As I mentioned, I voted in the Finnish presidential election a week ago on Friday. You can vote in advance if you're abroad, so that's why I did it so early although the actual election day wasn't until today, Januray 22nd 2012. (You can vote in advance in the homeland too, but abroad that's the only option.)
Despite today being the election we don't yet have a new president. In the Finnish election system one of the candidates has to get more than 50 % of the votes, and if that doesn't happen on the first election day, there will be another round in two weeks, and that will be between the two most popular candidates. So the second election will be on February 5! And again, I have to vote in advance, so I'll be heading to the embassy in Dublin next Friday.
There were eight candidates, one from each of the parliament parties. As expected, the candidate who got the most votes was Sauli Niinistö from the National Coalition party (centre-right, liberal conservative). His percentage of the votes was 37,0 %.
The battle for the second place was tight between Paavo Väyrynen from the Centre Party and Pekka Haavisto from the Green League. In the end, Haavisto got 18,8 % of the votes and Väyrynen lost with 17,5 %!
For thirty years in a row Finland has had a president with a social-democrat background. The current president, Tarja Halonen, was Finland's first female president and has been in office for the past 12 years. If Niinistö wins the election, he will be the first Coalition-president since 1956. If Haavisto wins, not only will he be the first Green president, but also the first openly homosexual president. He is in a registered relationship/civil union with an ecuadorian hair-dresser!
So it's a historical election in that sense.
The president doesn't really have much power, though. The real leader of the country is the Prime Minister (at the moment: Jyrki Katainen, National Coalition Party) and the president doesn't have any say in legislation or any of that. The president represents Finland abroad in different summits and meeting etc. The president is also nominally the supreme commander of the Finnish army! :D But luckily we're not in war. And if we were, I'd say the president wouldn't be the one making the strategical moves...
By the way, if you weren't able to tell by the names, all of the above-mentioned people are men, except Tarja Halonen. There were two female candidates in this election, one from the Christian Democrats and one from the Swedish People's Party of Finland, but they got the least amount of votes out of the bunch.
What else should I mention? Oh, the president's term is six years long. That's one reason why I go through the trouble of going all the way to Dublin to vote, because this is my first presidential election I can vote in, and there won't be another one in six years! The parliament election is every four years, the last one was last spring and that was my first one too! The previous one was in 2007, but it was a few months before I turned 18. Yeah, I guess another thing to mention is that the voting age in Finland is 18, but that is not very surprising in any way!
Random facts:
It took about 2 hours to count the votes after the ballot boxes closed
72,7 % of the citizens with a right to vote, voted in this election; that means 3 059 850 people out of a possible 4 407 185
In every election Donald Duck and his Disney friends receive a small percentage of votes
There are only about 80 foreign reporters in Finland following the election, which indicates that the interest abroad isn't very great. The reporters say that the strange language also makes it a little bit hard to follow!
So that's my little news flash on the elections, just to keep all my readers (all three of them) up to date on Finnish current events. Other than that, I don't really have a lot of news. Tomorrow starts the third week of the semester and I'm not completely burnt-out yet, which is nice! Anyway, I will write more soon. Bye!
I went back to the east coast last weekend in order to vote. The Finnish presidential election is going on, and I could vote in Dublin at the Finnish embassy. I did that immediately after getting off the bus, and after a while of walking around St. Stephen's Green trying to find the place... So after that I made my way to Bray to my aunt's house. I showed her how to make buns / cinnamon rolls!
The dough is rising...
Rollin rollin rollin...
And I can't believe I forgot to take pictures of the end result! I was so sure we took photos, but those pictures do not exist. Anyway, the buns turned out fine and people seemed to enjoy them.
The next morning (Saturday) we headed down to... I don't know exactly where, but it wasn't far from Bray. We had the dog with us and she was extremely excited! We started our "hike" at around 11.20 and were back at the car at 15.50. Here are some photos!
One excited doggy with the Sugarloaf mountain in the background.
That white line in the background is the Powerscourt waterfall.
I had some sort of a thorn in my sock tickling my foot, so I had to stop and dig it out.
Santa socks!
We even saw the sun a couple of times! And it didn't rain at all :O
Quite a nice view.
