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As an American living in Finland, I started this blog six years ago to address the political and cultural issues in Finland and the United States - but lately this blog is just a place for me to make fun of Finns and Americans. :-)

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7.8.2008

The Gilmore Girls get stuck in Helsinki

Tags: Everything — Author: Phil @ 1:21 am

LOL!!!! You all sooo need to watch this – funniest thing I’ve ever heard about Helsinki…

Comments (42)

42 Comments »

reindeer stew? Where can I get some? I come in 2 months? Do I Need to hit one first, or are they on the market somewhere?

Comment by winter “Yea, Proton Power, now in remission” — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 3:17 am
OMG the rediculus taxi prices, that’s so true LOL! But if you really want get robbed, go to any hotel or restaurant in Finland or rent a car. The travel brouchures should really warn people beforehand.

Comment by Cricket — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 9:56 am
Hey well if it keeps more Murrcans from trying to come here when the economy implodes and the climate bakes everyone to a crisp, that’s fine with me. Now where’s my damned Fritos?

Comment by v.i.lenin — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 10:38 am
@2 “OMG the rediculus taxi prices, that’s so true LOL!

Obviously you have not taken a black cab in the UK

Comment by chic sheik — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
If the economy implodes, then Finland will be first to sink. No money and nothing to fall back on. Oh well. Socialist countries always suffer the worst when the economy tanks.

Comment by Svengali — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 12:30 pm
“OMG the rediculus taxi prices, that’s so true LOL!”

Some colleagues from Cannes told me of the taxi prices there lol. How’d you like 80€ from the airport lol?

Anyone who thinks that taxis in Finland are particularly expensive hasn’t been around, I’d say. Then, what do you expect from someone who can’t spell “ridiculous” lol?

The high car rental prices are due to the car tax. The recent modification of the tax that favours small, low-emission vehicles should have made it to rental prices as well. If not, then it’s yet another example of the greedy multinational capitalists ripping off the little guy.

Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
Anybody heard of the tram?
I recall British tourists complaining how the driver would not let them pay. Then they complained how nobody knows how to queue properly outside of the UK. Must be on the other side of the sidewalk, I reckon.
Then come the passive aggressive masters, the Yanks, with the usual, “Why does everybody hate us?”

Comment by El Gabacho Chingón — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
It’s my experience that American TV writers tend to be somewhat fast and loose when incorporating information about other countries into their scripts: they just go for the cultural stereotypes and avoid bothersome background research on even the most basic facts.

The notion that cabbage rolls and fish would be the only food available is totally bizarre: pizza, Guangdong chicken, and even enchiladas are easier to find nowadays. And does anyone remember a single snowstorm that would have dumped nearly two metres of snow on Helsinki at one go? Helsinki-Vantaa Airport might cancel flights DURING a major weather event, but their snow removal is very efficient. The idea that someone would be unable to fly out of Helsinki for several days because of snow on the ground just doesn’t hold water.

Yes, I suppose taxis here are a bit pricey, something that is mitigated by the fact that drivers are paid a living wage and do not expect charitable contributions – “tips” – from their customers to survive.

The Gilmore Girls clip is not the only example of this: a few years ago I remember watching another sitcom in which one of the characters was asked how he liked his trip to Sweden “It’s great, if you like fjords and meatballs” was the answer (for those of you who have had to make do with an American public education, the fjords are in Norway).

And let’s not forget The Golden Girls, where the Rose character of a supposedly Swedish-American background frequently enlightens the other two about foods, customs and whatever from St. Olaf using words that might “sound” Swedish – but only to those never actually had to learn the language.

But it’s not just TV. The writers of movies such as “The National Lampoon European Vacation” and “European Road Trip” sometimes seem to be openly defiant of geographical, linguistic, and sociological facts. The former included a public hanging in a German village, while in the latter a Slovak waiter quits his job and retires after getting a tip of five US cents from an American backpacker.

