The city on the move

At Engel's square, Eira. Looking South at the sea.

The perfect Easter weather continued still today and I couldn't resist going out even though my ankle was hurting pretty badly (can it be an inflammation?) after the 40km of running during the Easter holidays. My mum was as supportive as always, saying: "You shouldn't go to the half marathon with that little practice". She has difficulties in realizing that I might have changed from those school years when I hated sport. In contrast, my sister had an extra challenge for the Helsinki City Run, the goal of all this training: for every minute over her target time (i.e. 2h30 for a half-marathon for both of us), she'll donate 1 Euro for the protection of the Baltic Sea, and for every minute she'll run faster, she'll donate 50 cents. I decided to take this challenge as well - maybe giving an extra 5 Euros if I make it to the finish line in the first place.

The tower in the Sinebrychoff parc (or as the people here call it "Koff's parc"or just "Koffari"), built by the Russian brewery family in the early 19th century.

As for today, the city was on the move in their impeccable outdoor gear. Maybe I have mentioned this already, but I'm always amazed how the Finns invest in their outdoor clothing. The pejorative way of calling the Finns the "shell suit nation" (or more generally tracking suit nation) has got a new meaning as the people do their Sunday passegiata (the Italian way of having a walk and making an appearance in their best clothes) in expensive gore-tex clothes. Or maybe the shell suit nation has divided into two classes: the gore-tex nation and the shell suit nation. I did my passegiata, of course, in my vintage Gucci velvet skirt and Dior sun glasses (ah, what a snob!) that got their first spring appearance. But I think I did my fair share of shell suiting with those aforementioned 40km.

Anyhow, Eira and Punavuori looked gorgeous in the intense sun light. The Finnish flags are there because of the Mikael Agricola day (the guy who invented written Finnish in the 16th century), we are not that americanized (n.b. because we're quite americanized) that we'd have them around all the time.

The statue of Juhani Aho, a great Finnish author from the 19th century who also gave the name for my book club.

I quite like some of the recent additions to the neighbourhood. The wavy windows on the top floor are superbe.

Monday's Reputation Revisited

I couldn't possibly care less about politics on a such a splendid long weekend. The True Finns gained amazing share of the votes last weekend but fortunately I managed to process my anger, frustration and disappointment during the 3-day work week (much of the working time was indeed spent reading blogs, following social media and trying to understand what the heck is going on in the Finns' head, and yes, I became a member of the Green party as well!) and was able to completely relax during this 5 -day weekend.

These sunny Mondays spent on the terrace of Le Pain Quotidien (love it!) with bio-croissant, Le Monde and International Herald Tribune (and actually enough time to read them thoroughly instead of reading the old news throughout the following week) and then on my own terrace are really good for the usual reputation of Monday (I'm afraid, Tuesday will have a drop in popularity though) and for my tan as well.


I have to say that although the Easter weekend doesn't usually make me search for my inner spirituality, this weekend has taken me to the religious world through the reading of Confessions d'un Cardinal, our Bookclub's next read and 'the book that the whole Church is talking about' according to the cover (the book also has a Facebook fan page with 3 people liking it, I guess they don't facebook that much in Vatican...). I've been mostly suffering due to my daily dose of 50 pages of an anonymous cardinal's confessions as I've become to learn that the Catholic religion nor its Vatican leaders do not interest me. By the way, I would really wish the editor of the book to reconsider the title as after 400 pages I'm still waiting impatiently some scandalous scoops...

Nevertheless, one interesting idea comes through the reading of the confessions and if I understand it correctly (to be honest, I haven't been reading that carefully) it would mean that in order to still be appealing to people, the Church should be in service of the poor and counterbalance the nefarious effects of the capitalist globalisation directed by money and business only. Indeed, who could better defend the disadvantaged of the world than the Church that doesn't need to worry about the electoral results or economic cycles?

Hmm, I didn't really mean to write about religion, rather about sunny Mondays and how we should only work 4 days a week and have 3-day weekends...