/travel/finland/Wrapping Things Up
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Argh. When I got my Visa card, they told me I needed to wait 6 months before I could get the credit limit upped from its current piddly 500CAD. I'm sure they mentioned it, but apparently it has to be "active" for 6 months. Now, I don't need my credit card every month. And if you let it sit for a month, your time gets reset. To add to the frustration, you can allegedly call collect to one of the Visa numbers. I don't know how to call collect from Finland, so I tried to use Canada Direct. It asked me for my long distance provider in Canada, which I don't have. So I pressed 0, and got a very curmudgeony woman who very quickly got frustrated and assumed I was stupid. It turns out you just have to pick Bell Canada, and then select a collect call. But then the Visa robot and the Collect Call robot just yell at each other. In other news, I got my biked tuned up at Pyýÿrýÿ Sauvola. Nothing quite so pleasant as a freshly tuned up bike. Got new racks, new treads, a toolkit, and some other miscellanies. They were friendly, helpful, and gave me a fairly decent "discount" without discussion. That seems to be the way in Finland, when you buy a bunch of stuff. They did a good job. I also closed my bank account today, and sent some money home to be spent on my upcoming cycling. It cost 16EUR to transfer the money in one week, and was otherwise quite painless. Nordea Pankki did much better than HSBC last year. Shipping my skis home would cost about 300EUR with Fedex. Can't ship them with the Posti since they're too long. Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet -- one option is to ask one of the Canadians here very nicely to courier them. I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was grand, largely because I haven't seen a movie in cinemas for a long time. It was only 5EUR; apparently Thursday is Cheap Night. I'm reading The Da Vinci Code. It's not so much good as it is addictive. There are still many errands to be run. I need to pack and ship some stuff, buy fuel for my campstove, etc. And I want to finish my project here, so I leave them with something useful.