Comment by K. Wilska — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 4:11 pm
Hey, who says Finns lack a sense of humour? Holy fuck, people, it’s a sitCOM! And, hello, do you know what the word LAMPOON means?

Comment by hfb — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 4:44 pm
@5

“Some colleagues from Cannes told me of the taxi prices there lol. How’d you like 80€ from the airport lol.”

LOL even harder

Try £80 from Heathrow to Paddington… I paid that last year !

I also paid $200USD Narita to Shinjuku

Comment by chic sheik — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 4:48 pm
#9 “Try £80 from Heathrow to Paddington… I paid that last year !”

Why would anyone want to take a taxi from Heathrow to Paddington when there’s a direct train connection that is much cheaper and faster?

#8 “hello, do you know what the word LAMPOON means?”

To really work, satire, parody, and lampooning should have at least some basis in the real world as a starting point. Of course writers of these scripts probably don’t have to worry, as they are protected by the sublime ignorance of most of their audience. Just watch Leno on an evening that the Jaywalking segment is on!

Comment by K. Wilska — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 5:09 pm
Well, atleast they didn’t mention polar bears…

Comment by Jhua — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 5:20 pm
@10

“Why would anyone want to take a taxi from Heathrow to Paddington when there’s a direct train connection that is much cheaper and faster?”

err..Because there are more than one person and your company refunds you ?

Comment by chic sheik — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 6:40 pm
#12
If your company doesn’t reimburse anything other than a taxi, it should. The one-way fare to Paddington from Heathrow on the Heathrow Express is £14.50 and it takes 15 minutes. For the slightly slower Heathrow Connect, it’s £4.90. How many people can you cram in a taxi?

Comment by K. Wilska — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 6:55 pm
Trips from/to Vantaa airport probably aren\’t much more expensive than anywhere else, but short trips around town are way overpriced due to a high base fare. Anyway you dice it, Finland isn\’t really a good place to get value for your vacation rubel. Try living there someday, if you dare, and see the whole rip off scheme from a native\’s perspective. Taxis are only the beginning. lol

Comment by Richard — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 8:05 pm
#11…Due to the effects of man-made global warming,a large group of polar bears were recently seen migrating from lake Inari,towards the general direction of Kemijarvi.
Numerous trash dumpsters have been overturned and destroyed,leaving trash and empty beer cans and Koskinkorva bottles littering the pristine Lapland tundra.
Also herds of reindeer are aimlessly fleeing these cute,cuddly
beasts that are competing with the horned critters, for their own ecological niche!

Comment by infinndel the jenkki dogg — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
I’m sure that Phillip is Gay.

Comment by x — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 10:44 pm
“I’m sure that x is a stupid foreigner”

That’s true.

Comment by an even stupider foreigner — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 10:46 pm
Finland is a good country for Finns(and Finns only). Can’t remember who said it but they were smart.

Comment by - — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 10:54 pm
Phil is gay

Comment by Tapani Pallomeri — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 11:00 pm
Phil,there are suddenly malicious assholes,infesting this blog,who think they are funny..they display no creativity at all!
They are not funny,but they are pathetic LOOOSERS!!

Comment by infinndel the jenkki dogg — Thu, Aug 7th, 2008 @ 11:17 pm
Agree. Am sorry for what these jackasses are doing to your blog and unfortunately there is nothing to be done about it. Be patient and hopefully they go away. Calling someone a homo and gay or whatever else you think is insulting is so fucked up that we can all hope and pray that you are eliminated by a mack truck running you over because you’re too preoccupied with your iphone.

Comment by Anonymous — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 1:44 am
Even I wasn’t this creative when I was a wanker.

Good job, I forgot the infinite aaaaaaaaaa-trick. Should’ve used it.

Comment by Punde — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 5:48 am
I’m sure Phil believes in freedom of expression, but my nick is my own and I’m banning that arsewipe’s IP as I know Phil is actually a dog-lover.

Comment by Hank W. — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 3:18 pm
Wilska – “To really work, satire, parody, and lampooning should have at least some basis in the real world as a starting point. Of course writers of these scripts probably don’t have to worry, as they are protected by the sublime ignorance of most of their audience. Just watch Leno on an evening that the Jaywalking segment is on!”

