The other thing about Finland. This guy who was a friend of a friend let us use his flat for free, which was very kind of him. He said "all you have to do is water my plants" - and obviously when we got there it was like a fucking jungle, literally hundreds of plants on every surface and hanging from the ceiling and so on. He'd printed out this grid which listed all the plants and all the specific times you had to water each one and how much and so on and you had to tick the box each time you watered them to make sure you knew where you were on the schedule. I just ticked every box on the last day and that was that. The flat had three rooms and one of them was a sauna.
After we got to the flat we went to meet my friend in a bar and I stupidly said "anyone want a drink?" and every single person in the bar immediately shouted yes. That round cost me about five hundred pounds. And no-one bought me one back. In fact i got a bollocking from one of these freeloaders for taking my drink outside while smoking.
The cocaine cost about 200 quid a gram as well.
We went to this festival and saw Marie Davidson perform, on stage she did this interminable rant about something that had happened but she was pretty incoherent so nobody had any idea what she was on about. Later we met Lena WIllikens cos she was playing and she explained to us that a Russian dj (Inge Maur is it?) had been backstage eating her packed lunch and a bouncer had told her that that area was closed and she had to move, but she asked if she could finish her lunch at which point the bouncers beat her up and kicked her out and I think broke her phone or took it or something. The was a video of the incident that emerged later on youtube and all the comments were loads of Finns going "Stupid Russian girl didn't do as she was told and was rightfully punished - what's the issue?" - but it was a whole big thing, the festival had to apologise. They really don't like the Russians, which is kinda ironic cos every time we ate some "Finnish speciality" Liza would say "this is a well-known Russian dish".
oh here it is in fact
Inga Mauer was reportedly beaten up and sent to prison after refusing to leave Flow Festival in Helsinki following her set.
www.bbc.co.uk
Oh and another thing we were in a restaurant and when we finished we had like half a bottle of wine left and we wanted to take it with us but they said "that's not allowed" but in the end the waiter said "Oh you guys have been nice, I'm gonna sneak it out and hide it behind those plant pots outside and you can subtly carry it away".
Another time we were looking for booze and all of the supermarkets had those gratings that came down and locked off the alcohol but in one supermarket we found a bottle that had somehow escaped being roped off and we couldn't believe our luck, bought it, no-one said anything. When I opened it and had a glass I spat it was disgusting - turned out it was alcohol free wine.
I told my friend in Portugal about all the laws and rules and stuff in Finland - cos Portugal is the total opposite, he was getting more and more annoyed with every single thing I said and by the end he was actually really angry, he looked like he wanted to go and protest at the embassy or something.