In Finnish we have quite a lot of words that we have adopted from English. Usually, people try to translate a new word first to Finnish, but usually the word stays as it is in the original word, specially if the word is more “technical” or professional from. For example we talk about brands not tuotemerkki (which is the translation of word in Finnish). We talk also about hot dogs and popcorn, even if there have been translations of them in Finnish too. A weak signal was found from an amusement park Linnanmäki from Helsinki. There these words have been translated to Finnish (kuumakoira= hot dog, paukkumaissi = popcorn).

I have started a new hoppy: doing woodwork. I just build a climing frame with slide and a cottage for my two hyperactive children. While doing woodwork I have familiarized myself in shopping at hardware stores (almost as well as shopping in shoe shops). This amazing selection of groceries was spotted in Starkki, one Finnish hardware store. You can buy there coffee, tea, sugar, bisquits, sugar rusks; so stuff that you need to get to keep your energy level up while building. Unfortunately, I could not find any beer from the store

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Finland, unfortunately, lacks behind when it comes to trend of ecological and ethical consumption. You can see it for example from the selection of coffee that is served in various restaurants and cafeterias. In Finland it is not a common thing to be served as fair traid or organic coffee- the situation is totally different in for example Sweden or England. One thing that I am still confused about is that should I prefer organic over fair trade, or the other way around… 

This picture is from Sweden Mc Donland’s where they serve organic coffee.

Here’s a video of my home office’s robot vacuum cleaner and the guardian dog of What’s Next Consulting. They are getting quite well together, or what do you think.  Just quess which one of them is shouting äiti (mom) in the end of the video

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I spend once again my holiday in Finland’s dear neighbour country: Sweden. And of course, spotting oddities is my obsession. So here are two case examples of Swedish waste management from both extremes. Here’s an example of poor waste management: a litter box with only a lid.

And effective waste management: a trash bin train for effective collection of waste (picture from Stockholm)

I have been writing  in my latests posts about couple of cases of coming of “black and white”. One case example was a shop at Arlanda airport selling only black and white items, the next case was canned peas, tomatoes etc. with black and white cans. These b&W canned Smirnoff drinks were spotted at boat from Finland to Sweden.

Again, from Japan the news of the innovative robots keeps on astonishing me. The newest one is a shopping robot- that does the shopping for you. Read here a nice story from PinkTentacle blog.

This ad was spotted in Southern Finland local bus. The ad was about running shoes: Karhu. What is the weak signal here is the text in the ad: technology inside. Even though that ad probably hinted to the complex and advanced manufacturing technique and materials of the shoe, the future trend proably is that all the items contain some kind of technology. Like spoons. Check here VTT’s Smart spoon. Here you can find some information about it.

Chili appears to be a new emerging trend in Finland. Chili is added to most weird stuff- like ice cream, chocklate and bread. Here are some evidences of the new coming of chili.

Image: Chili-pineapple-orange ice cream

Image: Chili-pineapple bread

Today in one grocery shop I spotted another product line that used black and white to differentiate itself from others. These cans of beans, tomateos etc. were colored only with black and white.