WHY DON’T WE HAVE THAT AT HOME? - FINLAND EDITION
The best innovations can be very small, but they improve the quality of your life in a certain way. And very often, those innovations are already being used somewhere - they just haven’t made it to your home place. That’s why traveling is so great: You discover a lot of those small but useful innovations. (And you meet a lot of wonderful people.)
That’s why we’ve decided to start a new series on this blog documenting the small innovations we encountered when traveling. We’re calling it “Why don’t we have that at home?”, because this is exactly what we think every time we see something really cool abroad.
I just returned from a trip to Finland (Elina, Maija, Riku and Kirill, if you’re reading this: Thanks a lot for everything!), so we’ll start with two things I’ve found in this beautiful nordic country:
1. Supermarket salad that’s actually fresh. I don’t like salad from the supermarket; it usually looks old and doesn’t taste like much. At home, I make the effort to go to a real market to buy salad. But the Finnish supermarkets showed me that there is another way: They sell their salad with the roots still in a tiny bucket of earth. Very simple, not expensive (the salad was one euro apiece), but works very well: I’ve never had salad from a supermarket that looked and tasted that good.
2. Mobile phone booths in the train. In every Finnish train coach, there is a small mobile phone booth. The mobile phone-crazy Finns use it to make calls because reception in the booth is better than elsewhere in the train. The great side effect is that fellow travelers don’t get disturbed by all the phone chatter.
Now over to you: What are the cool innovations you’ve encountered while traveling the world?
On the 16. July 2008 at 01:24 o'Clock
Seen today in London: a healthy fast food with iPods touch on the tables, which allow you to listen to cool music while drinking your strawberry-kiwi smoothie.
On the 21. July 2008 at 22:20 o'Clock
When I was in Finland, I noticed a cool thing in their kitchens: they have those grid thingies to let dishes, cups etc. dry in a cupboard right above the kitchen sink. So when you’re done doing the dishes (and don’t have a dishwasher like us college students), you just put the still-wet dishes in that cupboard. Very nifty.
Oh and yes - when you buy a train ticket online, you automatically are assigned to a specific seat –> i.e. no looking for an available seat and when you travel with friends, you’re guaranteed to sit together.
Ah, Finland is great…
On the 28. July 2008 at 14:24 o'Clock
I really liked the “I-Pod” Cafes in Cambodia. They have a huge collection of albums and songs to choose from and they provide the infrastructure to upload them to your I-Pod after payment. They have some legal issues but I’m sure this concept could work in a legal way and it’s a good way to make customers stay, too.
Another thing is the famous Brunch Club in Hong Kong (http://www.brunch-club.org/). I’d love to waste some money on a similar club - that provides magazines and news papers from all over the world as well as really good food - in Zurich.
Another Idea comes from Peru. Peruvians don’t seem to own cell phones. The phone companies (mostly movistar aka telefonica) have people standing in the streets equipped with 3-5 cell phones each to rent them out on a per call basis to customers. Of course this only makes sense in very crowded areas, but I’m sure this concept comes in handy at many touristy spots.
On the 28. July 2008 at 16:12 o'Clock
@Damian: Yes, I saw the grid thingie in the cupboard as well, very useful!
@Andi: Just checked out the website of the Brunch Club in Hongkong, it looks awesome! I would love to have something like it in Zurich - I’ll get back to you when I see a good location for it ;-)
On the 5. August 2008 at 09:01 o'Clock
[...] couple of weeks back, I wrote about the small but cool innovations I encountered in Finland, and asked readers to share their travel [...]