Posts Tagged ‘finland’

After years of talking about Moominworld we finally managed to schedule in a trip. It was not easy. We visited on the 20th of August. It closed for winter on the 23rd of August. Short summer.

You park up round the back of a petrol station and then get a bus over. Or at least near it. It’s not very clear. It drops you off and then you wander over this little park, down a harbour side and eventually over a bridge to the island where Moominworld is located.

As the bus pulls upped, one little kid screamed “Moomin! Moomin! Moomin!”. As Elina pointed out, if he was that excited about the arrival of the bus, he was going to have an epic day. Simultaneously, his parents were going to get rather sick of the word “Moomin” quite quickly, and then be forced to endure it for several hours more.

In fact it seemed that everyone there had small children. Except us.

We went to Snufkin’s Camp for story time. There were quite a few kids there listening to the Finnish version, then they all left and it was just us and Snufkin listening to the English version. Good news for me, though I think Elina felt a bit weird at this point.

Next door they have a napping area. This consists of an area shaded by trees filled with bean bags and hammocks. Why don’t more places have this?!? I have long campaigned for business hammocks in the office but what Mumminworld had surpassed even my expectations.

They have lots of buildings to explore, including the four flours of the Moomin house, and all the Moomin characters that you can take photos with. They also do shows every half an hour.

I also had my first entirely Finnish-language conversation. I asked for two tickets, she told me the price, I said “card”, she said yes, I paid, she gave me my tickets and I said thank you. Hardly Academy Award winning dialogue, but a conversation none the less.

In summary, Moominworld is awesome.

At the end of July we attended the Finnish picnic at Temple Newsam. It’s an annual event and we had great weather last year. This year, we were less fortunate.

It rained the whole day. However, we did not let that stop us and headed into the cafe to get some food there. Despite the lack of sun, there were still about a dozen of us.

Now that I will soon be marrying into a large estate, I’m pleased to announce my new business venture, FinnStore Self Storage.

Why pay Leeds city centre prices for self storage? We will beat their quotes and provide an even better experience. Self storage solutions for all sizes available at our site in Laitila.

Top features:

• Unlimited room – the sky is the limit when there is no roof!
• 24-7 access – simply fly to Finland, take the three hour drive to Laitila and access your stuff anytime
• Theft-proof – nobody is going to make the 18 hour round trip to steal your worthless possessions
• During the winter your items will be protected by a thick covering of ice and snow
• Tough security – the area is regularly patrolled by bears and wolverines
• Minimal chance of your documents being eaten by an elk thanks to our newly installed “no elk” signs

Contact us now to get a 80% introductory discount on your first 6 hours of storage!

For my third Toastmasters speech for the Speaking to Inform manual (The Demonstration Speech) I did an introduction to Finnish.

The video quality sucks as I did not get time to manually set the exposure. Audio is fine though and I’ve also included the slides below.

A lot heavier snow fall compared with 2012 and a definite improvement on 2011.

The Norden is a documentary series where they take someone from the United States to visit Finland, Norway and Sweden and compare the way they do things. With predictable results.

Prisons

Police

Guns are a terrible idea; go Norway.

Religion

I think the paster here does really well. He is down with the Heavy Metal Mass, and it feels like with the room 666 they are just teasing him. Plus the Bible does hate gays. I do not agree with that, but it is in there.

Last Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tove Jansson. She died in 2001 and is best known for creating The Moomins. In 1966, she received Hans Christian Andersen Medal for it. She also wrote an array of adult novels, but that kind of thing wouldn’t really interest me.

She also drew quite a few cartoons mocking Hilter, so it’s nice to know that not everyone in Finland was a collaborator ;).

The Moomins were originally comic strips, but if you are from the UK, you probably remember them from this animated series:

If you are ever on the south west coast of Finland, you may want to visit Moomin World. It is in Turku, which is two hours drive from Helsinki. Be ware though that it is only open in summer – which is quite a limited period in Finland. Though they also open briefly in the Christmas period too.

To celebrate her birthday they did a special event that included discounts on loads of stuff including free entry for people over 100.

There are lots of different reports that rank nations according to various criteria to tell you who is best at something. Education, healthcare, equality, prosperity, the lists go on. The problem with these lists is that they can be very subjective and so it is difficult to trust which ones are a) accurate and b) measuring something meaningful.

The Fin Global Development Index solves this problem. We have taken 23 different indexes and averaged them to produce a score for each country. This helps prevent bias in any one report from moving a countries position.

Secondly, I took ensure that a fair criteria was used. Rather than measure on the criteria that was used to build the report, I took a simple premise.

We all know that Finland is the happiest, most developed, generally best place in the world. It has an unmatched education system, high social mobility, and achieves such levels of happiness that most of its population manage to not kill themselves even though it is dark, miserable and freezing cold six months of the year.

Therefore, based on this premise, countries were awarded points based on how close they were to Finland in each of the rankings. Having an equal score resulted in zero points, being one place away was one point, and so on. Therefore if Finland ranked 4th in the world, you would earn zero points by being joint-forth, one point for being 3rd or 5th, and so on. The object being to score the lowest amount of points.

Countries represented

A selection of countries were chosen to represent the world. These included a selection of developed nations, as well as developing nations to use as comparisons. The complete list of countries included were:

• Norway
• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• France
• Spain
• Germany
• Estonia
• United States
• Canada
• Australia
• Japan
• India
• China
• Brazil
• Saudi Arabia

Indexes

The following index were used to compile the report:

• GDP (PPP) per capita
• Life expectancy
• Infant mortality
• Press Freedom Index
• Pearson education index
• Education Index
• European Health Consumer Index
• WHO healthcare rankings
• Human Development Index
• World Happiness Report
• Long-term unemployment (OECD)
• Government transparency (OECD)
• Global Slavery Index
• Social Progress Index
• Cancer rate (OECD)
• Health care quality (OECD)
• Suicide rate (OECD)
• Corruption Perceptions Index
• Globalisation Index
• Failed States Index
• International Property Rights Index
• Legatum Prosperity Index
• Alcohol consumption (OECD)

Results

Analysis

When plotted as a percentage graph with zero representing a perfect score and India (who scored the highest) representing the worst possible score, most developed countries represent similar levels of development.

Click for a larger version.

The highest ranking countries were Sweden, Norway and Canada. There is a possible bias for Northern Europe to share a similar culture and therefore score better on some of the metrics, or it could simply be that these countries are uniformly excellent (or more likely both).

It is also possible that OECD countries benefited from the inclusion of those lists as because there are less states on there, they may be moved closer together. This is unlikely to have had a large effect, as most non-OECD countries would not score that highly, but will have had some effect.

Conclusion

Northern Europe and Canada are the best places to live. Unless you dislike freezing your balls off, in which case you might want to consider the United Kingdom or Australia. You probably do not want to live in India.

Last month we went to a Finn Guild event at Roundhay Park to take part in a mölkky championship. Mölkky is a game that combines darts and skittles. You have a wooden block and have to use it to knok over other wooden blocks to reach a certain score. Our team, Thar She Blows, was named after the £1 team t-shirts one of our members kindly provided. We ended up winning bronze.

At the end of November we headed up to the Lutherin church in Headingley for Finnish Christmas carols. We went last year as well, which was arguably better as they had an organist, but it was enjoyable none-the-less and the performance pieces were good too. As ever, the best bit was the food afterward.

I also love how organised they are – at that event they gave out the date for the 2014 event!