I've been vacuumed all over

The capital area in Finland sucked me totally. Helsinki and its neighbor cities Vantaa, Espoo and Kauniainen form grand-Helsinki which has more than one million people living there. Most of them have moved there from small cities around the country, so it's a kind of melting pot of Finns and other nationalities. Much like Stockholm in Sweden.

I have faced feeling of superiority in so many people coming from Helsinki area that it just can't be a coincidence. It really happens although most of them are born in the rustic regions of Finland. A sudden rise in the ladder make some lose their inheritance or something. You can sense the Helsinki superiority also on TV, even in the news.

Ok, I'm not here to mock Helsinki people. I lived in Stockholm for almost two years and acted quite the same way myself. It's just that I spent two days in Vantaa this week and all this resurfaced. It was a work-related trip so basically I had no chance to choose whether I liked going there or not. It was bearable this time, but anyway I was pretty tired afterwards.

I stayed in a hotel near Jumbo which is a ridiculously huge shopping market center. It's easily bigger than those I have visited in Stockholm area, at least it seems so. I didn't have much time nor strength to browse late in the evening, but I guess I will do that some day. With my wife. She likes those shopping centers. I like them too, but the most of the shops are not usually to my interest. They are good places to find Christmas presents however. All goodies in one place.

One thing I don't like about the capital area is the presence of traffic jams during working hours. It would be desirable to use trains and buses there, even subway, but they just don't cover the whole area. And taxis are expensive of course. At least I'd be in trouble finding a good way of travelling there, coming from outside the ring 3 highway, or what this 'kehä III' or 'ring-trean' is called in English. Frankly, I don't give a damsugare.