Christmas Eve was a nice quiet day. There was no snow but a little frost on the ground. Temperature was below zero, helping the frost not to melt away. Santa had visited our place while I was playing with our kid in the park, giving us many nice presents. We went to a church and came back to spend a peaceful evening.

Christmas Day was full of packing and washing up. For some reason, there was not that much rush in the laundry room that day. We were lucky that it was even in function.

We had a date with my land-lady on Boxing Day. I gave her one of the keys so she could come back later whenever she wanted to. We had a huge amount of luckage to put in the car. It looked like there was no way to make it. Actually, we decided to leave something in the apartment. I told land-lady about it, and she said we could leave anything we like. And even come back later to collect them, if we wanted to. It was a crazy idea to travel a long distance in such a full-packed car, but it was also the only idea we had. My wife does good packing, which helped a lot.

It took us 8,5 hours to drive to the first pit stop. It was the most difficult trip. I had printed out the map to home of my wife’s friend’s (no GPS!), but when we travelled and my wife called the friend, she said: ”No, we are in the house of my husband’s parents. Call us when you get to Hoting. By the way, there’s no network coverage there!” No signal in Sweden? Yup, it was so North and between fjelds that it was possible to get an almost totally brain-cancer-free environment to live! Just like in Northern Finland, I’ve been told.

It was more or less miracle to find the place finally. Driving slippery roads in the dark, in a foreign country, isn’t easy (but it sure is hard enough, LOL! I can’t stop referring to that silly ABBA song, it seems). There was a lot of snow to enjoy!

The next morning I was driving a snowmobile with the husband. It was fun, doing 100 km/h on a partly frozen river. He knew the safe places by heart, but it was pretty dangerous to drive that fast, without seat belts and helmets. We had to drive fast because there were places where there was water between the ice layers, and they might not carry the weight of a snowmobile doing 50 km/h. Pure physics, man!

We got ready for the second trip, to Haparanda, where my aunt lives. It took the same 8,5 hours to make it. The mileage was quite the same: about 650 km’s. This time it was easier to follow signs, although it felt like those ups and downs of fjelds would never end. The local cars used to have extremely well-equipped light-systems: when they had long-distance lights on, they blinded me pretty much totally. Some of them refused to turn them off when they were coming closer. I felt like being X-rayed!

We were surprised by a group of deers near Kalix. Luckily all of them were standing on the opposite lane; otherwise we would have bumped into them! I saw them too late to react. It could have ended disasterously.

It was not until late in the evening when we parked the car in Haparanda. My aunt hadn’t seen our daughter yet, but she welcomed and got to know her pretty fast. The bed we slept in was a dream come true. In the morning I took a small walk with my wife to Tornio (Torneå) river. It serves as a borderline between Finland and Sweden.

The final trip homeward started around 3 p.m. – just like previous ones. According to the Googlemaps it was almost 700 km’s to Nokia. It took around 9 hours to finish it. Like in all parts of the whole trip, we had only one stop. It was for buying more gas and having a small snack and coffee.

It was an exhausting trip all in all. But worth experiencing – once. In the end my foot was hurting so much that it was hard to step on the gas pedal anymore. We got to our homeyard at 1 a.m., local time. No need to emphasize that we were beat, and slept well. And I was back in Finland.

Yes, it’s the number of my final post in Moved To Sweden. I hope you have enjoyed most of my blogging. I may continue blogging later on, but now I feel like my battery is dead. And I should have changed the title of ’Moved to Sweden’ as well, since now I’m living in Finland again. If it happens that I should re-start my blog enthrallment, I will let you know by visiting and informing my blog-mates, and also by writing the link here:

________http://smekthis.blogspot.com/_______________________

(had to change the service provider because I couldn’t create a new blog here from Finland!)

Thanks and have a good new year 2009 (what’s left of it )!!! And happy birthday, Elvis!

I’m still gathering fragments of things happened in Sweden. Now it’s about the 21st of December.

It was Sunday and I was travelling to Gröna Lund with my family. We had been there last December, so we knew what to expect. Repetition is usually not as much fun, but to our daughter it was pure joy once again. She sat on Santa’s lap and everything. And got a squeezable soft bear.

On our way back home I found opportunity knocking: Those trolleys were in traffic again and I realized I got another chance to ride it. I had failed miserably before and this time, with my family, I didn’t want to pass it.

