OK – it’s late, I have business to take care of tomorrow… my girlfriend’s homepage has the short, no-picture version.
On New Years Eve I went native briefly, at four o’clock in the morning, crying drunkenly about the mediocrity of it all. But it passed. What set it off was probably the finnish upper-class fools pretending they were having fun to bad music… reminded me too much of the people I went to school with (who still have way too much influence in Sweden).
Next day, over a very late breakfast in the luxurious manor, I thought darkly about about the wars: hidden beneath the successful, Nokia-powered surface there are scars. You will find lots of links describing how the Finns heroically fought the Soviet Union in the very cold and hard Winter War of 1939. But even though no one wants to remember the civil war of 1918 (the “White Army” prevented a revolution and then executed more than 20 000 Reds), the older generations still do.
On the other hand, their future looks better than it ever has – and come to think of it, so does mine.