Relevant History

This is what Finland is like

Well, it's a video from Sweden, but I was in western Finland, which has the strongest Swedish influence....

[via Halavais]

Technorati Tags: Finland, humor

The hotel in Turku

My wife and I spent four nights in the Sokos Hotel Hamburger Boras in Turku, so we got a pretty good sense of the place. Generally, I thought the hotel was quite good, though there were a couple odd or slightly lame things about it.

via flickr

[To the tune of Thomas Dolby, "Budapest By Blimp," from the album "The Best Of Thomas Dolby - Retrospectacle".]

Technorati Tags: Finland, hotel, Turku

Impressions of Turku

This was my first trip to Turku. To be honest, before meeting the conference organizers last year, I'd never even heard of the place. But I really enjoyed it.

The city has about 200,000 people, so it's definitely not big: it's perhaps a third the size of San Francisco. At the same time, it's got a lot of history, and some interesting modern stuff as well. The city has recently been competing to be named 2011 European Cultural Capital (from what I can gather, this is an annual EU-organized competition between two countries), so they're doing a lot of cultural stuff, both in the way of permanent things and festivals. They've branded all these efforts "Turku City on Fire," which is rather cheeky, since the city has burned down repeatedly, most recently in 1827.

The city was the capital of Finland until the early 1800s, when Finland became part of the Russian empire (though it seems to have had more independence than some other acquisitions). I think the city suffers from a bit of the same complex that Philadelphia has: both are former national capitals now overshadowed by much larger and more significant neighbors. However, like Philadelphia, there's lots of interesting historical stuff; unlike Philadelphia, some it dates back to the 13th century. They went through a somewhat unfortunate New Brutalist phase, and some of the city has aging residential blocks that could be anywhere in the world, but the rest of the city is still nice.

I wonder what the future holds for small cities like this. Part of me think that they should be able to develop world-class reputations, and get a lot more attention than they do now; but I've only been thinking about it for a little while, so I'm not sure what the long-strategy to become a small world-class city looks like. It's more than just playing off an interesting history, though that certainly helps; nor is it just a matter of competing on the sorts of things any city can throw together-- music festivals, sports teams, and the like. There's got to be something more distinctive, and probably more niche-specific. However, even if you can't compete with London and San Francisco (which are astonishingly geared to tourists, and for all the rampant commercialization of places like Leicester Square and Pier 39 have excellent infrastructures for supporting visitors), the world is a big place, so places like Turku (or Aarhus, or for that matter Charlottesville or Santa Cruz) should be better-known than they are.

One thing I noticed in Turku is that once you get out of the airport, the amount of written English on signs, menus, and other public texts drops to near zero, even though almost everyone can speak it. Parts of Denmark are like this too: I ended up eating in kebab places in Aarhus and Copenhagen because, paradoxically, I could read the menu more easily than in the local Pizza Hut: words like "cheese" and "pepperoni" get translated, but "gyro" and "hummus" are spelled the same way in English and Danish. (I feel a bit guilty not knowing any Danish or Finnish, but I'm definitely quite grateful that so many people there know English.)

For all outsiders' assumptions about the homogeneity of Scandinavians, I'm struck at 1) how much they insist they're different, and 2) how much their history belies assumptions of uniformity. To some degree, that homogeneity is an historical by-product of a few big historical movements, like regional trade and migration, and Swedish imperialism. After all, the region spans several thousand miles, and its various countries have pretty substantial ties with non-Scandinavian countries (Denmark with Germany, Finland with Russia, etc.). But after centuries of raids, conquests, counter-conquests, independence movements, etc., it seems to me that the region could have turned into another Balkans, rather than a group of peaceful cellphone-making social democracies. Instead, there's still a substantial Swedish-speaking minority on the western coast of Finland, and at least two Swedish-speaking universities.

Technorati Tags: Finland, travel, Turku

Disorienting

I'm really enjoying Finland and this trip-- Turku is a lovely city, and I'm spending time with some very smart people-- but I find two things kind of disorienting.

