3. nap

Our morning started pretty ordinary, due to the fact that the previous day we had walked a lot and became tired out. Knowing that we were allowed to sleep an extra hour longer truly made me happy and in all honesty, my roommate needed to get me out of bed to start our day.

Once we got ready with our morning routine, we headed down into the restaurant connected to the hostel, where they served us breakfast. Frankly I was rather impressed with the morning meal considering they had a wide selection of food such as scrambled eggs, sausages, oatmeal, toast, fruits and vegetables as well.

At half past nine the group met in the lobby by the reception and together we headed towards our first destination. The way here was about an hour long travel by public transportation. First we needed to get on the tram and once we arrived at the train station, there we transferred to a rather local bus. The interior was similar to the long distance buses at home. We successfully arrived at the location of our first program, the Museum of Technology.

At eleven we met up with our tour guide inside of the museum. As we got to know later his name is Tom and as a matter of fact he is an incredibly knowledgeable man and visibly is familiar with the topics he presents about. Our theme today was Utopia (an ideal society that does not exist in reality) and Dystopia (an imaginary place in which society is unhappy and afraid in light of the fact that they are treated unfairly) The main question, aka our hypothesis is the following: Will we live in an utopian or a dystopian world in the near future, even as close as 2044. Will all the technology be to our own benefit or will they have us living in fear? Our tour guide helped us gain insight and let us form our own opinions, due to the fact that the future is clearly unpredictable. What we learnt is that Finlands genius scientists created a theorem called the Megatrix which basically withholds the big idea of where we're heading towards in the future. What we need to take into consideration is that we already have many problems present in the modern day, such as the fact that nature is eroding. That can be seen with climate change and our natural oils disappearing. Humans also overconsumpt creating a lot of trash which just piles up, thankfully we recycle said trash and renew them into useful products. However, at this point of time the newest issue we're dealing is with the leaders of all the social media sites competing for digital power.

An example we got which helped us observe utopia and dystopia were heartbeat monitors. Thinking about it there are only benefits to such equipment. But is that really true? On one hand, wearing such watches can show us our heart rate, it can also conduct physical examinations of its user, perhaps even communicate with a doctor if anything seems off with the consumers health. On the other hand, if you take everything into consideration, if any website such as Google got ahold of the data of the heartbeat monitor it could easily take advantage of it and run tests. For example, a person doing a Google search while wearing the heartbeat monitor. It is a perfect psychological experiment to see if your heart beat remains the same or if it rises from excitement of said search.

Another issue we are already dealing with is digital unemployment, which basically means that robots and artificial intelligence are taking away jobs. They're able to do this since the modern robots have sensors in them which the old ones did not since they were just pure automatic machines. I'm afraid this will lead to serious unemployment globally and people really need to think about which line of work they decide to get into.

There's another example of how technology developed over time. Starting from the 1920s radios became a popular source of information. It was ideal because you only needed to use your ears to acquire information, and people were able to multitask while doing so. In the 1950s radios got replaced by television which already needed the consumer to use both eyes and ears. Back in the day they used phone books to be able to reach people but they've obviously been replaced by phones. In the 1990s computers became popular and now deeming our ears, eyes and hands busy. Nowadays everyone uses the most modern technology such as big screen televisions and smartphones. I have to say in the recent days one could not live without one of these and our question is the following. How divided will our attention be in 20 years with technology becoming more advanced. I suppose the only thing we can do is wait and find out.

After that, we headed towards our next destination, the Oodi Library in Central Helsinki. The moment we stepped into the building I was in awe. I have never seen such a great community space where people can read, study and work in quiet but at the same time there are special spaces in which people can get to know each other. We got to know our next guide, a lovely lady called Rita. She enlightened us that the library was a gift for Helsinkis 100ty anniversary. One third of the money to build it was from the government while the other two thirds from the city. The citizens of Helsinki had the chance to vote on what the name of the library should be, and the most popular one was Oodi which translates to ode. The building itself is the seat of freedom of speech and literature. Another important value in the library is that everyone is accepted and allowed to spend time inside, homeless, poor, wealthy, everyone has the right to use the services inside. There are sewing machines, computers and working offices free of use, people can even borrow sports equipment and musical instruments. There's a cinema in the building as well where they only play old, vintage movies. They have many classes and lessons here as well, such as cooking, language classes, and even knitting for ladies to help against loneliness. What was especially impressive is the fact that they have special studios for film and music production, along with a gaming section where we could see children playing Minecraft in groups. Now onto the interesting part, the books itself. They had a wide collection of every kind of book one could imagine, they even varied in 17 languages showing that it truly is an international haven. They have 3 robots working there which organize the books and bookshelves, cleaning the space to keep it in its organized beauty.

Unfortunately that concluded our trip to the library and had to leave. If only we had such a wonderful place in Hungary where people could get together to study and hang out… Well either way, we headed on our journey and walked around the area, observing each and every sight there such as the parliament, the opera house and the house of music.

After the long walk everyone was exhausted so we headed back to our hostel, where we had a wonderful, filling dinner and after that we fell asleep just as swiftly.

Ónody-Shmookler Hanna