My Dear Hard Drive

Posts Tagged ‘Migrant’

I suppose I am taking a risk here, because I’m speaking in defence of the freedom of speech in a way… Apparently, being honest about your true feelings isn’t appropriate these days. Someone important might get offended. In this case, that someone important was Fred Smith of FedEx for a comment made on Twitter about their town by certain Mr. Andrews who was on his way to give him a presentation of a sort. The unfortunate Mr. Andrews didn’t like Memphis. It seems, that Mr. Andrews should have liked Memphis, or at least should have pretend to, and as he didn’t he got into a world of trouble for mentioning that on Twitter.

What I want to ask is that how petty do you have to be if you bother to write a 350 word letter about a tweet message that most people wouldn’t thought twice about without you bringing it up? Now we all know that Memphis is a bit of an eye sore from the airport point of view. Mr. Andrews never said why he didn’t like Memphis. Maybe he has an obnoxious auntie there. He also never mentioned WHICH town he didn’t like, but thanks to Fred Smith, we all know now that it was Memphis. Now I know, that if I ever go to US, Memphis isn’t probably the nicest place to go see. (Not that I would have anyway, so no big harm done there, or even if I had been thinking about going, the harm still wouldn’t be big I suppose.)

I once got into trouble by stating online that I couldn’t understand how people could live in Helsinki. To me it was way too noisy and there were no trees in sight, and every building looked alike. I lived in Helsinki for some years after that, and I still can’t understand why some people choose to live there. I said that online, and a (former) friend who lives in Helsinki was offended. I simply cannot understand why anyone would be so precious about their home town. Now that I live in Hobart, I LOVE this place. I absolutely ADORE it. But I do understand that some people will find it way too quiet for their taste; they even might say it’s not pretty as there are no neon lights and some of the houses and stores are a bit of an eye sore, but do I care if someone says that out loud on Twitter? Of course not! They have a right to their opinion, and it won’t change my love for Hobart one tiny bit. I happen to like those eye-sores as well. They add character. :p

I don’t know how the letter got online, but I suspect that unless Mr. Andrews got sacked for this he wouldn’t have dared to. However, it got online and Fred Smith should know that publicity these days goes both ways. Everything that can be legally published and a bunch of illegal stuff can become public information. (And here’s a tip, Mr. Smith. If you resort to personal insults toward the little guy in response to something so generic than someone not liking your town, it doesn’t really sit well with general public.) Now, I am one of the few people who don’t have to worry about what drinking party photos will be published of me on Facebook, because I’ve yet to have my first drink. I still feel it’s completely unrealistic to demand a squeaky-clean public image from the people around you, because the only people who can keep that up are very likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, and you would not want to hire them if you knew. People are people, and we are very fast getting to know that we all have things in our lives that other people will judge. Be it your figure, your opinions, your way of life, your religion, someone will think you’re an abomination for it.

I rarely quote the bible, but this is such a perfect opportunity: Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

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There’s more to this story yet. Please read the comments made by Terbil Towl explaining who exactly wrote that letter… May that be a lesson in thinking before typing in anger.

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This Christmas I will be away from home. In 1999 I was planning to spend the Christmas with my then boyfriend, but on the morning of Christmas eve I decided I couldn’t do it, so I packed my bag and jumped into a train that was loaded full of people going home for Christmas. I didn’t get a seat during the 5 hour train ride, but that was alright, I was going home.

It may have been easier had there not been snow that year. Snow always makes me feel christmasy, it’s the most important element of Christmas to me. NOTHING says Christmas like snow. I was told there’s snow in Finland this year, just like it was a real Christmas that hadn’t heard of climate change or global warming. Snow in time. Christmas in time.

This year, I will be basking in the hot Australian Sun, not wearing a big red cardigan or anything, but shorts and a top. How depressing. I feel like it was Juhannus, the mid summer festival in Finland. If I ignore the fact that it is Christmas and concentrate on the thought that it could be Juhannus, I actually feel quite fine. But as soon as I think about snow back home, mom’s fantastic decorations inside the house, that are not the slightest bit tacky or untasteful, I want to cry. I have never seen a home that would have been decorated for Christmas with taste, other than my mothers, and oh I wish I could show you. Even the photos of a real Christmas have been destroyed when one of my dearest hard drives suddenly crashed and took most of my photos with it.

