Turku.

Duke left for the embassy and I stayed behind to finish packing my bag and since I was gonna hitchhike that was no problem. After packing my bags and looking outside the rain was too much to make me enthousiastic about hitchhiking, so I decided to take a bus to the train station to check out the price of the trains. I fell asleep in the bus (surprise!) and when I woke up I was once again not sure where I was. Luckily it turned out to be the backside of central station, so I got off the bus and walked into the train station. The tickets for the next train to Turku were 30€, but if I was to wait for a few hours, I could get a ticket for 23€ (don’t ask me why ).

I decided to wait and go see if Duke happened to be back from his embassy trip. If he was, he would most probably be at Café Java, so I headed there. Lo and behold, he was there. We catched up and sat there being nerds behind our laptops. Close to 2pm Duke accompanied me to the train station.

I took the two hour train ride to Turku and was a little surprised that the scenery was not too bad this time I arrived in time and sent Saara a message. She told me to meet her at 17:45 at the church next to her university. That gave me over 1,5 hours to slowly make my way there, so I decided to walk. It was a nice walk straight through the middle of Turku, an average provincial town.

I arrived early at the church and I needed to pee, so I looked for a food place with a bathroom. I ended up finding a pizzeria and ordered a cola to releave myself from the guilt of using their bathroom for free After that I walked back to the church. I sat down on the steps in front of it, but when it started raining I moved to the kioski that was not far away to take cover under the overhanging roof.

I waited and waited, but no Saara. Since I am really bad at remembering/recognizing faces I thought I saw her in every single girl that even walked in my direction. After 15 minutes I received a text message from Saara that she was there and was waiting for me. That was weird, from my position I could clearly see the stairs leading up to the church and there was no girl there. I sent her a message back telling her where I was and 5 minutes later she appeared. Turned out she was there early as well and needed to pee, but she used the toilets inside the church

Anyway, we found each other, said hello and took a bus to Saara and Grant’s place. Grant cooked some nice soup for us from vegetables they had been given from a cottage owned by Saara’s family up north. Delicious!

Grant just got papers to work in Finland as he became European citizen because of his dutch family. He was offered a replacement job as a PE-teacher. He has some kind of condition that does not allow his body to hold enough iron, so he has some sleeping problems as well.

Because of this and the fact that Saara had a busy day at school the next day, we did not go to bed late (which I din’t mind at all). One of the reasons I like this couple so much is because you immediately feel at ease and at home in their house. Yopu just become part of their everyday life, exactly the way I like it

After going to bed I woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling that I had been missing for over a month: the strong desire to program something! I tried ignoring it for a bit, but after half an hour of waking up every 5 minutes I realized that it was probably better to act on it.

So I decided to get out my laptop and start fooling around with the couchsurfing codebase. I played around for a couple of hours and then went back to sleep when I was actually tired (it was already getting light outside )

I decided that after every country I visit I will make a blog post summarizing what I (think I) have learned about its culture, people or customs. Starting out with Norway, here are some traveling and cultural tips:

• There are a lot of hot girls in Norway. I have no idea why girls are prettier in this country than in other countries, but it is true
• Drinking is often done in the comfort of the own home. Norwegians are reasonably private people. It probably also helps that alcohol prices are so high that many people create their own alcoholic beverages, be it housewine or spirits. If and when they go out, there is something called vorspiel, which is basically getting shitfaced on cheap stuff so you don’t have to buy so much beer/alcohol in the pubs.
• Norwegians have two languages: New Norwegian and traditional Norwegian. There is no clarity as to which one of the two is used the most. In some regions it is new Norwegian and in others it is traditional Norwegian.
• Norwegians have their own mile which is about 10 kilometers. This is widely used, especially in the north.
• The written Norwegian language is very similar to dutch, which makes it fairly easy to walk the streets as most signs make sense to you.
• That said, the spoken language is nowhere near similar to dutch and as such for someone not knowing any other Nordic languages completely ununderstandable
• Norwegians are very proud of their flag for some reason. You will find the Norwegian flag everywhere
• The average price level is about 20-25% higher as it is in Holland. It might not be 100% accurate, but generally I got the feeling that you spend 20 Krone as if it was 2 Euro, while it is actually 2,50 Euro
• Norway is an extremely safe country where you can safely leave your possessions unguarded for a while without worrying that it might not be there when you come back. I wish more countries had this morale
• Despite the towering alcohol prices, everybody drinks like it was some cheap eastern European country. Of course the incomes are higher in Norway, but still
• All strong alcohol is sold by one single shop. The government owns this company and as such has a monopoly on alcohol sales.
• People in the north seem a bit more friendly and willing to help you than people in the south. Of course it is no rule of thumb, but I found it to be this way.
• Norway does not have any bums or homeless people (or knows how to hide them _really_ well)
• Even though Norway is famed for it’s metal scene, I didn’t feel there were more metalheads in any public place than for instance in Holland. Did I completely miss it because it is ‘underground’ or something?
• Norway has some of the most breathtaking sceneries I have ever seen. Every part of my trip was beautiful, some even more astonishing than others.

