Arto's Blog

At the end of July I will be moving to Memmingen, Germany to live together with my girlfriend Sandra. I'm planning to stay there until the end of the year and after that we'll see what to do.

Memmingen is a town of about 40000 inhabitants in Bavaria, Southern Germany. It's the smallest place where I've lived this far in my life - all the others were cities with at least a few hundred thousand inhabitants. The closest big city is Munich about 100 km to the east. The Alps in the south are only about 60 km away which is great for hiking.

More important change than the location is that this will be the first time for me to live together with a partner. I've shared rooms and apartments with other students during my student years, but this is of course different. We've been meeting each other for more than a year now but I'm curious to see how the relationship will change when we'll be living under the same roof.

Renting out my apartment in Helsinki was surprisingly easy. I posted an announcement on a web forum and one hour later an old friend of mine answered that he needs temporary housing for his small family because their apartment will have pipe renovation. That's a good deal for both of us: I can leave most of my stuff inside and they can move into an apartment which is already furnished and has all kitchenware + other stuff needed for daily living in place.

I've been discussing with my employer about possibilities of working remotely from Germany. At the time of writing this it's still unsure whether it'll work out but I'm not too worried about it. Whatever the end result will be I'm sure it'll have more good than bad sides in it.

I will probably write more about my life in Memmingen in the autumn. However, before that I will have summer holidays, including a sailing trip, Rainbow Gathering in Finland, hiking and some cycling as well.

I just installed the reCAPTCHA system to prevent comment spam in this blog. Whenever you want to write a comment to one of the articles, you will need to type two words displayed in an image before clicking the "Send comment" button. For example, in the image on the right (which is just a screenshot, not a working captcha) you'd have to type "blast spawned". I hope it'll not be too much of an annoyance.

Comment spam means "comments" whose main purpose is not to respond to the article, but to advertise another website. A typical spam comment is something like "Very nice article! Maybe you'd like to buy product X from website Z?" At least for half a year I've been receiving several such comments per day, usually posted by automated programs instead of people. I have to approve the comments before they get displayed on the site so readers won't see them, but it's annoying to spend time deleting spam.

The cool thing about reCAPTCHA is that it not only stops spammers but also does something useful. The puzzles presented by reCAPTCHA are actually words which an optical character recognization (OCR) program in a digitization project has not been able to read correctly. However, humans usually can! So every time someone solves one of the reCAPTCHA puzzles it helps in digitizing old books, newspapers or radio shows!

Please tell me if you have any difficulties in using the system and posting a comment. You can always send me a private message without solving any of the reCAPTCHA puzzles.

We've had a beautiful winter in Helsinki this year. Lots of snow everywhere, trees covered in frost, icicles hanging from buildings, ski tracks on the frozen sea leading to nearby islands. The photo on the right is from a weekend camping trip and I compiled a Winter 2010 in Helsinki photo gallery.

The ground got covered by snow already in December and temperature has stayed below zero continously for two months now. In the city snow tends to get dirty but almost every week we've seen new, fresh, lightweight snowflakes falling down and making everything white again. Some people are complaining it's already too much but I think it has been an amazing winter.

Streets are lined with snow walls and some parking places have been converted to more than two meter high piles of snow. Cycling to work has been tricky and required extra time on some mornings, but usually by afternoon also the main bikeways have been cleared already. Smaller streets have seen snow tractors less regularly, but overall the city street maintenance has done a good job. Perhaps a little surprisingly, railways have had the biggest difficulties to cope with the snow: many trains have been cancelled and others have been late.

Sandra was here for one week and brought also her skis so we could go cross-country skiing together. We packed our backpacks full of warm clothes and food and headed out on the sea. After crossing Laajalahti bay from Munkkiniemi to Lauttasaari we continued about one kilometer further south to Käärmeluodot, a group of three small uninhabited islands which belong to the city of Helsinki. There's no regular ferry route even in the summer so the islands are only accessible by canoe or small boat. Camping is allowed.

