Van Helsingfors

On Wednesday, I was supposed to meet DLS but he bailed out on rather late notice.  I also noticed that it still actually gets slightly dark here at night because it's south of Jyväskylä. 

But Antti sent me a last minute email suggesting that I show up downtown to pop by some band clothing shop before it closed for the evening.  Having made it barely five minutes until closing, there wasn't anything I was looking for. Then we went to a department store to buy the Viikate album that was just released that day, and I only found out later (when I puzzled over the number on the booklet and read translated the fine print on the cover sticker) that it's a limited edition =)

We walked through pouring rain to find some sort of affordable restaurant without being attacked by tourist pricing.  Eventually we came to a Nepalese restaurant (which was really a lot of northern Indian food anyway) and fakiiri joined us there.

You see, fakiiri is very photographically elusive, so no one knew what he looked like until he appeared.  In fact, he is still photographically elusive.

At a very small and crowded karaoke bar there was a surprising number of people, so it must have been one of the better places in town.  The poor lone bartender had to manually do the DJing for a while before her buddy showed up. It was here that I almost got completely squashed by some lady who was so completely wasted that, well, she almost crushed me when she tried to hug me. (We were all surprised that she could still sing relatively well in that state, later on.)  After crushing me and causing me to miss the second-last cue in 'Nemo', one of her lady friends started talking to me in Finnish (why am I getting a sense of déjà vu?) and something about "Nightwishin laulaja". I pulled my "I don't speak Finnish" line on her and she said, "you should have tried when they were looking for the singer!"

"I did."

"Well they should have taken you instead of that m*****f***** from _____. I would have picked you."

Uhhuh. Right.

It's too bad they left soon after that, with Madam Totally Wasted being so wasted her friends had to drag her out of her seat, out the door, and push her into a taxi, because my performance of 'Sleeping Sun' was perfecto (how could it not be? I know it like the top of my foot) =P

There were some curiously-dressed women there; they looked almost Indian but Antti informed me that they were gypsies. I had no idea gypsies were brown. But they sure sing Finnish with an interesting accent.

I don't remember much about yesterday, actually. It was some GW-playing and TV-watching and Antti happened to have stuff to pick up in the area, so we took a short walk together. Then gemigemi tried to set up a spare computer so the three of us could play GW together, but it was too old and couldn't do it.

Today I met DLS at the Central Railwaystation [sic, according to the metro] and we wandered aimlessly a bit looking for a place where we could eat a little sausage [but they're all gone and replaced by kebab places now, unless you're looking at the late-night grill kiosks]. Of course, we just had to give up right when my 80-minute ticket expired, and our backup plan was that he'd kidnap me to his apartment and just get beer and sausages from the supermarket. 

DLS has a phenomenon that when he meets people in person he knows online, conversations continue in that artificially slowed, online pace. Which was definitely the case here. We mostly sat starting at his computer while watching his usual Geekchat haunt for random things to happen.

We only finished half of the 2L of beer that he bought (and ate all of the sausages - with tons of mustard) before I leaned back on his bed and passed out for a few minutes. He sent me home after getting some ice cream with the money he got back from inserting bottles into the bottle return machine.

It's neat. You feed it bottles and it's (normally) able to weigh out what kind of bottle it is and how much deposit you paid on it (hopefully correctly). But the clever thing is that it's just a machine, and it's in the bigger supermarkets, and all you have to do is take the slip from the machine to any of the supermarket cashiers and they give you the money.

DLS is too frippin' tall and a little intimidating because of his size, but is relatively tame, even if I keep poking him. [Darn hippies.]

I cooked up the vilest, ghettoist (un)fried rice with tuna and carrots this morning because students can't cook and don't have any cookable goods in the fridge. The younger, the less cooking ability, especially at a nerd school like a technical university.

It was also actually sunny today, so there were tons of people milling about downtown.  Almost like HK but with a different colour and a different language.

But really, aside from Matthieu's apartment, all of the apartments I've visited here have been student apartments of one kind or another. The one in Jyväskylä was sort of HUB-ish shared apartment, Samuel's temp digs were very dorm-ish with a kitchen shared with the entire wing, this one right now is housing for student couples/families, and DLS's was essentially a studio apartment. Well, Samuel showed me his usual place (it was being reno'ed) and it was a really nice studio flat, nice and close to The River (which isn't the only one, but one that Turkulaiset make a big deal about). This ought to be the "Homecoming Student Housing Tour."