Setting up the base

PW in the living room

We are now in Helsinki. We live in an area called "Roihuvuori" , loosely translatable as Blaze Mountain. It's certainly been hot. I'm sweating rivers every time we go out to do anything. 

We were going to have a lovely time with family last week, with a wedding and a barbeque and all... but I got sick. The night before the wedding. A head cold or flu or whatever, and it's still going on five days later although after the first night I don't think I've had any fever. A drag. But yesterday my mother drove us to Helsinki from my sister's house - about 2 h drive. We're in a suburban area of the capital city, in the eastern part. I'm not overly familiar with Eastern Helsinki. We have an apartment with three bedrooms in a bigger building. One of the bedrooms is bizarre. It's situated between the other two and there's no window. For light, one of the walls is glass, but such clean glass that IT has now twice walked into the glass, trying to step into our bedroom. (There are curtains on both sides of the glass, so you can get privacy.)

Glass wall

Today we took care of some paperwork. We got phone plans for PW and IT (I already had one) and went to the office for Digital and Population Data Services Agency. PW needed to register with his residency card and IT and I needed to make an address change. The wait time was short and we were served by the nicest, kindest lady ever. But the processing may take a month, unfortunately. 

What is really frustrating in all these bureaucratic contrivances is that the Finns mostly do them all online, but they use something called strong authentication. If you have a Finnish bank account you mostly have this service, to do your banking online. But the banks charge some money every month for their online services whether you use them or not, and I've thus closed my Finnish bank account years ago. So I have no strong authentication and it's hard or impossible to do things online. On the other hand, since everyone ELSE does them online, the agency buildings are much less crowded than, for instance, in the US. 

We decided to do something nice but important while we were out and about: visit the huge library downtown, Oodi, and get library cards. I might have gotten a bit emotional. Finally, after all these years, I have a Finnish library card! I can probably also use it for e-books when I'm back to the US.

Suburban Eastern Helsinki