Went to see this property today. It was right off a main pedestrian street, one of the more popular streets for shopping in the city. Loud buskers and shit like this.

And then yeah, the entrance to this place was in an alley off this main pedestrian street. There was a parking garage next to it and an M&S loading bay across the street. So...you weren't living above a shop but you were living adjacent to shops.

I didn't even go in. I thought, "£700 to live in this busy area where there are going to be loud buskers in the day and loud drunks at night? And this is in an alley? And it's in some kind of retail/industrial/car park area? No chance of it."

What also put me off was I saw the other flat hunters waiting there. There was some Asian guy maybe in his 30s and a pretentious-looking young couple. Fuck this.

I find that at this stage in my life, looking for flats is embarassing. I tend to be the oldest person in these group views. But at least I'm a foreigner so I have that excuse.

You know, £650/month, I'd do the viewing. But £700? No way. £700 is luxury flat territory. This was not a luxury flat. Certainly wasn't a luxury location.

In other news, I heated up a chicken tika curry that I bought from M&S. Awful stuff. I ate maybe half of it and then I had to throw it out. I felt like I was going to vomit but I thought, "Why would I vomit? I threw it out as soon as I started to feel sick. I didn't try to stuff myself with it. I should be fine. I'll just lay down for a little bit" and then two seconds later, I was running to the toilet and vomitting.

So that's the end of this curry experiment.

I made it to £30,000 recently. When I went to the bank to deposit some cheques, the teller actually encouraged me to put my money somewhere more sensible. Somewhere where I'm getting more than 0% interest.

I was looking on some Finnish property site and they were selling three islands for like 350,000 euro. Each island had a nice little house on it. Like a cottage. It's crazy. That would be awesome. I mean, £100,000 is the minimum for a decent house in most of the UK. You could get three full islands for that in Finland. Good islands, not the leper ones.

And nobody else lives on those islands. You have to take a boat to get there. Or a hydroplane. Or in the winter, you can drive there but that must be terrifying.

It would be awesome. But let's see what my current budget would afford me. I recently found a property website that Finnish people actually use. I'm probably owed about £5,000 so let's say I have a budget of 40,000 euro.

Some weird, dilapidated places.

https://www.etuovi.com/itempage/g84724?sc=M1252895799&pos=4

That place is like in a suburb of Helsinki, though. I assumed it would be way out in the eastern border region with Russia. Interesting. I wonder if the paintings are included.

A lot of these places are going for 1 euro or even 1 cent. I don't understand them. The descriptions are in Finnish.

All of these ads have a section for "sauna: yes/no". It's some kind of legal requirement in Finland that every property has to have a sauna.

£25,000 for this place, which seems to be two houses. I wonder what the catch is. It's in the western part of the country. Looks pretty big. Built in 1888. Ha. "residential condition" is described as "tolerable".

https://www.etuovi.com/itempage/f73892?sc=M1252895799&so=yd&pos=11

You sort by "size" and these idiots list the size of entire apartment blocks rather than the size of the individual apartment available to buy. So this is useless.

Some new apartment block in Helsinki has flats for £20,000. No pictures of the interior, though.

Let me just look in Helsinki. Yeah. There's a number of places. 18000 euro for some flat. Here's one for 13000. We're not talking luxury but that's like £10,000. That's less than two years of rent at every flat I've ever had.

Maybe these are in bad neighbourhoods or something but whatever. It can be done. I can just rock up in Finland and buy a flat in Helsinki today, with cash.

My mother was talking about retiring in Finland. This was about 10 years ago. She obviously never did but it was something she'd talk about for at least the past 30 years. She'd look at the flats on the internet and I think her budget was 20,000 euro, actually. And she said that it should be possible to get a small flat for that.

But yeah, this is Finland. Even if you don't have any money, they'll find a place for you to live. I read an article just recently about how Finland solved the problem of homelessness by giving homes to all of the homeless.

So I could just go to Finland tomorrow and say, "Give me a house and I'll take some of that universal credit too" and they'd say, "Here you go". If they're doing it for immigrants, surely they'd do it for citizens.

They actually have an alcohol allowance. They give you money that you can only spend on alcohol. Finland really has it figured out.

I was reading the comments under one of these articles praising Finland and the guy was saying, "Too bad the UK is so crappy, we'll never be as good as Finland as long as the tories are in", et cetera. And a guy responds, "There's literally nothing stopping you from moving to Finland right now."

It's true, of course. People don't do it. I was talking to a solicitor recently. He was telling me that he used to live in the US and there were a bunch of cities that he lived in there. He said that he loved it but he just missed Scotland. He mentioned his fondness for golf, which I didn't quite get because they have golf in the US too but I don't know. Maybe not as many courses or not as good courses or whatever.

I'll have to think about it. I mean, fuck the US. That's not a place you want to retire. That's a place where you get sick and they bankrupt you and take your house and then you're living on the streets, sucking dicks for sandwiches. But yeah, Finland would be cool. Maybe when this job ends, I can do it. And it should end any day now.