So and all of a sudden, after three years in this neighbourhood I was getting some kind of social action. I don’t know if I mentioned it before but I am the ultimate stereotype of a city boy. I love pollution and I love the neurotic movement of the big cities; I love all this running around, spreading to go to work and hurrying to get back from work while getting stuck for hours in traffic. Living in Helsinki I often miss the pollution and the smells of the metropolis of this world and living here made me feel a kind of an addict away from his drug …sometimes. At times I feel like sticking my nose behind a car’s exhaust just to get a bit of my …poison!
The residents of Helsinki will never understand how lucky and how …unlucky they are at the same time. I mean, they live in a capital with everything that a capital brings, the smells of the junk food, the traffic and the jam, the factories and the shipyards; oh yes, there are factories and shipyards close to the centre of Helsinki something that might sound just impossible in other capitals. There are actually coal energy industries near the centre and I imagine that if you live in London this minute you probably feel dizzy and sick. But Helsinki has a natural ally, the cold. The freezing nine-month long winters.
Temperatures that sometimes reach minus twenty just kill all the microbes and all the pollution monsters. Seriously, if you could somehow move this city as it is to Italy or Greece people would probably be dying in the middle of the streets; but here you see people cycling in minus fifteen with snow piling all around as if it’s a nice spring day. Apart from that, Helsinki is the smallest city I have ever lived and I’m used to live in houses where I had no idea who lives next door and never really been bothered to find out. But here things are a bit different and for a neurotic city boy much different!
Helsinki, even though Finns think of it as some kind of major capital, is more like a small town and the people have the attitude of a small town. They like to know their neighbours, they say hello to them and they even organize neighbourhood events to get to know each other. Apparently these events always include makkara, the Finnish sausage, and a lot of beer.
Makkara and beer are things that mark Finnish identity and any activity of Finnish life, from the sauna to moving house. Moving house is another thing that always amazed me in this country. Well, for a city boy like me moving house means that I have too little time to move house, I’m too neurotic to sort out my things so I call a company that packs and moves and then it takes me a couple of years to unpack! For the Finns it means, here’s another chance to join my friends and enjoy some makkara with beer after a day’s heavy work and since moving usually happens during the weekend it means a good chance to spoil all my friend’s weekend plans, work hard carrying heavy boxes that they have absolutely no idea what they have inside and end drunk from too many beers we all hand during and after.
I have never done it for myself; since I came to Finland I have done it for three friends. I have promised to myself that I will never do it again but I have to admit that after moving all these boxes you have no idea what they have inside and where they are going, a makkara and a cold beer is the best thing!
So, here I was, having my usual early evening cigarette and thinking if my neighbour had learned how to say good morning in French while planning my next move which was …German and while smiling to myself I saw the first car arriving and parking just meters away in the middle of the small neighbourhood street. Then another one followed and another one with a dirty white van behind and then another van and another small car all of them looking full of boxes and things. A small woman jumped from the first car wrapped in a bright red coat and ran towards the house with the big glass door.
The house had been empty for the last few months and I can hardly remember who lived there before, it is one of those sorts of things you have the feeling where time and memory loses its value and in the end you imagine that this house had been always empty and alone. The woman tried a couple of keys before finding the correct one and then with a small happy shout she opened the door. Immediately after people came out of the other cars, doors opened and everybody started carrying boxes towards the house.
Most were women; there were three men I think with two of them looking rather old for helping in a major move and most of the boxes looked pretty heavy for them. There were other things moving from the cars to house as well, a big white blender and a coffee maker machine, stools and chairs and piles of cushions. Then piles of clothes and more kitchen things like pots and pans. Somebody was carrying framed pictures and then some kind of carpets. I have to admit they were all very effective and fast and when a bigger track arrived most of the cars were already empty with the two vans leaving, obviously to reload and return.
The woman with the red coat, she had taken it off by now and was in a very colourful jumper, was all the time moving around, giving instructions, smiling at everybody. I was there watching and on my third cigarette. A really ugly brown leather sofa came out from the big track that somehow brought doubts on my first impressions for the taste of my new neighbour. Nothing wrong with leather sofas, on the contrary they look perfect in the waiting room of a dentist or an insurance company. Leather sofas for some reason remind me German furniture catalogues from 1970s, the ones you were posting the money to them after choosing from the pictures and then a week or so later a truck stopping in front of your house unloading something that had absolutely nothing to do with what you thought you paid. But then again more cushions came out; all colourful that somehow changed back my good feeling for my new neighbour’s interior taste.
Read all the Helsinginkatu 10 chapters in order, HERE!
Thanos' Pulp Fiction 