It was quite an experience. I had ridden a trolley in Helsinki but not in Stockholm. This seemed to be something like 60 years old wagon. It was in good condition however. There was a conductor in the back, and he accepted also cash which is not the case with other communal transportation. SL cards were another way to pay the fare. The conductor was dressed in an old-fashioned uniform and he was acting plus speaking in a funny way. He rang the bell quite often.

The ‘slut station’ was in the centrum, near Kungsträdgården and NK building. There we watched the beautifully constructed NK windows, very much like Stockmann’s in Tampere and Helsinki. There was a lot of Christmas-related stuff for sale everywhere of course. All we lacked was snow.

It’s finally time to catch up where I left it. I’ve been so tired of everything that I haven’t had the time to blog lately. Sorry.

Let’s go back in time, all the way to the 20th of December. I had booked a Christmas buffet (julbord) in a restaurant nearby as early as two months in advance. It was an expensive place but I wanted to go there and celebrate Christmas spirit there with my family and the Swedes.

I’m sorry to admit that I have forgotten the name of the place, but it was some ‘backen’ (hill) anyway and located right after the gates of Gamla Filmstaden. Everything about it was great. The service, the food, the drinks… We even got a table near the fireplace. Especially the multiple fish selection was great. And the ham was one of the best ham I ever tasted. Redwine was just right with the food. It was such a shame that our daughter didn’t like much anything. She ate only potatoes and ham. Dessert was also fabulous, with home-made candies.

There were a lot of beer bottles in every table. Actually, we were the only ones not to drink beer. Maybe it’s part of Swedish tradition to drink beer with Christmas buffet. The atmosphere was cheerful, some Swedes were indeed drinking schnapps and singing Christmas songs. And the service was in function all the time.

We ate from 2 to 4 p.m. after which we rolled back to my apartment. It was too much to eat, granted, which led to the fact that we didn’t eat anything before the next morning… It was a worthwhile experience to us all, leaving a good aftertaste and pleasant memories.

There’s so much to remember to miss, so I may have forgotten  to remember something. But here’s the list I came up with now:

Jaime and the rest of the gang at the office (minus one), my team at the customer’s, Giv’mo’ – the singer and the street musician, my apartment, Kista, Råsunda, Hallonbergen, Stockholm in general.

Vasalundshallen, LOL, pretty women in black, all those second-hand record-shops, blogging about Sweden, spending time with my family in Stockholm.

Buns, cakes and cookies, knäckebröd, communal transportation, pancakes, Gallerias, the Zombies concert in Stockholm next Spring, LOL!

Speaking Swedish with the Swedish, because doing it in Finland is not the real thing. Free newspapers.

Plus many other things. I skip the list of things I won’t miss in Sweden, because I want to keep up the good spirit.

I was thinking of user interfaces of today, when I suddenly invented a new TIC model. You see, the UI’s are sometimes difficult to understand, which tells about bad design. For example the common popup window query is something like this:

The file has not been saved. Do you want to save before leaving?

-Yes
-No
-Cancel

Then we can find one step more difficult UI in Gimp:

Save the changes before leaving?

-Save
-Don’t save
-Cancel

There’s no ’yes/no’ option there at all. I thought about it for a while, and here’s my own suggestion:

File hasn’t been saved yet? Don’t you want it to be saved?

-No, I don’t want to save
-No, I do want to save
-Cancel

And, believe me, I have met something like this. Well, not quite but close.

Once in a while, you need a virtual kick in your ass. Instead of  alleged multiple pushes of your chair. Thanks to Mogli for straightening me out. And for the phrase ‘Back to Baywatchsics, man!’

Yesterday it was the last entry in Vasalundshallen for me. Sniff! I also visited my favorite second-hand record shop in Solna probably for the last time, and left it empty-handed. Two sniffs! It was a lonely, dark and rainy evening, so the weather was in balance with my feelings. Three sniffs!

It’s a shame I can’t take Vasalundshallen with me to Finland, LOL! The gym started to be like another home to me. And those familiar faces I got to recognize during the year… Well, they were only faces to me, but still.

The somewhat legendary sauna room was exceptionally friendly this time. There were some guys with me,  most of them lying down with swimming shorts on. One of them took the shovel and looked at me, saying: ”Ursäkta (Excuse me), no problem..?”. I said ‘no problem’ and he started throwing water on the hot stones. Six throws, a new record. There are two big stoves in the sauna, but the problem is that there is only a dozen stones in each of them. Them stones should be responsible for the heat, not the electric resistors! You will break the stoves this way, and they won’t offer you real heat. Maybe that’s the point..?