I was woken up at 9:30 by one of the sisters scavenging for some leftover food I got my things together and packed my bag. Duke was the last one to make it out of course When everyone was ready, we left the ship which had just docked.

We decided to go have cheap breakfast somewhere as we were all hungry (and some of us were hungover). Some of us wanted to walk into town and others decided to take a bus. The german girl left alone (kind of weird, but hey, she’s german ) and the rest split up in two groups. Within seconds we lost each other as no one knew where the rest was going. I guess that was kind of typical for this cruise

We had some fun watching sempo trying to convince a cop to give him an alcohol test (they were testing drivers coming off the ship, and with good reasons ). At first the cop agreed, but later he changed his mind and told us that the line of waiting cars was too long. Bummer, since he was pretty drunk!

We found each other again a few busstops down the road and decided to go to McDonald’s. There we had some nice fat breakfast to kill our hangovers. After that, Tiina Duke and me were going to some place (turned out to be Café Java) since Tiina needed to talk some stuff over with Duke. They did their thing and I spent my time on the internet. After Tiina left, me and Duke stayed there for a couple of hours planning the next couple of days and catching up on email and CS stuff.

After a few hours we went back to Daniels place after asking him if we could maybe stay with him for one more night (since our stuff was there anyway and we were pretty beat up). We catched up with Daniel and I had some nice much needed sleep.

We had dinner and both worked on our blogs (I was now working on October 1^st) while talking with Daniel and listening to music from either Daniel or me. We did not go to bed too late as we _really_ needed to catch up on some sleep.

The next morning I woke up at what I thought was 8:30, but it soon turned out that the particular clock I looked at was still on Helsinki time (there is a one hour time difference ), so it was only 7:30. Nevertheless I got up, hungry for water and breakfast. Yoav was also awake, so we decided to go ahead and grab breakfast while it was still rather quiet on the ship. The breakfast buffet was almost equally huge as the dinner buffet the night before. This time however we started slowly and as we were progressing, some of the other surfers started coming in. After a while I felt really tired and wanted to go back to bed for another hour as the ship was not docking before 9:30.

I went back to my hut and lay down. Next thing I know I’m being woken up by the surfers saying that we were in Stockholm. We got off the ship, which was almost as chaotic as getting on it the day before. The Stockholm surfers arrived a few minutes after we arrived to welcome us. Not all of us were out of the ship yet, however as the girls had just woken up and still needed to shower, powder their noses and get breakfast. We decided to go ahead without them so they could later catch up.

The Stockholmers seemed like a really friendly and active bunch! They took us to a little breakfast place that no one would ever find otherwise. We had the cosy basement to ourselves and had a lovely breakfast in there (Okay, all the cruisers just looked at the stockholmers having breakfast as we just had breakfast on the ship ).

After breakfast and some relaxing we started walking towards stockholm’s old town. The old town is a beautiful area and it was very ncie to walk around in. It is quite hard to guide a group of about 25 people through a busy city though Somewhere along the way the sisters rejoined the group. We walked to the royal palace and witnessed the changing of the guards. It could have been very nice, but there was apparently some photographer taking pictures which made the whole thing a little touristy. Nevertheless, interesting to see

After that we decided to head into a pub as most of the stockholmers were ready for a drink and most of the cruisers were too tired to walk around all day. We quickly found a nice Irish pub were we all sat down. A number of us went out to explore the city a bit more and some other stayed in the pub. Duke and me went out to find a supermarket to buy dinner that we could eat on the ship on the way back.

Around 15.00 we started walking back to the ship as it was leaving at 16:30. As soon as we got back on the ship we continued drinking (I was only getting started then, but some of the Finn’s were drinking long before we got back to the ship ). I shared buying two cases of beer with Duke, Yoav and Jani so we had more than enough beer for the night. We strolled around the ship again, spending some time everywhere. Duke played some more guitar and we listened some more

After all the bars had closed we had either lost everyone or they had gone to bed. The sisters decided to look for cabins that had after parties going on and I decided to tag along. The tactic of having two good looking girls go into cabins with open doors to check them out and only then showing up worked quite well Before we knew it we were invited in by some polish guys who gave us some drinks and we had some nice talks (although the level was not too high since we were all pretty much drunk or exhausted)

In the end we went to bed at 6 am. Even though I had been drinking all night, it was apparently not at a pace that got me drunk, so it was a nice evening. Just a pity that we would be arriving to Helsinki at 9:30