It was unbelievably windy on the top of the "mountain". We didn't stay there long!
We had to hide behind a big rock from the strong freezing wind.
At this point we were (or at least I was) getting quite tired, so we just wanted to head down quickly, which is why we didn't really take any more pictures. Four and a half hours of hill walking had its effects... We compared the soreness of our muscles the next day!
In the beginning of the autumn term when I met a lot of new people, I heard the question in the title a lot. "What is Finland like?" and I would never really know how to answer that, because I wasn't sure which aspect of the country the asker was thinking of. Shape? Size? Weather? Society? The most common follow-up question is "Is it really cold?" or "Is there a lot of snow?" So yeah, I thought I'd make a little post about Finland answering that question from a few different viewpoints!
Weather is probably the first thing on people's minds when they think about a country. I'm not sure if Irish people think they have seasons or not... At least some people seem to dress like it's summer although it's January.. But compared to Finland, the Irish seasons resemble each other quite a lot. The Finnish spring and autumn are pretty much Irish (or Galwegian) weather; windy and rainy.
The winter can be cold, but it can be mild too. It depends on the year, and it also depends on the part of the country. Southern Finland nowadays doesn't even get snow every year, and the temperatures are quite mild. But from the middle part up to Lapland there's usually at least some snow! The past few winters have been VERY snowy, even Helsinki was completely covered, but this year it snowed really late and the temperatures have been mild, so some of it has melted. When I went home for Christmas, the temperatures were between +2 and -7. Christmas eve was -2. If you compare that to Christmas eve 2010, it was quite a lot colder, -32 ° C. So yeah... There's quite a variation there from year to year! Both with the amount of snow and temperature. Here are some wintery pictures, taken by either me or my mom! (There are quite a few, but I figured it's pretty fast and easy to just scroll through them :D)
Joensuu, winter 2010-2011
Joensuu, winter 2010-2011
Joensuu, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, winter 2010-2011
Rääkkylä, Christmas 2011 (Notice the missing tree? It was there in the previous photos!)
Rääkkylä, Christmas 2011
Joensuu, January 2010
Joensuu, January 2010
Joensuu, January 2010 (That's the Joensuu town hall. It was designed by the same architect as the main railway station in Helsinki! He was called Eliel Saarinen.)
Joensuu, January 2010. You can see the church on the right. (I guess I could mention here that about 90 % of Finns are Lutheran. Which is Christian protestant.)
Joensuu, winter 2010. The backyard of my apartment at the time...
We went skating with some friends. These are all taken in Joensuu, January 2010.
Most schools have a sports field beside them, which is used in PE for sports like football, Finnish baseball, running etc. in the autumn and spring, and for skating in the winter. That's if it's cold enough, because it takes a while before the water that's laid on there freezes.
In case you haven't ever skated, you might not know that it's fun when you form a chain and the first person drags everyone else. :D It doesn't look very speedy in this picture but...
Hee hee
Yeahh I think the windows in that apartment were a bit old and "leaky".
If you looked at my previous post about Helsinki, you probably saw that it really wasn't very snowy. So that's winter :D Oh, I should probably mention that since Finland is situated pretty far up north, the winters are generally pretty dark. Finland is quite a "long" country, so the Southern parts get more daylight, than the north. In fact, in the most northern part they don't get ANY sun for about two months! But maybe I should move on now. I have a feeling that this will be quite a long one...
Summer. I love the Finnish summer. The nights aren't dark like winter, because in the summer it's the opposite! In midsummer we only get a couple of hours of darkness, or not even darkness, it's just like "twilight". And again, in Lapland it's pretty much light all summer long. It's called the "nightless night".
Just like winter, summer also has a lot of variation in temperatures. Sometimes June is rainy and about +12 to +18. It's pretty normal to get a heat wave in July when it's around +25 to +30 for a couple of weeks. The past couple of summers we've had several heat waves and they've lasted almost a month at a time. In August 2010 we even made a new record for the country. It was +37,2 ° C at a weather station near where I lived. I was working that day and I remember cycling home afterwards and feeling the air flow on my arms, and it didn't feel cool at all like it usually does, it felt like I was cycling in a sauna! That was pretty unbelievably HOT! I think most Finns prefer it under +25. But I enjoy the hotness once in a while. I have to admit though, that if you're working in the summer heat, it's not that nice... It just makes you very tired.