So this Christmas… All I want is a room I can crawl into to listen to Sylvia’s Christmas Song and have a good old cry. :p (If you follow the link and read the English lyrics, I think there’s been an error in translation:

“And quiet are now all the prisoners’ groans,
But oh, who pays heed to a prisoner’s moans?”

Should read something like

And quiet are now all the prisoners’ groans,
But oh, who pays heed to the singer’s moans?

And then, after having that cry and a bit of crumble and public display of disapproval of snowless Christmas, go to a beach and pretend it’s the best Juhannus ever.

Popularity: 9%

As my regular readers know, I am a Finn who moved to Australia in April this year. While the transition has gone smoothly on most parts, there is one thing that keeps me puzzled. Sometimes people are friendlier towards me than what I expect, and sometimes I feel they are down right rude. I know I make mistakes with my politeness here, as us Finns don’t have an equivalent to the word “please” and all these thank yous and misters and mam’s are used very sparingly and they are not considered necessary at all. Politeness comes from the tone of voice and your expression, not the words you use. We have little such shallow signs of politeness or friendliness, given that we are not the friendliest and most open people out there, not at all. That is to say that I suspect the cold shoulder I receive occasionally is due to my own behaviour, no matter how friendly I attempt to be and no matter how I remind myself to say please and thank you and not reply with one word only and the sort.

One of my problems is to ask questions. Small talk. Australians ask you ever so effortlessly about your weekend plans and the sort, and I go on and blabber about my plans without asking the same question back, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I’m used to people sharing their plans if they want to without prompting. It’s always been a problem for me, even in Finland even though the type of questions is different there, but here it is even harder, as everyone asks you questions that they either do or do not expect an answer to. Like “How’re you goin’?” That question was thrown at me by a young man who was having a smoke in front of his work place (I assume) when I walked past with my dog. What are you supposed to reply to that? Unsuspecting Finn as I was, I just said “good” and smiled, reminding a second later that I probably should have said “good thanks” and then continued on to ask how he was doing. However, by that time I was already meters away and couldn’t, obviously, return to the conversation without appearing I was actually interested in how he was doing. Clearly, he wasn’t interested in my well being either, but he must have been one of those friendly Australians, who just cannot let a stranger pass by without attempting to make a conversation, no matter how short.

I was on my way to buy some more calico. At the shop, I was waiting for someone to come to me and ask if they can help me. There was 3 assistants anyway, and I was the only customer at that point, so I kind of expected someone to come over and offer help. Nobody did though. So I did a circle around the place and returned to my original position next to the rolls of calico, expecting them to understand that I was, in fact, decided on the calico. Nobody approached me or seemed the slightest bit interested in me. Did I possibly fail to look them in the eye when I got in or give some other sort of signal of approachability or friendliness, I don’t know, but I ended up carrying the 20 meter roll onto the counter myself. I was then attended to because there was no other option I would imagine.

As my assistant was measuring 10 meters of the stuff for me, I asked if she knew where the material was manufactured. She didn’t know, but promised to ask someone else. I decided I better explain why I wanted to know, given that calico is like junk fabric to most people (the unbleached, un-everything material that most dressmakers use as mock up dress material testing the pattern) and to most people it doesn’t matter one bit where it comes from. So I explained I make wedding dresses out of calico and that Australians have a really good regulations in pesticide control and the sort when growing cotton, even if it wasn’t organic. She seemed interested at that point, and I felt like I had broken the ice. Good going, Sebbie, you’re getting the hang of it, I congratulated myself in my head.

She then went on to tell me that I should contact this-and-that person at a wedding magazine she used to work for, and tell the manager her name to get a better deal on advertising in that magazine. She also gave me an estimate of the price the advertising would probably cost. I was impressed by her willingness to help me out, but I was no longer surprised as I had noticed a lot of people will go out of their way to help you ahead by giving you contacts and tips. I thanked her excitedly, and told her that I will do exactly that, although I won’t have the money for advertising in high end magazines just yet. When she was done cutting my fabric and packing it up, she went off to find that woman who would possibly know where the fabric came from, quickly explaining why I wanted to know. She didn’t have any idea, so I said it’s all right, that I’ll just need to know where it comes from before I sell the dress to someone to whom the ecological point of view matters a lot. Before I could finish my sentence, she had already drifted off back to a conversation with the other shop assistent, and the one who was serving me had made her way over to some pile of fabric. As I hadn’t even nearly finished what I was saying, I started moving towards the door still talking, uncomfortably aware of the fact that nobody paid any attention to me whatsoever.

