Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #93, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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The past week was a busy one. I travelled back on 13th Feb. 14th Feb was Valentine’s. 15th was our 3rd anniversary. On 16th I rejoined the office - which had its own challenges. 18th was Savya’s second birthday.
Busy week.
I wrote a valentine’s day poem for Prerna on the flight back to Helsinki. We had just had a conversation about Valentines day in Finland and the poem just came to me.
We have been super busy with travel and Savya, so it was nice doing this thing for Prerna. We were so tired for our anniversary that we ended up cutting the cake on 21:30 on 15th. We had wondered out loud if we even needed to.
I think we do. We think we do. The small things matter.
a trip to Porvoo
For our anniversary, Prerna wanted a drive to Porvoo to visit the Runeberg home museum. And so, we did.
Throughout winter, I have been scared to drive on snow, so we haven’t gone anywhere, outside of the trips to Espoo.
This was a nice drive. There were snow covered pine trees on both sides of the road. The road was cleared and dry most of the way to Porvoo. I have driven in snowy conditions once this season and that is not fun.
We had been to Porvoo in the summer of last year. We had visited the old town, had lunch at Cafe Kiva and picked some souvenirs at a trinket shop. It had been a fun trip.
We drove straight to Runeberg Koti, parked our car on the side of the road. Savya had fallen asleep on the way over, so we put him in his pram, and made our way to the house/museum.
about the Runebergs
Johan Ludvig Runeberg is Finland’s national poet. He was a Swedish-speaking poet, writer and academic.
His most important work is Fänrik Ståls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål), published in two parts in 1848 and 1860. It’s a collection of poems romanticizing the Finnish soldiers and common people who fought in the Finnish War of 1808–1809 against Russia. The opening poem, Vårt land (“Our Land”), became the Finnish national anthem. The way Runeberg portrayed ordinary Finns — farmers, soldiers, everyday people — as noble, brave, and deeply tied to their land gave Finns a sense of shared identity and pride at a time when Finland was a Grand Duchy under Russian rule.
Frederika Runeberg was his wife, and Finland’s first female writer. She wrote novels while Johan wrote mostly poems. The famous Runeberg pastry is attributed to her, though her original recipe was lost through the ages. More people (like Prerna’s Finnish teacher) now consider her to be more talented than her husband.
trip continued
The Runeberg Koti sits on Aleksanterinkatu in the old town of Porvoo, right in the heart of the charming wooden town district. We had visited nearby places in our last trip. Not that Porvoo is that large.
It is a wooden house, painted in yellow. There are accompanying houses and a garden that is open in the summers. The house has old furniture from Runeberg’s time adorning it.
The wonderful staff at the Koti, helped us get in through the wheelchair entrance, the main entrance had the stairs and no lift or easy access. We bought the tickets at the museum shop, passed the main entrance, left our jackets, and shoes in the hallway and then were on our way.
The kitchen was small. There was an accompanying room/cabinet full of utensils from their time.
The fox skin chamber was next. There were ten fox skin pelts on the wall along with hunting guns. But that was not the interesting part for me. It was the three bookshelves full of books and papers.
Then came Frederika’s room. This was her study. There was a bust of her child in a corner, among other paintings and objects.
Next was the massive hall. There were large paintings on the walls. The furniture was a wedding gift from Frederika’s mother. So many years, and it was still here. There were more busts and sculptures in this room. The drawing room had these nice big leafy plants. All, cuttings from Frederika’s plants.
We slipped into the bedroom next. The bed felt small, but we realised it had a construction which allowed to be elongated as needed. There was a mirror on the wall which allowed Mr. Runeberg to do bird-watching in his olden days.
The final two rooms were the guest room and the exhibition room. If the bedroom was red, the guest room was blue. It felt nicer than the bedroom. There was a display case that contained their personal items. The exhibition room had a table with many Finnish words and sentences. Prerna took what she knew and put it in one of the frames, while I sat at one of the chairs and looked at the books on the bookshelf.
All through the house, in almost every room, I found a table and a chair of some sort. I had fun imagining Mr and Mrs Runeberg sitting at the table, looking out, writing.
We bought a trinket from the store and were on our way out after that. We took a bite at Yatra - momos, samosa and a sizzler. We talked about what we had seen, how the home had felt. The food was OK. Most of my attention was on making sure Savya did not break anything.
Back in Helsinki, we went on a walk, came back and then cut the cake. I managed to get Savya to laugh and then click a picture. It came out nice!
How do you celebrate your anniversaries? If you have them, that is.
/five things to share
1. Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like by Ellie
Japan’s conditions create a map of where the U.S. is heading unless significant structural changes occur. We’re seeing intensified overwork culture in a stagnant job market, parasocial intimacy becoming a substitute for human connection, and convenience replacing domestic life. There is slow collapse of dating, shrinking fertility rates, and a pattern of young adults dropping out of social life under economic pressures.
Similar pressures exist in India as well, where all you’re doing is sleeping, getting up, going to work, coming back, sleeping and so on.
Finland is better at this. For now.
2. Memberships Year Seven, Nuclear Bombs, Solar Power — Roden Newsletter Archive by Craig Mod
Laptops kinda ruined this. I find it hard to focus on my laptop, the wondermachine it now is. So: I’m typing this on my “modern” word processor — the cheapest iPad Mini I could find, stripped of anything fun, with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, in Obsidian. It’s been working pretty well for me. iPadOS is so bad (at this point they’d need to do a full reset to make it feel whole and / or interesting) that it makes doing any kind of “fluid computing” impossible. So it’s best to just stay in Obsidian and write.
I was thinking about this just yesterday as I was writing the last nordletter on my Mac. For the past month I had carried just my iPad and the Logi keyboard with me to India.
iPadOS is bad - just jarring enough, to break the flow, that you can continue to write. I find less desire to do something else on the iPad, not so on my Mac. It’s easier to find something to read, something to browse on the Mac.
3. The Only Moat Left Is Money - Elliot Bonneville by
Reach is also gravitational. Past some threshold it accumulates without you — posts find people, people find posts, the thing feeds itself. Below the threshold, identical effort produces nothing. Same quality, same idea, same work. Zero. Not because it was bad. Because you showed up on the wrong side of the line.
4. OpenAI’s first ChatGPT gadget could be a smart speaker with a camera by Jay Peters
OpenAI’s first hardware release will be a smart speaker with a camera that will probably cost between $200 and $300, according to The Information. The device will be able to recognize things like “items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity,” The Information says, and it will have a Face ID-like facial recognition system so that people can purchase things.
Sounds like the iPad on a swivel home device Apple has been rumoured to be making since quite some time. Given Apple’s manufacturing chops they are more likely to turn it into a hit product.
5. PILK #3 | Facebook is absolutely cooked by
The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions.
Not on Facebook, other than when I have to log in to get to the marketplace. I decided to scroll my feed after this. It is different from what this post talks about. Not heavy on AI generated slop, though IG is like that. Reels upon reels of AI generated story sort of things - of grandmas being eaten by tigers, that sort of thing.
The thing Zuck wants after all. And what Zuck wants, we all get one way or the other.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.