LOL…so Jaywalking is real, but the Gilmore girls making fun of the dark, horrible Finnish winter and food, isn’t? I would so enjoy someone doing a Jaywalk-like segment in Helsinki. Of course, it would be a lie when they edit it to make all the Finns look like total dumbasses since only Americans can be so stupid, right? I think most Europeans would laugh at that skit.

Seriously, Finns lack sarcasm or something. Recently I got pulled over for going a bit, *ahem*, fast on the highway. The dude only gave me a warning and told me not to drive so fast in the fast lane. Later that evening I joked to my husband that I felt like saying to the cop, “Well, what other lane can I drive fast in if not the FAST lane?”….and he made some stupidly serious comment about how there’s a speed limit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I say, I say, son, it’s a joke.

Oh, and actually I do remember a snowstorm in 2004 (if I recall correctly) that dumped close to 2 metres on the center and they closed Vantaa and the plane landed in Oulu where I had to take a train home from. It happens…though infrequently.

Comment by hfb — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 4:53 pm
“LOL…so Jaywalking is real, but the Gilmore girls making fun of the dark, horrible Finnish winter and food, isn’t?”

They got the part about the “walking deads” right. It describes Finns rather accurately

Comment by Anonymous — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 7:56 pm
I actually thought that the writer had to be somewhat familiar with Helsinki. It was a little bit too accurate to be relying on the typical vague stereotypes. But hfb, was that you at the other end?

Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 9:48 pm
#25 ahem… the cops lack sarcasm if they give you a warning… a bit like New Jersey State Troopers and a few other high up on the asshole list… you don’t get cute with the law.

Comment by Hank W. — Fri, Aug 8th, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
I almost never agree with Hank, but he is totally spot on about asshole cops in the USA.

They make the Kela employees look like Mother Teresa.

Comment by chic_sheik — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 10:41 am
#25: “Oh, and actually I do remember a snowstorm in 2004 (if I recall correctly) that dumped close to 2 metres on the center…”

Depends on what you mean by “close”.

At the beginning of February in 2004 there was, indeed, an extremely heavy snowstorm by Helsinki standards. Nevertheless, the amount of snow that came down (less than 50 centimetres) was closer to zero than it is to two metres.

A meteorologist interviewed at the time
http://www.freeyourmind.fi/toimittajat/orolma/2004/lumipyry010204.php
said that snowstorms of that magnitude occur about once every ten years.

“…and they closed Vantaa and the plane landed in Oulu where I had to take a train home from. It happens…though infrequently.”

Indeed, there was an interruption to air traffic to Helsinki “for several hours”, according to accounts at the time. I challenge anyone to produce evidence of a situation in which Helsinki-Vantaa would have been snowed in for days on end, as the Gilmore Girls clip suggests.

But don’t get me wrong: my point here is not to wail about Americans getting inaccurate information specifically about Finland on US TV and cinema; a couple of examples that I mentioned earlier had nothing to do with Finland.

If we look at the Westerns of John Ford, “My Darling Clementine” was supposed to take place in Tombstone, in the south of what was then Arizona territory. However, the set was obviously placed in Monument Valley, in the north. Another John Ford movie, Cheyenne Autumn (Credited as the first one in which Ford takes a sympathetic view of the plight of Native Americans), injects a certain amount of realism by having actual Indians play Indian roles, and speaking an Indian language with English subtitles. A friend of mine who knows something about these things says that the movie is a cult favourite on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, because the “Cheyenne” Indians in the scenes are in fact, speaking Navajo – and what they say differs significantly from what the subtitles suggest.

Other cases that come to mind is the suggestion in the Bond movie Goldfinger that covering a person’s body in gold paint will cause that person to die of “suffocation” for lack of oxygen to the skin, and the notion promoted in Pulp Fiction that administering an injection of of adrenaline directly into the heart muscle is a good way to revive someone who has overdosed on heroin.

