Midsummer, or Juhannus as it is called around here, has come and gone and with it the longest day of the year. This is the view on the backyard that the Balecam showed at 1am, as you can see it was still pretty bright.

Although most finns go out of town during this holiday, I stayed in Helsinki to tidy up the house in preparation for my parents’ visit next week.

Although this is the high season for the sailors of the Baltic sea, yesterday the number of boats seen floating around the old harbour was unusually high.     The reason was the arrival of the Götheborg, a mid-18th century Swedish ship that had sailed the trade routes to Asia, sunk in front of its home harbour of Göteborg and was very recently rebuilt. I took these two photos from the balcony as the ship was approaching Suomenlinna. 

There is a number of italian restaurants in Helsinki, some of them bad, some of them good, many of them quite expensive. However they all have one thing in common: their menus are full of spelling mistakes! The incriminated menu in the picture (if you can’t spot the mistake, “Bianci” should be “Bianchi”) is from Trenta, an upper scale restaurant recently opened in one of the Sokos chain hotels. As a matter of fact I liked the food and the service, and they obviously spent a lot of money to get things done right, so why couldn’t they pay a decent italian translator? I mean, it’s two pages of text, how expensive can it be?

So here is my proposal: if you have an italian restaurant, or a restaurant with items written in italian in the menu, send them to me and I’ll spell check them for free. You can offer me a dinner (in that case for two, please :P) if you want, but you don’t have to. I’ll do it just for my own peace of mind, so that I don’t have to take my blue pencil with me every time I go out.

P.S.: of course this apparently crazy proposal is supported by the fact that the number of restaurant owners that read this blog is a big fat 0. As a matter of fact, that’s probably the number of readers in general.

P.P.S.: the “blue pencil” is a reference to a practice in use in italian schools, where the teacher has a double ended pencil, one end being red and the other blue. The red end is used to mark “normal” mistakes, and the blue is for critical ones.