I'm in Helsinki, where the temperature right now is approximately freezing. Hello, winter. Sadly, the snow forecast seems to have been downgraded to mostly rain and sleet. In the taxi from the airport this morning, Ilona said that there had been snow forecast for Stockholm also, but that seems to have turned into rain as well.

Tonight I had a strange dinner by myself at the restaurant in my hotel. The restaurant is basically a tapas place, and I had an interesting, and not terrible, Finnish take on a vegetarian Spanish tortilla. I'm exhausted now and am sprawled out on my bed with CNN on in the background. I woke up before six to get my flight, and I still managed to miss both the 6:50 and 7:05 Arlanda Express trains. I got to Rådhuset just as the train was pulling away, and then when I got my Arlanda Express ticket the 7:05 had just left. For some reason the ticket machine wouldn't take my AmEx card even though it said it takes them, and I asked the guy standing behind me in line if I was doing something wrong because I felt like I was going crazy, the machine literally wouldn't take the card in. He was a young-middle-age-ish businessman and he said no, I was doing it right so it was probably random and I should just try another card. I was obviously trying to hurry because there were people in line behind me and because I thought maybe I could still catch the 7:05 train, and he said to me "Well, if you were really that stressed out about making the 7:05 train, you should have woken up earlier." I thought that was such a bizarre thing to say. I think I responded with something like "I guess that's true." And I guess it is true? But what a totally weird thing to say! He wasn't hostile, but he certainly wasn't warm, he just said it very straight-forwardly.

Helsinki seems interesting so far, although all I've really done is have a latte in the airport, take a taxi to the hotel, walk to the conference at Finlandia Hall, walk back, and have weird Finnish tapas. It seems like an interesting mix between Scandinavia and Russia. A little bit of Stockholm, a little bit of St. Petersburg, a little bit of Finnish style. The parts I have seen so far definitely do not have the small, cozy feel of Stockholm - the buildings and streets are bigger, and much more gray. Finlandia Hall is quite pretty and is situated nicely on the water, and the walk there from my hotel takes like five minutes and you pass lots of very large statues of various men I've never heard of as well as the Parliament building which is like, half Low Library at Columbia (i.e. classical, columns, etc.) and half drab mammoth Soviet monstrosity.

The first day of the conference was interesting. The main conference (the 15th European Conference on Public Health) starts tomorrow afternoon, and today and tomorrow morning are a pre-conference called the 18th Nordic conference in social medicine and public health: The future of the Nordic welfare model. Pretty self-explanatory. It was a good crash course for me on comparative policies and problems in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. I'm too tired to write about it in depth right now, but let me just say that it does not cease to amaze me how healthy and wealthy and just really bloody well-run the Nordic countries are (not that they don't have their own problems), and Sweden seems to be the absolute international pinnacle in many measures. Quite interesting to be an American. Especially at the Nordic conference today where I believe I was the only American, and you wouldn't even know it since my badge says Sweden. There was definitely more than one snarky - but always sadly true - aside made about the US starting with disclaimers like "I think it's safe to say this in present company..."