Great PR for Helsinki.

However, it would be interesting to know if Mr. R.W. Apple Jr. and her wife were here on their own expense or invited and hosted by someone else.

According to the article, they enjoyed some very good food and received excellent service. This subjective feeling could depend on whether or not they had to use their own wallet.

“silent, humorless and melancholy people”..?

…and to think: that can all be cured… with Koskenkorva…

Yeah, who the hell can afford Chez Dominqiue around here? They should have hit up Hesburger before they departed.

Yeah, well, eat the rich… I’ve never in that kind of Helsinki. I live in the reality of Helsinki … or inhorealismi.

Truth is out there…

Hank – they should have spent a Friday night at your Peanut Club in Vantaa.

Naah, Toppari is the “classiest” place around.

Ah, what a bunch of ancient, yet strangely flattering clichés!
The “where to stay” & “where to eat”- listing in the end is quite revealing: 2 most expensive hotels in town, and all the eateries I could never ever afford.

p:la, you said it.

One word: Citysherpa

http://blogit.hs.fi/citysherpa/
and you will get something else

It is a flattering article but as much as I love my hometown and -country, this kind of bright-eyed critiqueless view of Finland as some sort of last frontier of innocence and purity kind of scares me. I got that a lot in France. People would come up to me and say things like “Finnish women probably never get sexually harrassed by Arab men, since you have absolute gender equality. You also do not have homeless people.”
Flattery is nice but realism is very welcome, too! I felt almost forced to talk about alcoholism, high suicide rates, domestic violence, long distances, and loneliness just to drag these people down to the ground. Often it was to no avail, the ideas were so fixed in these peoples’ heads.

So are Peanut Club and Toppari the places to go if I want to see Finnish women falling at foreigners’ feet?

Yeah, who the hell can afford Chez Dominqiue around here?

Um, don’t buy a new high-end mobile phone every six months and you can afford a 6-course menu with drinks every month with the money you’ve saved. Also, not buying bubble real estate helps a lot with being able to live the life of a bon vivant.

Yea… they should really write more about the Finland *outside* of Helsinki…

…like Vantaa.

There was a grotesque error in the article, namely the acoustics of Finlandia Hall are notoriously bad which is also one of the reasons why Musiikkitalo will be built.

Furthermore, the aesthetic merits of the Enso-Gutzeit building can also be debated (and indeed have been debated)…

I stopped reading after the first page. What an awful list of cliches! Helsinki is indeed beautiful in summertime, but that was just too much.

And, seriously, do any normal people, that is, those who evaluate a building with their eyes and not according to some abstract aesthetic criteria, think that Aalto’s buildings are NOT awful? A few years back Hesari ran a series of articles about buildings in Helsinki that were demolished to make way for the horror houses of Aalto and his buddies — it was a painful read every time.

Hank, that was a brilliant counter-balance to the article, you should have it published in NY Times

So are Peanut Club and Toppari the places to go if I want to see Finnish women falling at foreigners’ feet?

Toppari upstairs disco maybe, but Red Onion is then the meatcounter. Peanut club doesn’t atrract loose women, its a pool hall, and in Toppari you can see foreign men fall over

I was laughing my ass off reading the food part. Reindeer kebab… and Vorschmack is divine… made it a couple times home. Easy recipe, but *rinse the herring* – otherwise the saltiness will kill you.

Mannerheim’s Vorschmak

Excellent with jacket potatoes, smatana, pickled cucumbers etc.

Now theres about a dozen different recipes. Basically this is traditionally a recipe to do from roast beef/mutton leftovers. Salted herring is traditionally told to be put overnight to rinse into milk.
A variant is then to mix the simmered vorschmack with eggs and breadcrumbs and put into the oven in a pan, so it comes more solid.

But yeah, delicious.

The direction of the comments never ceases to amaze me as opposed to the topic Nice to see Hank take some Martha Stewart-isque touches this time around Toppari, isn’t that that terrible joint in Korso? (TopHat?? Think my friend played some records over there few years back. He was never striving to make it to the top or even semi-clean-cool-clubs Go figure, I guess for some people places like that is the “shit”

Naah, Toppari is in Myyrmäki by the station. The “Irish pub”… or örinäish pubi… http://www.toppari.fi “Top Hat” then again is Korso’s answer to Moulin Rouge

It’s nice to see the place featured indeed, even if it does concentrate so much on the over-class places to go.

Anzi, I sympathise… but you should come here to Sweden… you won’t have that problem at all from the Swedes! Some of their stereotypical views of us are quite scary in this day and age.. and even as a Finland-Swede, I would say 50% of Swedes don’t know we even exist as a group (and we speak the same language for god’s sake!). In fact, I have been told quite a few times by Swedes, “Considering you’ve only lived here for a year, your Swedish is very good”.

Sorry, that was completely off-topic!

Well, fuck you all pretenders south of Pitkäsilta! The real experience start from that bridge…

WTF is everyone complaining about again? We have a nice, positive article written of Helsinki and suddenly people can’t take it?

What comes to high-end restaurants.. well, if you take the trouble and spend the money to travel all the way up here then hell yes you should eat in the best places. Whenever I travel, food becomes a major expense – I don’t want to go halfway around the world and eat at a local equivalent of Stadin Kebab. Nobody eats at fancy places _all_ the time, but traveling is an exception.

