Differently Organized

Sadly, our beautiful young laptop hard-drive is kaput. Fortunately, I managed to back up almost everything before we turned it over to the geek authorities. Now we await a couple of key pieces information from Tucson Arizona, before our internaitonal Acer warranty kicks in and gets us a free new hard-drive. In the meantime, I am writing by hand like some kind of literary Luddite.

In happier news, we went dancing at the Savonlinna hoe-down and pulled our latest international dance-floor hijacking. We achieved more than I'd ever dreamed: we made Finns whom we didn't even know laugh out loud. The band gave a rocker vibe to some Finnish folk classics. Couples whirled by, around, and sometimes right through us, following all the old-school steps but maybe a little faster than before. We hung up-front with good looking rebels lacking causes, who in their johnny cool quaffs kept shouting "rock-and-ROLL!" We laughed and made up our own steps, dodging high-flying couples and holding our highballs high.

The whole experience lent weight to Miia's theory that Finns, for all their high-tech wizardry, are culturally equivilent to Canada in the last generation. I don't offer that quip disparagingly, in fact I highly recommend it to the boomer set, or Xers burnt out on ultra-capitalist hard-core consumerism. People have more traditional values here, they value hard, honest, physical work, they value independence and autonomy, they value simplicity in design and meetings ones needs. They are immensely innovative but don't generally have 18 electronic gadgets around when one will do. These are, like all cultural observations, gross generalizations. But there is value in understanding those general differences, and appreciating them. There is always so much to be learned from people who do it just a little differently.

Chris

ps. Mightn't be any new pictures until we get the laptop back, but we shall do our collective best.