Mixed

Lesson learned: there is no reason to beg, if I ask for something and the other person makes the conscious decision to turn down my request, I have every right in the world to be upset. However, getting upset right before going to bed cannot be categorised as a  good idea, as beginning a new day with a big grey cloud above your head is hardly desirable.

 

Arguing should always be scheduled for after lunch and before dinner, that way there is plenty of time to make up.

 

Anyhow, why worry about negative things when there are so many marvellous things to look forward to?

 

First, I just received a text from my best English friend: they have landed in Girona and are on their way to Barcelona. Tomorrow our crazy, touristy weekend will begin. Good food, good drinks and relax, relax, relax. Our friendship goes way back to when we used to live in the same student flat in Manchester; we used to party like crazy and have sleepovers in each others rooms. Thursday was our night in when the three of us shared a bottle of bacardi or malibu and pondered upon the meaning of life. Primark used to be our second home, and in the evenings we would go for long walks down Oxford Road to Piccadilly Circus and back.  

 

Second, there is a lot of entertainment going on: family dinners, coffee with a new friend who seems to be a supersweet girl. Très bien.

 

Third, IN TWO WEEKS I WILL BE AT MADRID BARAJAS, ABOUT TO BOARD THE PLANE FOR COPENHAGEN. THIS IS SOMETHING SO EXCITING THAT IT DESERVES CAPITAL LETTERS! Presuming that Spanair/SAS will stay in the air (and I have some serious doubts), I will eat raspberries in Stockholm, sip on a coctail on the ferry, mess around with friends in Aland, SLEEP and go second hand shopping in Turku/Lahti/Helsinki (not sure yet).

 

 

Positive thinking the Russian way

This poem by Russian national legend Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin is one of my favourites, as it captures the essential of positive thinking. Life is not always perfect, nor should it be, but with a bit of hopeful thinking, we will get very far. After all, life is what you make of it and people who concentrate on the positive aspects of life are indeed happier. However, it is good to remember that everyone is entitled to have a bad day once in a while.

Если жизнь тебя обманет...

Если жизнь тебя обманет,
Не печалься, не сердись!
В день уныния смирись:
День веселья, верь, настанет.
Сердце в будущем живет;
Настоящее уныло:
Все мгновенно, все пройдет;
Что пройдет, то будет мило.

1825

Meaning, more or less and without rhyme:

Should life deceive you,
don't be sad, don't be upset!
On a gloomy day, surrender;
The day will become merry, believe.
The heart lives in the future;
The present will be dejected there:
All is fleeting, all will pass;
What passes will be pleasant.

Google knows it all

My cousin Anette had a fun-looking-thing on her blog: google your name + is and see what comes up.
Well well.. according to google I'm a most admirable slut, who pleases them mightily.
Oh, bugger! How did google find out about my secret sex life?

Random? Yes.

Books

Il y a toujours une permière fois...

Aujourd´hui j'ai reçu mon premier e-mail en français - et j'ai tout compris.

Maybe it's time to start learning French again… or maybe not…

I remember my French classes in school; we used to eat chocolate cake (très français), watch the Count of Monte Cristo (the golden locks of Guillaume Depardieu were absolutely enchanting) and get into almost physical fights with verbs. After surviving those six years (learning French was just a tactic to learn other languages more easily) of practising how to pronounce the letter "R"*, this girl moved on to more pronouncable languages.

Now, why would it be a good idea to learn French:

-> I have personally been playing with the thought of working with something related to the European Union. Although French isn't required, it is a major plus if one wants to survive in Brussels or Strasbourg.

-> French literature: the writers of the enlightenment period wrote some pretty amazing things, and reading the original always beats any translation no matter how good it is.

-> Imagine the following scenery: it is autumn and you are sitting in coffee shop in Paris. You can see how the the city is waking up, with the fresh air in your face and you can smell freshly baked bread and croissants, not to mention recently brewed coffee. Well, you want to be able to order that croissant, don't you?

