Home sweet home...

Due to the circumstances, I would like to make a pause of complaining about Helsinki, to talk about my hometown, Athens. But this is not a complaint, like in the case of Helsinki, with some kind of hope that this can change to better and one day it probably will. This is a desperate comment with no hope to change anything but my sadness.

I am from Athens, a city of 5 million habitants , from a suburb of the north, known as a living place of basically new rich people, my family not included. But I lived also a part of my youth in Exarheia and to me there is no surprise what happened on Saturday.

Exarheia area is very near to Omonia square, in the very center of Athens. This is basically the place where the left wing and the anarchists gather, to meet, to manifestate, to drink, to live. It is more from tradition that they go there, even though in the last years there has been a try to clean up the place and put instead some fancy cafes and posh bars. It is a really live place where you can really feel having some action: free dogs that everybody knows by their name hang around, heroin addicts asking for 1 euro, anarchists fighting with fascists, faschists fighting with anarchists, celebrities and intellectuals taking their coffee in the terraces, posters-invitations to manifestations or simply solidarity to the hunger strikers etc. And even if it seems strange, it is not at all a dangerous place to be, unless of course you go with an animal fur and heavy diamond necklace... But I have to admit it is not at all pintoresque: there is only big old grey concrete buildings, narrow streets, where the bright sunshine of Athens can hardly arrive to its people.

And now some words about the actual situation of Athens. In Greece the right-center wing party is governing. But to be honest, the common idea is that it doesnt matter if it is right or left wing, because in Greece the 2 basic parties are exactly the same: corrupted to the bone, filthy for money and power, shameless, with no sense of ethics, a horde of savage animals that take turns to power and try every time to eat what has been left from the previous party. In a few words...

Well, now the situation is that there is a super high rate of unemployment, a huge amount of students that nobody cares how they will be absorbed by the market, a great amount of gratuates that finish the university and work as pizza delivery for the rest of their lives or in "better" jobs that earn 750e per month when the cost of life--apart from the transports and rent appartments-- is almost the same as in Finland (a beer in Athens in a normal bar costs 5e). The conditions of work are terrible, most of the time without paying to employees the healthcare neither the pension money, with a knife on their neck that, listen boy, this is it, you work 50 hours like a dog, for 750e and if you dont like it, look, there is a queue of desperate people waiting outside... The only decent work that a young person can find is either for the state or in this kind of works that stand between legal and illegal, like private lessons at home, hairdressers, plumbers that get completely black undeclared money.

All these young people live in the misery, doing one and two works so that they can manage it, they cant have family, neither a flat of their own and like 80 per cent of the people less than 35 live with their parents or in a family apartment.

And on the other hand, there is the high society, that owns great amount of land and money, like the shipkeepers and other people of the power that do whatever they want with no laws to stop them, no taxes, free to have monopoly and act like they are the bosses. If you go to the very north of Athens you will see Porsches, Ferraris and houses that you have never seen in Finland...

Now, for getting a place to work for the state there is only one skill you have to have: being a cousin or brother of a politician or just have lots of connections that are ready to help you and you to help them and vote for them in the future... So the result is that the state is made principally from people that once got a place, a chair, and since then they have mainly worked to get all of their family in their...company: the Greek state!

The result of this and many other things, that i would need pages to describe, is that they have left the state with a huge deficit, very high unemployment rates, a healthcare system in the point of collapsing, an extremely bad and old educational system that is based mainly on extra private courses after school, problems with the immigration etc etc.

And now the Greek police... The Greek police is also a part of this corrupted corpus that almost nobody respects... They normally act violently in all the manifestations, beating people up and humiliating them. It is very common in the center of Athens to stop you just to check your ID or if you have rasta to search you for drugs and try to humiliate taking off all of your cloths, and then take you to the police for the night just because you didnt have identification with you.

They are normally people from authoritary families, with low education, that are given guns to go around the city. Last year a student was completely beaten up and was for days in a hospital. Normally in these cases the justice lets the policemen go without any charges. The same happens also when they get immigrants in the police station and beat them and humiliate them and then post their videos in youtube, proud of their achievements.

In the other hand I sometimes feel pity for them, because some of them think that they do the right thing, or that they are heroes or rambo of the city... In Greece also we have had a dictatorship in the 70s and since then the police is not seen with good eyes since from even the normal people...

Now, in Exarheia it is very common to have problems with the police, because there are policemen all around bothering people and people bothering them. It is not the first time that I have heard this story of throwing bottles or insulting but I have never heard of a policeman firing at a 15 year old boy neither. According to the latest news the policeman was not acting in self defence. A group of young boys insulted them verbally and then the policemen went to park their car, and came back and one of them shot to the crowd...

And then, Athens on fire... What I want to say is that this is not something that happened by accident, it is part of the sickness of the Greek society that is getting decomposed (almost half of the population of Greece lives in Athens), with huge differences between poor and rich, a miserable and desperate youth that sees no future and in the first opportunity they move out from there (like me), disgusted by these who govern years and years, the same people and their children and cousins and nephews making nothing but scandals and nothing, absolutely nothing ever changing.

A-f-r-i-c-a, black continent, as a friend says.

FOR EUROPEAN UNION CITIZENS WHO MOVE TO FINLAND, TO CONCLUDE:

1) Be a student or have a work, whatever
2) Go to Malmi (take a big book with you). It takes one or two days if you want to wait to the queue and 2 weeks if you reserve a time from internet.
3)Then go to Maestratti. You have to wait 2 weeks, they will send your registration number at home.
4)Then go to the bank. Nordea needs registration number and work contract, Sampo just passport.
5)Then to Vero.
5)Then to Kela. After two weeks they will send you the card or- like in my case- many papers saying that they will study your case after 2 months.
6) If you want to search for a job, go to Kluuvi, to Eures. They are not at all helpful, they will most likely try to send you to Tyovoimatoimisto, but you can give a try because they are supposed to help european citizens to get a job in Finland.

Nordea bank or how to beg a bank to take your money

Today I will talk about the Nordea bank experience.

My boyfriend (A.) had a Nordea bank account and that's why I thought it would be more practical to have the same... Well..
On September, when I was still staying in Kerava, a small city-suburb of Helsinki, I went to the Nordea bank to make a bank account so I can transfer some money from Spain. The woman that was attending me asked me if I am a student or working (a question that repeat you all the time in Finland, even for yoga lessons). I said no, neither of them, and then she told me that then it is not possible. She didnt ask me where I am from, but she just told me that if I am a foreigner and dont belong to one of these categories I cant have a bank account.

I couldnt believe it so when I went home I called their customer care service. They told me that...in some offices they accept to do it with a passport and some not. So that I dont spend my life going from bank office to bank office to see which one accepts in Helsinki, I decided to wait to have my registration number so that it would be more easy.

When I got a registration number and this basic contract I went again to the bank, this time in Kamppi and with A.'s mother. The employer asked to see my contract. She was like...hmm, I dont see here how much you gain exactly...hmm... and...here it doesnt say...hm... After a while I got kind of angry and then I told her-in Finnish: Look, I got this job and they want to pay me. For that they need my bank account. Or you do it or another bank will do it instead.
Then the lady got...OK, no niin. And then she finally did it!

She told me though that I cant have still an internet access to it until I have some money inside. Then, I transfered my money from Spain, and went back. BUT, this time they told me that.. we are sorry but you can t have internet access before you get your first salary....! So...they want me to go to the bank everytime I want to do something until the end of the month that the company will pay me this ... one week of work?? Well, this seems to be what they want.