My beautiful neighbourhood

We live in My Home Navadweepa apartment complex. The quality is about the smae as your standard concerete subsurb in Finland, except for a few differences.

• Only about 5% of Indians can afford to live like this, so people here correspond to Finnish middle class by their occupations and values.


• since work is cheap here, there are guards and intricate flower beds around the house.


• Thirdly, everything is tightly packed while in Finland there is lots of park around this kind of housing.

The area is surrounded by wall and guarded. Since work is cheap here, security guards are vastly more common than in Finland.



The walls are surrounded by barbed wire. In general, security measures do not mean that there is a threat nor that security would be very effective. Indians are chill, laid back and bribable folk, we haven't experienced any threat of crime against us, but neither do we put much trust on security organizations which would be impenetrable if run by Finns.



9 floors in 3 apartment blocks.





The area contains a small store, a gym, a barber's shop, a swimming pool, a playground, a tennis court and a badminton court.



The central square has celebrations on weekends. They play loud music and there is variable amount of people depending on the event. The most noisy and popular event thus far was a talent contest near Diwali where the occupants had prepared dance and song shows and there were also outside pro performers and food being sold.









Around the house there is a jogging track which is surrounded by delicately maintained flower beds on both sides. This level of detail simply wouldn't be possible in Finland because of the cost of work involved.





The rooms are a bit oldish by Finnish standards. The concept of a single-person room is still new to Indians, so there are double beds. The kitchens have microwave ovens and gas stoves. Air conditioning is present in every room, a necessity in hot Indian summer.



The public space.



Solomon, the house servant in our flat. When we signed the rent contract, we didn't know that the apartments include a house servant each. I'd love to include an interview of him, but he doesn't speak enough English. More about him in the next post.