-> Krzysztof Kieslowski made some impressive films in French.

-> You'll need to know French when you move to Tahiti upon your retirement.



*If the "r" sound was complicated, how about the Polish letter combinations cz, rz, sz, ci, si, zi, dz, dzi + various letters with funny little things on them. Now repeat after me: W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Talk about pronouncable.

Belgrado, Bratislava, Budapest, Liubliana, Praga, Sarajevo, Skopie, Sofia,, Varsovia, Zagreb

Tak chcialabym, chcialabym, chcialabym! Podrozowac po tych krajach i tych miestach, jezdzic samochodem, poczuc wiatr we wlosach, sluchac muzyki i byc totalnie wolna od wszystkich ograniczen. Jest moim wielkim marzeniem widziec te miejsca, sluchac te jezyki, oddychac powietrze i po prostu byc tam.

 

I believe that every individual goes through some sort of experience during their childhood that will affect their future lives in one way or another. For me, the one big event that filled my life in the early 90s was the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the war in Yugoslavia. Instead of playing with dolls and my little ponies like most other girls, I would watch the news and suck in all the information I could on Eastern Europe. Why? That was simply what they were showing, in the weekends I would watch Italian football. And it wasn't just the news broadcasts, during the winter olympics in Albertville in 1992 a new fascinating "country" appeared. IVY, Itsenäisten Valtakuntien Yhdistö, known in English as the Commonwealth of Independent States. Those athletes didn't have proper flags in front of their names, just the Olympic ones. My mother got me Zlata's Diary, the diary of a young girl in Sarajevo during the war. Unlike Anne Frank, she had a happy ending I think, she left for France. The encyclopedia had a lot of useful information on Yugoslavia, too. I still remember the beginning of the first film ever to be made in newly independent Slovenia; there was an old lady playing solitaire. If you don't win something terrible will happen.

 

And I was hooked. I still am.

 

Languages that sound like music, with a lot of letters that the Finnish alphabet is completely lacking.  The melancholy, the beauty, the wilderness. And the freedom, as crazy as it might sound, I associate everything beyond Germany with freedom.

 

And then there is Hungary: with a language that instead of music sounds like Finnish, but with the wastness of the puszta.

 

At moments I get "homesick": I miss many places, but the homesickness I feel for Eastern Europe is more like a sudden urge, a need to be there, to experience all the melancholy, beauty, wilderness.

¡Despiértate!

 

Two hours thirty minutes  after waking up, the state of my mind (not to mention body) is closer to asleep than awake. Imagine the feeling of sitting on a big fluffy white cloud in the middle of nothingness and you will understand what this morning has been like. I have tried everything; cold water in the face, fresh air, the blackest tea , little walks,  a banana- and nothing is working. My eyes stubbornly keep closing themselves, and the few moments that they are open everything I see is double. My legs refuse to carry me and the rest of the body feels kind of numb. If I survive this day, I promise I will go to bed at 9 pm tonight and sleep like a king for 9 hours.

 

Does anyone have any good suggestions how to wake up in the morning?

Nervous

 

For all of you who don't remember what it feels like: sitting still is problematic, your stomach is filled with a funny feeling (very much like it might have come to life all of a sudden), you don't know what to do next and concentrating is impossible. Yes, I am nervous today.

 

Somliga går i trasiga skor...

Melancholy, listening to Nordic music from a long time ago. It should be raining outside, being in Manchester would be perfect today. A cup of tea, raindrops against the windows and books everwhere. I feel like lying down, closing my eyes and slowly drifting away.





I believe the photo was taken by Annica.

Cappuccino and Clouds

 

Yawn! I have been on google searching for Portuguese silversmiths and reading Portuguese websites for a while now. Yawn again. I cannot really say that I know the language so it takes a lot of concentration. At least the cappuccino helps a little bit.

