A Few of my Favorite Things

I just came back from a trip to Estonia. It was my first trip where I was completely alone the entire time. No travel companions, no friend anticipating my arrival, no one else dictating my schedule, unless you count my rather overbearing couchsurfing host. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is a pretty town to visit but I think the biggest thing I learned was that I prefer traveling with people. Places are more fun to see and food is more fun to eat when the experience is shared.

That being said, I don’t think I would have done what turned out being my favorite thing from the trip if I had had anyone else with me: taking pictures of doors. To be clear, these aren’t just any doors. They are colorful and happy. Each door I saw was unique, either in color scheme or detailing.

Here are a few examples:

And here is a collage of some of my pictures put together. 

I took 30 door pictures so this is only about half. This whole project started when I chanced upon a poster in the Tourist Center that looked like my collage. I decided that instead of spending 10 Euro on buying such a thing, it would be cooler to make your own.

And now, on to my other favorite things. Some of these are quirky things I’ve found about Finland but have come to love. Others I wish we could have in the US.

1.     Cars actually stop and wait for you to cross when you’re trying to cross the street instead of speeding through the crosswalk so they, heaven forbid, have to wait for you. They often even slow down well before they get to the crosswalk.

2.     Speaking of waiting, people hold the pedestrian crossing signs to heart. If it says wait, people will wait even if the street is mostly deserted. This is not true in Helsinki and it isn’t true of everyone in Turku either but many people do wait.

3.  Above every kitchen sink there is a cabinet to put your clean dishes to dry. Not only do these cabinets function as effective storage spaces for your dishes, they don’t take up extra room and they keep the counters from getting all wet because of large clunky dish drying racks. This is not unique to Finland, I’ve seen them in several European countries. The US needs to get with the program. A Finnish woman named Maiju Gebhard invented these to save time spent on washing dishes. Apparently the idea for these was originally patented in the US as well but I’ve never seen one.

4.     There is a cute amount of attention to detail. In the parking lots, for example, there are giant cherries (or apples, I can’t tell which) all around the Student Village to block cars from entering certain areas. A parking lot in Helsinki is marked off by giant stone turtles. It’s much nicer to have a cherry blocking your path than a barricade.

5.    And finally, Finns accept silence. I am a quiet person and tend to not talk a lot. Here this is the cultural norm. Oddly enough, I’ve become more outgoing, relatively speaking, since coming here and I attribute this in part to the fact that I feel I can be myself, reserved or not.