I managed to get back home without any more culture shocks, but it did leave me wondering how little things make such a big difference. My culture back home is seemingly very similar to this one, but still I can’t manage to buy a simple piece of calico or the daily croseries without being baffled by the differences. How I don’t know what to say when the cashier asks me that question “how are you today” as I know fully well she really doesn’t care. Why can’t they just say “G’day” and skip the fancy stuff. At least I know what the proper response to that is.

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Spurred by the comment I received to the Obama-post, I started thinking about what a war is like to most nations apart from USA. Most nations, when they say their soldiers protect their nation, actually do mean that. USA has had what… One attack on their own soil, and that was hardly a military attack. They are STILL terrified of it. American civilians, thank God, have no idea what a war is like. I can say much the same for myself, thank God, but I can’t say the same for my family members, of whom some are old enough to have fought or lived through our two latest wars, the Winter War, which was fought at the same time as the World War II, and/or the Continuation War. By “us” I mean the Finns.

Finns do not have a hired army, apart from some staff members that stay on duty the whole time. If there should be a war, it would affect every family in Finland. Virtually every male, between ages 18 to 60 will be sent off to protect our borders. That excludes those who are incapacitated and includes men who refuse to carry a gun but will serve in other duties, and some women who serve in arms on voluntary basis. That guarantees, that there will not be wars that are of selfish reasons by the government leaders, as they will be sending their own sons to the slaughter just as they send those of the common citizen. Nations like that usually fight only when it is absolutely necessary, and not because some reason made up by the government to justify spending tons of money on an army.

This was the case when the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin attacked Finland on November 30, 1939. The reason was, that Soviet Union (now Russia) wanted to protect their capital of the time, Leningrad from Germans, as it situated too close to the Finnish border. They were worried, that Finland, despite it’s neutral position to WW2 would still allow Germans to attack through it, or could not stop them from doing it. Finland refused the request to use the land for military purposes, so SU attacked.

Now imagine. You sit peacefully in your home, listening to the news on the radio, and you hear that your country is being attacked by a country of a massive size, with an army 4 times the size of yours, and that is only counting their strength in soldiers sent your way. (If it was USA, it would probably mean something like the combined forces of all European countries, Russia, and probably South-America as well, and I don’t think it would still create terror similar to that of Finns.) You know that Sweden, on the west side of your country, has agreed not to join the war on your behalf in exchange of a promise by Russians that they won’t cross their border when they get there. WHEN they get there, they say. They are planning to walk all over your country in two weeks, and there is nothing stopping them, but an army of 250 000 men shooting pea guns. An army including your husband, your sons, your father and your brothers, and not only them, but every man you’ve ever known, unless they are over or under that age limit of 60 or 18. You thought they went to military rehearsal, but now you know they were sent to the border in case there is a war.

If you would live in Helsinki, the capital, you would know to expect bombing. You would know exactly where the bomb shelters are, and how many seconds it takes for you to collect your kids and run to the shelter. You would sleep with your clothes on, so you wouldn’t have to run to the streets in your nightie. The city would be sitting in a total darkness at nights, and what long nights they are in the winter, so that the army can misguide the Soviet bombers to bomb an inhabited island before the actual city by lighting little fires in there. Other towns were not as well protected as Helsinki was, and I used to live in a house that was one storey shorter than it started out with, the Russian bombers had shortened it a bit. At least it was still standing. The attic, where I dried my laundry, once was the top floor, now blown to pieces. Someone had lived there. I hope they heard the warning sirens in time and ran to bomb shelters before that happened.

You would eventually decide that it would be better for your children to live somewhere safe and you ship them off to Sweden to be raised by people you have never met, and to be treated like second class citizens all through their childhood and young adult life. You, and many of your friends would never see the children again, and some of them would never learn to speak your language. You would no longer work at what ever you did before, but you would be making clothes for the army, or filling shells of bullets with gun powder. You would go to the store hoping they had something to sell today, as you ran out of food a week ago. My grand mother once told me how she spent her last money on a bowl of pea soup at the bus station knowing that the next time she would get paid was a week from that, and she would not have a thing to eat until then. And that was after the war.