YMMV of course, but don’t diss the article just because it lists places you can’t “afford” to eat at or thinks some buildings that you can’t appreciate look nice.

The writer mentioned Häkkinen but not Räikkönen, in a way it kind of underlines how Kimi is grey like a building. Just there but not memorable.

*Shrug* Must be easy to be a travel journalist. Visit places, stay in expensive hotels and eat in restraunts with Michelin stars then copy paste the clichés about the place from the first tourist guide you can grab..

Tero – “However, it would be interesting to know if Mr. R.W. Apple Jr. and her wife were here on their own expense or invited and hosted by someone else.”

The NYT pays the expenses for its travel writers and articles. And if the NYT didn’t pay, then likely the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did as they used to do quite frequently for journalists during the boom years, e.g. http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/04/20/chapter_six_part_1/index.html paying for this Salon reporter’s way over the top report on open source in Finland. Given that I work in one of the places mentioned in that article, I showed it to a few of my colleagues a while back and we had a nice afternoon laughing at the unreality the writer came up with.

Typical Finnish pessimism… You get one nice article and all you can do is whine and find faults with the article. Sometimes I think you all would be a lot happier living in a hole and having the rest of the world dump on Finland. I have been living here for a while and find it pretty damn nice (save for October and November).

hfb:

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs has long since stopped paying the trips of foreign journalists. It is so strapped for money that it is for example the only ministry in Finland where university internships last for only two months instead of the normal three. With university internships the practice is that the university pays two months’ salary and the employer pays one month. The Ministry For Foreign Affairs of Finland cannot afford to pay that one month to its university interns. So foreign journalists are pretty much left to fend for themselves.

And I’m not whining about that article, I think that it is very nice and I welcome positive press about Finland with open arms. I just wish that sometimes the positiveness would not be so over the top.

The article is “too much”. I mean this is just what “finnish honesty” was griping about – stupid people like him read this article and think Helsinki is a paradise on earth. The blog the two reporters did last year from Washington Post was more “realistic” in the sense while it was good PR it wasn’t this kind of disgustingly sweet syrup.

Granted, it is a fine travel article, and reindeer spinchters might be the staple food of travel writers, but I am more worried about the stupid people reading the article. The stupid people with too much money that come here then expect to stay at Kämp. and then they face the reality and complain and complain and complain and bitch and moan and whine. Because I have to listen to these stupid people complain.

I think you all would be a lot happier living in a hole and having the rest of the world dump on Finland.

But we do live in a hole… err no, people in Turku live in the hole. But everyone comes here to complain about us. Stop complaining, you stupid foreign people – read Mr. Apple and take LSD.

And I have to watch the ugly buildings, I have to pay for the falling marble, I have to pay for the new music house… I have to pay for all that and eat at Stadin kebab because its the only thing I can afford.

The writer mentioned Häkkinen but not Räikkönen, in a way it kind of underlines how Kimi is grey like a building. Just there but not memorable.

Could also be that Häkkinen is a two time world champion, whereas Kimi is more famous for stroking his gearstick in public…

Comment by bill – “Typical Finnish pessimism… You get one nice article and all you can do is whine and find faults with the article.”

Of course bill, what else did you expect. It’s not the Finnish pessimism that gets me, its the moaning bloody expats. Someone thinking of coming here? Quick, remember to tell them there’s no hope of finding a job, it’s terrible in the winter, etc. Someone writes something nice about Finland? Remember to tell them it just isn’t true, it is not really like that, oh and remember to throw in an in-joke about the bit of Helsinki that you live in, because everyone lives there and will know what you’re talking about.

I bill, like you, am enjoying living here a great deal, and shall continue to do so for a long time yet I hope.

CB:
Like I said, I do not mind positive things being said about Finland and Helsinki. There are a lot of good things here, things worth coming for. My problem lies where Hank’s does, with the stupid people like “Finnish honesty” who read these articles and take them word for word. Then they come here, see that Finland is not heaven on earth, and start their imitation of a rusty door. This is why I’d wish that some of these articles would tone down the syrup just a bit.

I’m sure that you’re an intelligent person with realistic expectations and who knows that adapting to a new country and culture takes time and effort. But as we have seen from some of the comments on this blog. not everyone is realistic and intelligent.

I made that spoof article, not because I’d like to bring forth all the negative aspects of Helsink and Finland, but more of a metric buttload of salt, as a suggestion of the “pinch” required to read the original article with.

Helsinki is beautiful, green and quite safe and with a good infrastructure. We have quite a few good restaurants, and even if I wouldn’t go to the top end, I wouldn’t diss Sea Horse or Salve. And even I wouldn’t go sleep at the Kämp, just across are cozy places like Omapohja.

But I still don’t understand why he didn’t like vorschmack

There is a domestic American political reason why The New York Times would write up such a puff piece, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Finland.

The Times wants to create dissatisfaction domestically. But since it’s audience tends to be very well-educated, it needs to do that with subtlety, by encouraging imaginative thinking on how different American life could be, if only domestic politics were different.

Needless to say, the only way to counter such dreamy thinking is pointing out the faults in their examples.

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