Helsinki: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
by tristero
I haven’t been in Helsinki, a city I love in a country I love, since the summer of 2000, just before darkness descended upon America. At the risk of sounding like the lazy reporter who asks the taxi driver from Heathrow a couple of questions and writes, “All England thinks…,” I’ve noticed three things that have changed:
The Good: The air is a lot cleaner. According to a friend, this is because Finland now has to meet the EU emission standards for gasoline and also because there are more new cars on the road. Before, the air was far dirtier than any American city I’d been in including (sorry, my blogging colleagues) Los Angeles. Now, the air quality is actually pretty good.
The Bad I don’t recall legalized gambling eight years ago (someone please correct me), but now, at least, the RKioskis – kind of like 7/11s – have electronic slots and lottery betting parlors. The machines have been quite busy when I’ve stopped in for phone cards and magazines. It’s very depressing. As I’ve written many times, state-sponsored gambling is an unfair tax on the innumerate and uneducated. It’s sad to see it here. UPDATE: I stand corrected. According to Hirvox in comments, gambling and lottery parlors have been around for decades. It’s still depressing, even if the money is used for good purposes.
The Ugly The use of English has grown exponentially (and pardon my grammar). English signage has, in many places, overwhelmed Finnish and Swedish. Some cafes, restaurants, and hotels don’t even bother displaying signs in anything but English. I suspect this has something to do with Helsinki as a more popular tourist destination than it was, as well as a certain trendiness among the newly rich (the number of luxury foreign clothes shops in Helsinki seems to have at least tripled). It’s a real pity as Finnish, to a non-speaker like myself, is a deeply rich and strange language, oddly beautiful to hear and nearly unique. It is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, related to Hungarian, but really just about in a class by itself (Estonian is the only one I’ve heard personally that’s close). There is a great pleasure in encountering a delicious word like mustikkapiirakka -a pretty simple and brief word for Finnish – and trying to figure what it could possibly be (go ahead, look it up). Sadly, translations now are ubiquitous. Even more striking, I’ve heard several younger Finns speak English with near-perfect Northeast American accents. In other words, at least in some schools, they’re teaching American English, not British English, these days. UPDATE: Silly me, who never watches TV if I can help it. A linguistics major informed me that her perfect American accent was due to all the American television series that are on.
Oh, so far, every Finn I’ve met can’t possibly understand why the American election is so close. Then again, you don’t have to be Finnish to think that. You just have to be sane.