I would have stayed a little longer in the heat room, but I was curious to know the temperature and I didn’t want to wait till the temperature had drastically lowered down. The meter located near the exit, so I took a look at it. +76 C, what the hell? It has always been exactly 80 degrees before, and I had begun to wonder whether the meter was broken or there was a thermostat somewhere, letting in cool air if someone threw water on the stove. This time it was the hottest visit in the sauna for me, as far as Vasalundshallen is concerned, and the meter showed a measly 76 degrees! It seems to be as accurate as my weighing scale that I bought in IKEA last year.

As I left the dressing room, I met the paper-reading man, reading a paper of course. I recognized him even with his clothes on, LOL!

I spent the last one of my free tickets I had received because of a mistake they had made in Vasalundshallen (Browse my blog until beginning of November, if you want to know more about it), so I was kind of living on a borrowed time there the whole of December. I guess I was lucky in that sense – good things do happen to me too!

In Finland, and especially in the army, we have this tradition of ’aamukampa’ (I call it ’morning comb’, which is a direct translation). You buy a comb and start removing pins of comb, one per day. Finally when you have no mornings left, the comb is totally pinless.

Herewith is a snap shot of my morning comb, suggesting for one morning left at work. This calendar type of tradition seems wholly unknown here. Well, it’s about time to bring it here too. Then again, maybe not…

To link this to my past, I didn’t buy a new comb. Instead I broke my old comb I purchased while I was in the army. I didn’t break it then, I had a lot of different kinds of other calendars to keep track of time during those weary days. And then I needed the comb, which is not that much the case these days. 

A small correction: I just heard that they really have this comb tradition in the Swedish army. They have also a long tape which has X amount of days (more than we have in Finland). They cut the tape daily, according to number of days left.

Sweden is a peculiar country in a sense that they sell snuff (snus/nuuska) although it’s forbidden everywhere else inside EU. It’s tobacco alright. You put it in your mouth and take it away after a while. That’s about it.

I heard from an unreliable source that snuff is not forbidden because no-one has proved it to cause cancer. Well, that was from a mouth of a snuff user. I have read several articles about how dangerous it is. Some claim that it’s even more cancer-causing than cigarettes.

It may be due to the new regulations, which don’t allow people to smoke in restaurants, that snuff users rule here. You don’t have to go out and freeze, when you have snuff in your mouth. And that’s pretty ok to me. No smoke – no feeling sick. I bless the snuff in that sense. It doesn’t bother me at all, but if you say it’s harmless, you’re only fooling yourself.

It’s funny that you can use snuff in Finland but you can’t sell it there. And, as they have the same regulations in restaurants, the need for snuff is almost overwhelming these days. And I know many men who really use snuff, almost on daily basis.

Buying snuff in Finland-boats has been made difficult: you can buy it only when the boat arrives Stockholm, early in the morning. The Finnish passangers that are on a cruise, are usually sound asleep. Therefore, many of them might miss their chance to buy it. There are also limits how much you are allowed to buy snuff at a time. I guess it was something like four packages, each containing ten boxes of snuff.

Snuff is to me like a perfect compromise: it doesn’t bother those who don’t use it and it lets users enjoy it and die of it. A happy end to all, kind of. Seriously, Sweden should ban snuff as well. Or it should be accepted in all EU countries. Either way. There are so many exceptions that such a many number of countries have had to sacrifice after joining EU, but Sweden is keeping its currency and snuff. Just forbid the use of it - who has said joining EU should be fun?

The place where I sit gives me pain. There’s more than one meter free space behind my chair, and still some co-workers push the back of my chair every time they pass me. It’s not that cramped goddammit!

I really really want to believe that it’s accidental, every time it happens. Not all of them do it still. It annoys me and doesn’t actually help my concentrating on work at hand. Anyway, I think the chair-pushers don’t mean any harm to me. They are such nice guys otherwise.

I must be over-reacting. Probably because I had a real chair-kicking incident in Finland a couple of years ago. My superior came to me from behind (not a Freudian slip), kicked my chair pretty hard and started shouting at me. In front of my own ’subs’. I took it very, very badly. And, judging by the annoyance of these lately chair-pushings, I still haven’t got over it.

Small things may amount to something big. Personally I wouldn’t want to push somebody’s chair deliberately. That’s almost physical violence to me. I’d apologize at least.