(Water) Closet Blues

0300. You might think my bathroom obsession strange, but hygiene is very important and so it's really fascinating to find something so different. The sky is lightening up already, having curtains are critical. When I walked into here yesterday there was a set of curtains lying on my cot, and while J happened to have some extra clips to hook them up to the runners, she didn't have enough. "Two men came in here the other day to set up the room for you, I don't know why they didn't put them up." So she phoned Maintenance and a man smelling of tupakka came by and dropped off a package of clips. This room is approx 3x4m, but I'm a really bad judge of metric sizes. Hell, it's bigger than my old HUB room. The bathroom is 1x2m (I'm more sure of that!) and the World's Smallest Kitchen™ has only about 1m² standing space and the stove is about half the width of Canadian stoves. They weren't kidding when they said "kitchenette".

It stopped raining yesterday evening but now it looks all wet outside again. Sky doesn't show any signs of clearing up soon. It's interesting that I can see people outside at pretty much absolutely any time of day.

0730. I just had a shower and breakfast. You can call that my Finnish baptism. It was the best shower ever, eine wunderbare Dusche. I actually wanted to get wet, unlike my usual. Breakfast was wonderful too. Der "cloudberry"-konfitur war sehr teuer (almost 5€ for the jar, about 2 times more than lingonberry or strawberry). I had it on some potato-flour bread. I also finally drank Keisarin Morsian tea (elderberry and quince black tea). Someone sent me a couple of teabags when I was in high school, but I kept them in a tin and never used them because they smelled so good. Hmm. Sun is peeping out now. Still cloudy though. But the sun is warm.

...Mikä sun...*oikea* nimi on?...

Is what my instructor asked me in the middle of the day when she was taking attendance. Because it's a crash course in Finnish, we are doing just the really important useful phrases and colloquial forms, which is a little too bad. The instructor is obviously speaking more slowly to help us learn but it seems that the natural "melody" of the language allows more variation and enunciation than I had thought. It's feeling a bit like the first few days of German 111, where I recognized the forms of the sentences but the vocabulary was new. Just like in German 111, we started with greetings, introducing ourselves, and saying where we were from. I totally threw the teacher off by saying "olen Kanadasta... mutta sydämeni kotimaa on Suomi", and then she looked a bit surprised and then wrote that last part on the overhead projector slide. There was a guy from Russia who had also tried to learn some on his own, but it was much less refined. And just like in German 111 I have to force myself to shut up a bit.

Lunch was decent - it was a pretty big serving and definitely worth the 4,30€ for an entreé, drinks, salad, and bread. I couldn't finish mine today and I already didn't get very much.

Right after class I went to find Matthieu's office - his building's rooms are horribly numbered and so I had to stop some random guy in the building and ask him "missä on...?" pointing to the room number on Matthieu's business card. The guy said, "oh, I know" and finally showed me where it was. It's in some hallway behind some door with a completely different room number. He was waiting for me - having looked up the prices for some prepaid mobile phone subscriptions. He drove me to the downtown area, where I followed behind as he darted into, through, and out of various shopping malls and department stores to get to all sorts of places. He helped me buy postage stamps, the phone card (14,90€), checked a couple of book and department stores for the TTR:N (Menolippu Pohjoismaat) game, and didn't find it. Eventually we went to the only game shop in town and had to order it. It should be in by Friday.

Matthieu: You talk to him - he speaks really good English...
Me: ! But it doesn't feel... right!

He ends up talking to him for me and ends up speaking English anyway :P

In one of the bookstores I bought some looseleaf paper of the exact (?) kind Samuel wrote the note on my Christmas present on, and also a copy of the book that was that present in original Finnish. 12€ is pretty cheap for a hardcover children's book with quite a number of pages. Matthieu's parking under one of the malls was even only 0,50€ for the first whole hour (0,50€ for the second, and 1€ for subsequent hours)! The downtown area itself is pedestrian-only.

I have a theory about homesickness and what triggers it. I'll formulate this at the bar tonight and get back to you on it.

0115. Had to write five simple sentences for homework: it took some effort to keep them simple but make them slightly creative.

Wasted some precious air time calling Otto to say hello. My theory about homesickness is this -> it does not happen in situations where (for these feelings are caused by being away from what one loves the most) the observed does not actually have to get away from that very thing.

That is music to me - it brought me here, and because it does not change... then I won't be homesick...