First, when I go to Korea or Japan, I'm used to seeing signage that I can't understand. I don't read the language, and I don't expect to be able to: it looks completely different from English. Here, in contrast, I'm surrounded by words that use familiar letters, but those letters are arranged in patterns that are (to me) completely incomprehensible.

Indeed, Turku seems to have more than the usual share of obscure signs. I've been puzzled by two others.

The first is a model ship suspended from the ceiling of the Turku Cathedral. It's a cool model, and the effect is very nice; but why's it there?

via flickr

I suppose, in some sense, it would be strange not to have a ship model in a cathedral in a port city on the Baltic; but I get the feeling that there's more to the story.

The other is the Agricola Rooster. There are several things in the city commemorating the life of Finnish humanist Mikael Agricola--- an exhibit at the archaeological museum, for example-- and the posters or other advertising often feature a rooster. Why the rooster? What's the story?

via flickr

The second that throws me of is that it's light out waaaaaay too late. It's nearly 11:00 in the evening, and the sun just went down. So on one hand I'm dead tired, yet on the other my brain says it's 7 in the evening. Strange.

[To the tune of Pat Metheny Group, "First Circle," from the album "The Road to You".]

Technorati Tags: Finland, travel, Turku

Science park self portait

From a visit to Turku's science park:

via flickr

Technorati Tags: biotech, Finland, science, science cities, Turku

Hotel views set

I've created a Flickr photoset of views from various hotel rooms, taken over the last few years.

Turku, Finland, this morning, via flickr

I'm also trying out the Plazer Applescript on this post. We'll see how it works.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Don't Look Down," from the album "Tonight".]

[ Posted from Sokos Hotel Hamburger Bors via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Finland, hotel, travel, Turku

View from the hotel this morning

We're near the town square, though our room looks in the opposite direction (toward the south, perhaps).

via flickr

When we arrived last night around 12:30, there was still barely some light, and people were sitting in the hotel cafe and bar. I asked the concierge if it was always this busy on a Tuesday night. He said that this was the first warm evening of the summer, so people were making the most of it. Or, to quote him more precisely, "In the North, people get a little wild when it warms up."

Technorati Tags: Finland, hotel, travel, Turku

A few trip pictures are up

...on a Flickr set for this trip.

via flickr

Now to bed.

Technorati Tags: England, Finland, heathrow, Helsinki, travel, Turku

We're here!

We made it to Turku, and have collapsed in the hotel. Nineteen hours on the road, more or less-- twenty if you start in Palo Alto-- though with a long layover in Heathrow. More anon.

Technorati Tags: Finland, travel, Turku

Finnair 834

We're on our way from London to Helsinki; once in Helsinki we're supposed to catch a connecting flight to Turku. However, it's not clear to me whether that's going to happen.

We left late, and according to Expedia, had only 35 minutes to catch our flight to Turku; however, Finnair says we're getting into Helsinki a full hour earlier than Expedia projected. It's a muddle.

Now the only question is, does our flight to Turku actually leave when Expedia says-- in which case we'll make it with no problem-- or does it leave an hour earlier, in which case we're done for?

We're going to find out soon enough.

I suppose there's a chance we can catch a late train to Turku, which would be marginally better than being stuck in Helsinki for a day, but still far inferior to actually making to our destination.

We're currently over Sweden, between Orebro and Norrkoping, and heading toward Stockholm.

This is the farthest north I've ever been. It's 10:20 Finnish time, and the sun shows no inclination to go down. I wonder if it's still going to be light at midnight?

My talk is coming along. I've got some really nice historical stuff that encourages us to rethink what we know about culture and innovation, and in particular forces us to pay more attention to the central role that manufacturing plays in both the creation of distinctive local cultures and the development of innovative products. Now it's just a matter of weaving it all together. But that's what long flights are for.

Technorati Tags: Finland, travel