1. About a month ago, Miriam left her school iPad on the city bus. Jeremy ran down to the central bus office and a really helpful employee there made a bunch of phone calls and tracked it down to a specific bus and driver. Jeremy was back home, iPad in hand, within an hour or so.
2. On Friday, Magdalena lost her mobile phone. We had been walking and busing all over the city that day so I really had no idea where it could be. I was more annoyed than devastated at this loss - we got her the cheapest phone there is, but still, it would be a pain to replace it and of course, I had JUST loaded it with 10 euros of credit the day before.
I was all ready to kiss the phone goodbye when someone called me from it on Saturday afternoon. It was a really nice guy named Aleksi and he'd found the phone "on the ground outside the Mormon church." He put it in a plastic bag for us and hid it in the bushes outside the church so we could get it on Sunday. But in the meantime, we had a lovely conversation by text message about the US and Finland. He said he lived in the US for a while and he wanted to know why we moved to Finland. "If I'd been born in the US," he said, "I would never leave." He seemed pretty excited to have found a phone belonging to one of the very few Americans in Turku. And I was pretty excited to have the phone found by him! He was so kind and generous to have found the phone, made the effort to contact us, and then gone out of his way to put it back at the church where we could find it.
3. Something you see on a regular basis here is random pieces of outerwear propped up on coat racks, shelves, stair railings, fence posts, etc. It's easy to lose a mitten or hat here and friendly passers by just put the lonely item in a prominent place and hope it finds its way back to its owner. This system is not without its flaws - sometimes those items just stay there forever. There is a pair of shoes (! - sometimes people walk around outside in boots and then change into indoor shoes) in one of the classrooms on campus that, according to my coworkers, has been there for years. Maybe someday they will find their owner.