I had actually never been on Käärmeluodot, but I knew from the outdoor map that there would be some basic facilities. Two of the islands had a cooking shelter and one of them was in use also during winter time, with free firewood provided by the city. A couple of other skiers were having a break and there was even a fire ready when we arrived.

However, it didn't take long until we were alone — only 5 km from city center and 1 km from densely populated Lauttasaari — but far away from city life. We cooked salmon and potatoes on the fire for dinner and set up our tent nearby. Later at night the wind became stronger and it started snowing again. The city disappeared behind a white wall and it felt almost like being in the wilderness. Our tent was well secured so we didn't have anything to worry about. I have winter pegs which are designed to hold the tent stable in the snow — the tiny summer pegs which normally come with tents are good for summer but useless in winter conditions.

On the following day we had breakfast and skied back. Part of the way it wasn't really skiing but rather walking with skis through the new snow. This time we took a different route towards Lehtisaari. There was some water on the ice near the shore and we had to make a small detour to avoid getting our feet wet. After that we felt we'd had enough exercise and took a bus for the last five kilometers home.

Last January, somebody had made a snow cat in the Helsinki central park. There it was sitting quietly on a wooden plank, smiling and looking at people passing by. I'm sure many of them smiled back and became just a bit happier because of the cat.

During these days a large part of the world is celebrating Christmas, either as a religious event, a family gathering, a materialistic festival or all three of them. In Finland where I live it is common to go shopping for gifts and even feel stressed about finding the right gifts for right people. I admit that I did some Christmas shopping too. However, the snow cat reminds me that a gift can be anonymous, it doesn't require buying anything, it can be given at any time of the year and that small surprises in life are often the best gifts.

With the cat, I wish all of you peaceful Christmas and many small surprises for year 2010!

In the picture you can see me and Sandra on the way to Mt. Roan in Norway. She is my new companion on my travels — and in life.

We met in Helsinki in March 2009 at a Hospitality Club sauna party and ended up cooking together in the middle of the night. Quite soon after that Sandra came for a few days visit at my place, then for a week, and I also visited her in Memmingen, Southern Germany. Since then we've tried to spend at least one week per month together.

Sandra has an organic food store which is great for one of our shared hobbies: cooking. Her brother looked at us once in the kitchen and asked how can we eat all that food. Because it's tasty, of course! We also like to go out and do sports so gaining weight hasn't been a problem so far. Actually Sandra has been more worried of me being too thin and suggested that I should eat more chocolate.

Other activities which we share are hiking, cycling, listening to music, going to concerts and traveling. In the summer we traveled together for six weeks, mainly in Southern and Central Norway. It was a road trip by Sandra's car combined with many hikes in national parks. Mountains and fjords were beautiful although Norwegian weather made it quite a wet experience: out of 31 days there were only two when it didn't rain at all. But we survived and enjoyed five days of sunshine in Finland right after leaving Norway and driving quickly through Sweden.

On the road our lifestyles fit together quite well. We're both more into going out walking and wild camping in the nature than booking a plush hotel and lying on the beach. We also contact locals through hospitality exchange sites and stay with them — just as we both did already before when traveling alone. One big difference compared to my earlier trips has been less time spent in Internet cafes and writing blog articles, but perhaps that's not such a bad thing.

Life is funny. I never studied German at school or spent much time in Germany but love isn't restricted by country borders. We have both traveled quite a bit and lived abroad in the past. And although we're communicating mainly in English there's now an extra motivator for both of us to learn a new language.

I'm still living in Helsinki and Sandra in Memmingen near her shop. We don't have any immediate plans of moving together, but in the long term it doesn't make sense to continue flying back and forth. However, that's what we're doing now about once a month and send messages or call in between. Sandra is not a computer person but she has for the first time in her life gotten used to writing long emails. That helps a bit in communicating with a nerd like me. :-)