Should you live close to the Russian border, you would have left in a big hurry after the news… A little before possibly. You would pack everything you can on a horse carriage and take that last look at your home knowing that it might not be standing the next time you see it. You might not ever see it again, because your home village would be overtaken by Russians and you could never return. If you decided to stay regardless, like some people did, you wouldn’t know what would happen to you. There are no rules on a war path.

It was an impossible war, but the Soviet Union never made it to the Swedish border. Now look at the statistics here and understand why it was a miracle that Finland survived.

We received help from USA in the form of clothing and food, which we paid back before scheduled. (How ever did my grand parents and their generation ever managed that I don’t have an idea off.)

(Click on Read more to find some videos of the war, in English aired in USA.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Any Finland fans out there? I have noticed lately, probably due to our music exports in the form of Him & and friends, Finland is no longer a country that awakens the question “Sorry what where?” first, but rather excitement: “Oh I love Finland!” Even though, this is exciting for us, being grown up to the belief that nobody gives a damn about us and our culture, I find it exhilarating that there are parts of our culture that foreigners will never quite get, no matter how much you try to explain them. (At least not without living decades in Finland.) Our obscure language is in the middle of all of it. It is our secret language, that you can learn, but can you crack the code?

A lot of us hate Finnish Rock, that we call Suomi Rock. Finnish rock is kind of a combination of traditional folk music and rock always sang in Finnish. Even though it has Finnish overtones, that is not the stuff in question. But the thing with Suomi Rock is, that even the Finns who hate it, really do love it. I figured it out after leaving Finland. When it’s not everywhere, playing like an inevitable country western tune you can’t escape, suddenly you start missing it. And I played a little bit of Eppu Normaali and then I played a bit of Raul Badding on You Tube just to take the edge off. You Tube is a great escape for the expats. I haven’t actually missed my language that much, as I can dig up a video with my own language and dialect when ever I need it the most.

Our culture really is in our songs. They tell the pain and agony as well as our obscure pride and strenght. We are weird people, us Finns, weird even to ourselves. At the same time we can be incredibly distant and cold, and be the friendliest people you ever meet. Our polite means ignoring you. We let you mind your own business, even though we’re secretly very very curious about you. We are poker players in every day life, you will never shake us to the core, you can try, but you will fail.

The Finnish patriotism still leans heavily on the Winter War, when Russia declared a war on us as we refused to give parts of our land in exchange of undeveloped parts of Russia to defend Russian capital (Leningrad at the time) from Germany. As Finland refused, Russia decided to invade the country with a pact with Sweden that they would not cross Swedish borders if Sweden would not offer help to Finland. What they didn’t count on, was that Finland would fight back. This fight led into a loss of war and the area we were asked for, but what it gave us was a sense of unity, we were Finnish people, a small nation with a heart of a lion that would stand the ground against forces that were impossible to stand against. Let me just quote Wikipedia here.

Those statistics can tell you quite clearly why we are so proud of the outcome of the war even though we lost the war. We are proud to be alive! Not happy to be alive, proud to be alive. We should have been killed, squashed like a bunch of annoying bugs. And this is where we get our pride, even though we are too humble for our own good in our private lives. We are good when we are together, worthless by ourselves.

We kill ourselves when things don’t go our way. Sometimes we kill a bunch of other people before we kill ourselves. That is the way we do things. If we don’t have a family to kill, we can always kill some strangers – a new unfortunate development, that requires more victims than it used to.

Our way of killing our families and ourselves is clearly present in a Finnish Rock song Murheellisten Laulujen Maa, which translates; “The Land of Mournful Songs”. I’ll make an attempt to free translation…

Without a foult of his on, he happened to be born
into this cold country up in the north
where his fore fathers
drunk, of course,
beat up wifes and children, if they were caught.

He wanted to avoid
the traditional fate of a man
I will never buy an axe
and will never drink booze
Or else I will drink the house

And the snow will be inviting my family in the winter
But I shall never do like my father
But as the imployment office won’t give a job
The hand of fate offers him fire water
That’s how Tommy Doom awakes from dead
and the ways of the masters
is taken up by the slave
Heading towards the bottle shop.

