A Finn on My Couch

Antti arrived tonight from Helsinki. It's his first time in the Western Hemisphere. He excitedly showed me a magazine he had saved from the plane, Sky Mall.

"Have you seen this?" he laughed. "I've never seen these things before. I think this says a lot about America."

He pointed out an ad for a double hot dog toaster, complete with correctly-shaped bun and weiner slots. Then he pointed out an ad for a contraption designed to shoot balls for your dog to chase, so that you don't actually have to draw your arm back and throw.

"You know you've really gotten far away from nature when you need this product to exercise your dog," he said.

He turned to a page advertising a small foot rest you can attach to the wall of your shower to make shaving your legs more comfortable. "It's the little things that count," he said. "And look at this non-fogging shaving mirror for the shower. Because it's too much to lift your hand and wipe it."

Antti is a travel writer on assignment in San Francisco. It will be interesting to see what other things strike him as peculiar that we take for granted. Even my roommate Tuyen observed today that the road bike catalog he was browsing probably featured more choices of tire pumps than the number of bike brands in China or India.

"Look, you can get a pump with the guage at the top or at the bottom," he said, pointing to two nearly identical pumps.