I'll try and find some summer photos for you now from my archives! Boohoo :( There were some really good ones from 2009 but something's wrong with the files, they won't open. But anywho:
2007: Twister in our backyard. I'd say this is a typical July weather, low +20s.
Rock festivals are really popular. This is from Ankkarock in August 2009 (Vantaa, Southern Finland, near Helsinki)
This is from Ilosaarirock in July last summer. Ilosaarirock is a big rock festival held every July in my hometown Joensuu :P You can see from my clothing it wasn't very warm that day. But that weekend was probably the only cool one during July 2011!
Ilosaarirock 2011. This was taken around midnight, so that's about how dark it gets in July.
All the bikini shots were the pictures that aren't working, sorry! :D
One thing people also want to know, is if there are Northern lights (aurora borealis) in Finland. Yes there are! I've seen them many times, but not very recently. For some reason I associate seeing them in midwinter when it's very cold. That's probably partially because when a high-pressure area is... how to put it... I guess above Finland, it's not cloudy, so you can actually see the sky and the lights. But the real reason for aurora borealis is not cold weather, it's solar winds. And I might be wrong, but I don't think that has anything to do with seasons. So I would have to ask some space scientist why is it that I've only seen northern lights in the winter.
Here's a very good northern lights video shot in Finnish Lapland. That's a tourist ad, but never mind!
What else is there to say about Finland than the weather and the strange light phenomenons... Oh yeah. Sauna.
This is the sauna from our old house. Basically every house has a sauna in Finland. Small apartments in blocks of flats might not have individual saunas, but there will be a common one in the cellar usually, and you can book it for yourself. Saturday is the traditional sauna day, and also Wednesday (which is "little Saturday"). But for example I went to sauna whenever I felt like it, not necessarily on a Saturday. :D But for some reason (which might be the constant rain) I crave sauna a lot more here in Ireland than I did when I visited Finland. But I did go a couple of times on holiday.
What else... I suppose it sort of has a reputation of having good education. And yeah, I don't have much complaints! My teachers have mainly been good and I guess I learned a lot in school. I think that some of the news stories that for example some American reporters have made about Finnish education may exaggerate just a little... But if you want to see some of those, you can find some just by googling "finnish education".
I can't compare the Finnish system with the Irish one because I know very little about it. Universities seem quite similar though, apart from how the degrees are structured, for example, but I won't go into that now. :D
Finnish people have some stereotypes about themselves. It's a common belief that Finns are somehow a lot colder (emotionally) and more impolite than other Europeans. I guess that can be true, especially if they speak English and they haven't practiced a lot in real conversations. For example, there is no word for "please" in Finnish (the politeness is expressed in another way), so if a Finn asks you for something and doesn't say please, they're not trying to be impolite. :D
The truth is, I think, that Finns aren't one bit colder than any other nationality, but they are a bit shy about speaking other languages. If there's a flaw in Finnish education, it's in how they teach languages. It's too focused on grammar and writing, not enough on conversations and actual speaking! And if there were more pronunciation exercises in school, people might be more confident about their English. And I've read in a few exchange student blogs (Americans in Finland) that they've noticed, that people are very shy, but once they start speaking, their English is actually very good. And they're as nice as any other nationality!
Also, Finns believe that Finland is very far behind in everything. Like we always get the new movies last in theaters, and the same with music and fashion and all that. Everyone (and I'm not generalizing at all here... ) thinks Finland is too small and everyone wants to move first to Helsinki and then to New York. New York, and the US in general seems like some sort of a promised land to some people. Ireland was very popular among Finns at least a few years ago. It seemed like everyone was traveling to Ireland!
If you want to know what stereotypes Finns have about the Irish, well. :D
they're always happy
they all have red hair and freckles
they drink a lot (a LOT) of Guinness
Riverdance. Just... Riverdance.
I guess that's about everything I can come up with about Finland right now. If you have any questions about Finland or anything, feel free to ask me and I will answer to my best ability! :D (Again I'm assuming that at least some of the readers of this blog are non-Finnish.)