It drives a man into a desperation
when frost is harvesting the crops
On the cold soil, without a sound
a cold eye is staring
when an axe is lifted

Between the hills
In the soil of the ground
The fathers proudly look at their sons
Unemployment, booze, axe and family
Snow, police and the final mistake

This land of mournful songs
of thousands of lakes you can run into
The simple nation, with selfpitty unmeasurable
with reason or point
Whose songs tell about lost cards of life
and locked up gates of Heaven
They speak of the desperation of Dennis.

(Other songs you have to check out if you are a true fan of Finnish music… You don’t have to like them by any means, but you have to check them… :p This is to understand a little bit where all your idols came from, what they were brought up with… What is injected into them whether they liked it or not:

Paratiisi – By Raul Badding Sommerjoki - or sung by Ville Valo for easier exposure
Joutsenlaulu by Yö with an odd manga video to go with it. :p
Moottoritie on kuuma by Pelle Miljoona – this is Finnish for punk people. A song of a man who can’t stay still but wants to see the world.
Levoton Tuhkimo by Dingo – a legendary 80’s band that had more fans than any band in the Finnish history before Him. :p
Finlandia hymni by Jean Sibelius – the song that captures all things Finnish at one go. In English, even though these young lads don’t seem to quite get it. :p Finlandia Hymn is a part of symphony called Finlandia, written by the same bloke.

You won’t find a Finn that doesn’t know words to all of these songs. If you do, punch the lights out of him as he doesn’t deserve to call himself a Finn. )

So there you have it. A crash course to Finland.

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Since I was little, I have felt like I didn’t belong in Finland. Of course, I had my phase when I declared I would never move out of the house, but soon after, I wanted to live in Africa. I was a big Tarzan-fan, I read every Tarzan book in the library – and there were many – and I wanted to live in an African rain forest. That was when I was around 8.

My Auntie lived in New York, and for some period I wanted to live in New York as well. It was the 80’s, when everything was about how cool USA is, and how not cool the rest of the world was.  That was around 12 and 13. Then I got into rock, and wanted to live in London, because, I heard they have a great music scene there, ironically I only listened to American bands but I no longer wanted to live there, as I had gotten an america-overdose from TV and all the hype.

For a while, I wanted to live in Tallinn, when I was in my early 20’s, since the first time I visited it. I think the only issue I had was the language, because, even though Estonian is very close to Finnish, I didn’t know it, and I never seriously tried to learn it. So I stayed put, I guess Estonias down fall was that it was so close that you could really move there any time you decided to, and that is one of those things that can stretch plans forever. So I never went, but I wouldn’t mind living in Estonia even now, it is a gorgeous place.

Australia had never even entered my mind, as it was “so far”. Even though Brazil fleeted by as an option, for some reason Australia was “too far”. Then I met my Brett. Tasmania, which had completely missed my radar screen before, sounded like a fantastic place starting from the first sentence Brett told about his birth place. Even when he tried to point out its flaws, I grew more and more fascinated. When our plane was landing to Tasmania in 2006 March, I felt like an astronaut returning back to Planet Earth after a long assignment in outer space. (What I can imagine. ) It was so green and so blue, exactly like what Earth looks like in those photos taken in space. A ball of serenity. But in Tasmania, that never changed. It is just as green and blue up close at is was up in the air. The mountains were all covered with green gum trees, and in the trees, parrots had a lively discussion with each other. Since the first time my feet touched the ground, I knew I was home.

We had to return back to Finland for a year. When the plane took off ground, I bursted in tears. I didn’t want to go back! Parting from all that beauty was painful. The year went by slowly, counting days until the end of the next month, passing time to be able to return. Saying goodbye to friends and family, saying goodbye to Finland. I played “Finlandia” over and over, as that, to me, embodies Finland. I would not return, but that didn’t mean I didn’t love my country.

Five months has almost passed. I miss some things. I miss a decent dish brush. I miss bum showers. I miss mixer faucets. I miss heating that doesn’t make sound. I miss my mothers bakings. I miss oats bread. I miss the people who can sit silently with you without it becoming awkward. I miss my family. But despite all of that, here, surrounded by mountains and the ocean, breathing air that smells of Eucalypt and tea trees, I am finally home.

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