Comment by K. Wilska — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
**and the notion promoted in Pulp Fiction that administering an injection of of adrenaline directly into the heart muscle is a good way to revive someone who has overdosed on heroin.**

What is the correct way to revive someone who suffers a lack of sense of humor? Sounds like you need a scoobie break.

Comment by Dave the Extrapolator — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 9:24 pm
#31

The scene in Pulp Fiction that I mentioned wasn’t particularly humorous: it was simply an example of sloppy scriptwriting.

Comment by K. Wilska — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 9:29 pm
Wilska, if I recall correctly, that scene made the theatre burst out in shocked laughter… Black humor, ever heard of it?

Comment by Dave the Extrapolator — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 9:40 pm
On that note, why don’t we discuss why Tarantino decided to mislead the moviegoing public that they are able to draw squares in mid-air with our fingers, like Mia (Uma Thurmann) did as they were arriving to the theme restaurant?

Comment by Dave the Extrapolator — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 9:43 pm
#33
“if I recall correctly, that scene made the theatre burst out in shocked laughter”

What does that prove? Once when I saw Psycho, there was deafening laughter from the audience during the shower scene. Still, I don’t think that Hitchcock intended to make a comedy – apart from that last internal monologue by Norman Bates, perhaps.

Comment by K. Wilska — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 9:50 pm
But I admit that the adrenaline injection scene in Pulp Fiction may have been reasonably funny. Trouble is, that some people take things that they see and hear in movies and on TV (especially productions that are not overtly in the sci-fi fantasy genre) more seriously than they should, and for that reason, dialogue put in the mouths of professionals in TV and film scripts should undergo at least a modicum of fact-checking. I think that Tarantino could have made the OD scene at least as funny as it was without spreading serious misinformation about first aid.

In addition to geographic and ethnographic howlers, I mentioned the gold paint suffocation bit in Goldfinger: I actually heard a teacher tell a class that the notion that a head-to-toe paint job could result in suffocation was actually a fact. She was American, not Finnish: apocryphal urban legends spread by Finnish teachers tend to focus on the dangers of drugs.

Comment by K. Wilska — Sat, Aug 9th, 2008 @ 10:10 pm
Wow…sounds like Wilska needs an enema administered by a hot Swedish nurse, stat! Jesus, you should hang around drunk people and correct their sense of humour and hyperbole because, you know, they might mislead someone.

Comment by hfb — Sun, Aug 10th, 2008 @ 1:17 am
#37 Actually, people who know me know that I have a great sense of humour!

Trouble is that far too many scriptwriters seem to get their background information from a guy they met at a pub.

Comment by K. Wilska — Sun, Aug 10th, 2008 @ 1:49 am
hfb, why don’t you try discussing the issue instead of personally insulting Wilska? He/she pointed out your lie about the “close to 2m” so would be nice to hear your response (on the subject, not on Wilska’s lack of sense of humour).

Comment by - — Sun, Aug 10th, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
I’ve got a little video of the after-effects of the snow. See now when they ploughed it the piles were over 2m tall… the bizarro part was it fell mainly in the city and right on the coast, so like above ring I it was just ankle-deep and above ring III it was “what snow”…

Comment by Hank W. — Sun, Aug 10th, 2008 @ 2:34 pm
hfb:
“Wow…sounds like Wilska needs an enema administered by a hot Swedish nurse”

Yep, next thing we know, he’ll be crying about some store clerk’s cute remark about mashed potatoes for years on end.

Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Mon, Aug 11th, 2008 @ 9:17 am
#39 noname – It snowed sideways for 3 days and if the total snowfall wasn’t 2 metres, then the drifts in the centre where I lived certainly were. Even so, the whole comedy skit was just that, COMEDY. Everyone knows that people with that kind of cash would get the fuck outta there.

Freeridin – they weren’t mashed, they were fly covered liquified potatoes.

Comment by hfb — Mon, Aug 11th, 2008 @ 6:18 pm