 

The last few days have been a bit strange and my face has reacted accordingly; the inside of my mouth is full of little spots which make eating and drinking quite painful. The areas around my mouth and on my nose also feel sore. My skin is generally of the crazier kind, reacting to almost everything that is even slightly out of the ordinary. I'm lucky because the problem is only aesthethical; having my face, throat or arms covered with big red spots does raise questions but usually I don't even feel that they are there. My main weapons to beat the redness are very simple: aloe vera based moisturiser for sensitive skin, no make up, avoiding the sun if possible. I should probably pay closer attention to washing detergents and such things… Let's just see if all the nice things planned for this weekend will give some relief.

 

Tip of the day: if you are bored, I recommend you to try to find the homepage of Portuguese cutlery maker Silva Junior. This has turned out to be quite a mission impossible.

 

 

 

Nicknames

Colega, idiota, pava...

A dear child has many names.

One Month To Go

 

In exactly one month I will be sitting at Barajas in Madrid, waiting for the connecting flight to Copenhagen from where I will be flying to Stockholm. From Stockholm the ferry will slowly float over to the Aland. I CAN'T WAIT! Very few times in my life have I felt such an urgent need to go back "home", only in Moscow did pure stubborness impede me from jumping on the next train back to Helsinki, much to the bad luck of my friends who had stick up with me. I want to be close to my family, drink tea and coctails with my friends, go for a massage, go swimming with grandma, search for treasures in a second hand shop, visit the Finnish mainland, breathe Nordic air and feel chilly. Eat berries and rye bread, run in the forest, watch silly TV with Finnish subtitles, fight with my broethers and just be.

 

Excited!

One of the most exciting things at the moment is that a couple of friends will be visiting in two weeks time. My head is already buzzing with things that I want to do with them; apart from a bit of party and ultimate relax, it is also quite likely that they will see the most famous spots of Valencia, as well as try some local delicacies, paella and orxata.

And how are we feeling today?

Hot, sweaty and a bit useless. I have done absolutely nothing today, my head is a blur, my stomach is hurting and my whole body is feeling sticky. The internet is being extremely slow and I have no energy to do anything.

Yey, Miss Happy is in the house again.

I suppose that after reading up on misters Obama, Medvedev and Putin, I'll place myself under an ice cold shower, imagine that someone is giving me a massage and try to think some happy thoughts.

Random picture of Obama walking into the mouth of the big bad eastern bear.

Because the world is just dying to know what I ate today

Carrots...


















Carrots, onion and liver...


















Carrots, onion, liver, potato, more onion, garlic, spicy green things, apple...























and pineapple juice.

Why doesn't it always rain on me?

Exhilarating might be the most adequate word for the feeling I experienced this morning. It was raining (actually, pouring down) outside, it was chilly, almost like in autumn! The morning is still being quite grey and the air is brisk. The last few days have been so hot that al our energy has been completely soaked out, we have been experiencing the state of being “ploff” as the Spaniards would put it.

Anyway, I’m really excited about today: not only have I planned a delicious lunch (cold potato salad with liver patties and lots of onion), but in the evening we will go t-shirt shopping with my boyfriend. While he’s looking for cool tees, my intention is to satisfy my daily caffeine fix at Starbucks and maybe even find a good book as I’ve run out of things to read.

 

?

Whittard of Chelsea (the tea shop) delivers to the UK and to international countries. Could someone clever please enlighten me, what is an international country?

Franklin's Virtues

After some happiness hopping on the internet, I came across Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues. Apparently this man, who was in his late 20s when making the list followed these rules until death. Nobody is perfect, and living according to these guidances all the time is nearly impossible, but I do think that they serve as a type of inspiration for those who are trying to be better people in a world that is very egocentric and money-oriented.

TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Franklin himself carried around a little book with a page for each virtue, he then evaluated himself and his behaviour at the end of each day.

http://www.school-for-champions.com/character/franklin_virtues.htm
http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official/hpda/addons/franklin

HUNGRY!

I'm daydreaming of freshly made sourdough rye bread with real butter,  cheese from Kastelholm and juicy tomato. Together with that I want a big glass of raspberry water.