Impossible is nothing

So...6 days in, I'd say the detox is going pretty well so far! Played floorball on Sunday, went to the gym after work on Tuesday, did Thai on Wednesday and I'm about to go swimming this evening :) Equally, there have been no trips to demonic places such as Hesburger and McDonalds! Not to be made more than 4 times a year, in my humble opinion.

I'm slightly distressed because my stock of Tetley teabags is rapidly running out...it may require a phonecall to ma mere for her to send me some Scottish Blend this time! tihi!

I'm being a bit of rubbish daughter since this Sunday is Mother's Day in the UK and on Monday it's Dad's birthday and I still haven't sent anything for either occasion. I have however got the gifts in my possession...sorry Mum and Dad! They will be winging their way to you very soon, promise!

I think I need to get a haircut soon, sometime before my trip to Ostrava would probably be good, and advisable!

So, the weekend has finally arrived! This week has been somewhat slow, certainly in comparison to last and probably because the office is quite empty at the moment with various people being on holiday. Nothing much really happened. Had my Finnish class twice this week though, which is nice. My teacher is sooo funny, really smiley and sooo enthusiastic, which makes all the difference! There's nothing worse than a dull teacher, how would you ever get motivation to learn anything. Ultimately, I can talk about myself in more detail, where I live, where I work, what my hobbies are, how old I am, where I come from etc etc! All of those things which would have been nice to know 5 months ago, but never mind! It's really good to know now. The odd thing with the state of my Finnish is that I think I actually know a lot of random words, but I don't know how to use them, so it's still very passive. However, this is changing thanks to the lessons because they are focussed of speaking the language! We just need "sisu" to get through it and master this beast of a language ;)

Well, I'm looking forward to the weekend cos I'll be taking a trip down memory lane, so-to-speak. It's time for the Aiesec cottage weekend in Ruovesi again. I participated in it shortly after I first arrived in Finland and it was a first in many senses for me, Finnish Sauna, Finnish lake swimming, Finnish forests etc etc...so this time I know the script at least and I can be a bit more prepared. It also coincides with the 60th anniversary of Aiesec in Finland so I expect there will be some serious partying to be had!

Righty ho, off for a cuppa and then for a swim!
Hyvää viikonloppua jokaiselle :=)

Detox and I said, yes, yes, yes!

Ok, it's official: I'm in detox. I hate to say it but Finland is having a bad influence on my health habits...I drink too much, too often (!) and last week, we went to McDonalds for lunch on Thursday and I ate 1.5 pizzas on Friday in addition to drinking copious amounts of alcohol, which I duly suffered for yesterday. So, today, I'm starting as I mean to go on and am going to play floorball with some friends. It will be good to run around a bit, then there's 2 times thai this week, gym at work and maybe swimming too. It will be fine.

Tonight I'm going to cook beef fajitas, which I'm quite excited about. Even more exciting, however, was last night's Sushi evening at Jakub's! We made home-made, hand-made sushis, with all the proper ingredients and I got to show off my chopstick skills...haha, all those embarassing moments eating Dim Sum in Glasgow have paid off...the Finns were worse than me! result! It was a really nice evening anyway, I met some nice new folk and we played a "werewolf" game, pretty challening, but I won the first round along with Jari!

On Friday evening, I watched my first 2 Finnish films with Kirsi R. One was called "Vares" and was like a detective type story, quite entertaining although I'm not sure how well the jokes were translated in the subtitles since Kirsi seemed to be laughing a lot more than I was! The second was called "Jade Soturi" or "Jade Warrior" and is possibly one of the weirdest films I've ever seen...it's a parallel story, set both in Finland and in China and has to do with Sampo from the Finnish epic: Kalevala....I think I need to see it again to work out what the hell goes on. It was visually very impressive though.

Today is nice, I woke up to fresh snow, just when I was losing all hope for winter in Finland! Hoepfully I'll be able ot borrow a colleague's cross-country ski equipment soon and I'll be out and about on those, trying it out! looking forward to that. Otherwise I'm still trying to plan my ski trip to Lapland in April. Watch this space.

Ok, off to get ready for floorball.

NB. the sushi in the picture wasn't made by us, unfortunately! Although ours did look really nice nonetheless!

blinded by the sun (aurinko)

Well it's been a relatively busy last few days. My plan-less weekend turned out being quite full in the end, which is always nice :) On Saturday Laura and I went to the public sauna in the Kauppi area: herrlich! I had been there a couple weeks before with Aiesec but didn't actually use the sauna. Then I was thinking that it was such a beautiful spot and that I'd definitely have to go back soon, which is what I did! We weren't planning on taking a dip in the lake, but somehow once you're there, sitting on the top bench inside the sauna (for me that was way too hot actually, it felt like my skin was literally sizzling, inside my ears and nose too....eek) with 90 degrees, you go outside and dipping in the lake seems like a very good idea! It's fantastic...when you get back out of the water, the feeling and the noise of your blood pumping around your body is immense! I must point out that the lake is of course frozen right now and the hole is artificially made by some machine under the water!

Then Laura and her parents very kindly invited me to dinner with them in Veganissimo, a vegetarian restaurant in Tampere and it was delicious, yum! I was so starving by that time too, the food couldn't have tasted any better. Later on we went to Klubi to see a band called 22pistepirko...it means "22 spotted ladybird" or something like that! They were really big in the 70's and 80's I think but are making a comeback. It was good, they played really well but I thought there could have been a little more band-audience interaction. Afterwards we expected a good dancing session in Klubi but given the tone of the band...the DJ's selection was quite random so we didn't stay too long! Did however hear "kom säger dom" by Familjen, the band from Skåne, Sweden which supported Kent at their gig here in Tampere last month. They're definitely growing on me.

The weather has been stunning for the past few days so Sunday was spent with a nice walk around the lake in Hervanta and then I caught up with Leena and Kirsi, Leena had popped up to Tampere for the weekend. Can't believe we hadn't seen each other since I was in Åbo in October last year, time flies by so mentally fast...there was definitely some good banter! We chilled in Kirsi's flat amongst all her animals for a while before heading into town to a couple of pubs; ended up in Henrys bar, it's nice in there, full of men, lol.

Now I have an infected wisdom tooth again, it's such a pain in the ass, recurring and it's got to the stage where i think i'll just have it pulled out. It's not fun. Så...ultimately, I'm just chilling out tonight, needs must.

ein nachdenkliches Schweigen

Mir fehlt es Schlaf, schon wieder. Was ist denn neu!? Wahrscheinlich liegt es daran dass ich Gestern Abend mit Kirsi und den anderen Kollegen unterwegs in der Stadt war. Das war aber ganz nett. Zuerst habe ich eine Präsentation für die Managementgruppe des nationalen Klusters gehalten. Die treffen einander 1mal pro Monat und dieses Mal waren wir daran als Gastgeber in Tampere. Wir waren in Kehräsaari im Stadtzentrum wo es eine tolle Sauna mit Blick über die Stromschnellen; super schön, besonders Gestern weil wir auch so schönes Wetter hatten. In der Sauna haben wir angefangen auf Deutsch miteinander zu reden, toll! Am Ende war es so dass Kirsi zu mir auf Englisch geredet hat und ich nur auf Deutsch geantwortet habe....etwas besonders aber auch lustig! Die Anderen waren ein bisschen verwirrt!

Später sind drei von uns in eine Jazz-Kneipe gegangen, sehr gemütlich :) aber bis dann hatte ich schon zu viel getrunken...es wird gesagt dass das beste Geschäft nach einer Sauna und ein paar Biers abgeschlossen wird, das kann ich dann wirklich verstehen, es stimmt! Sehr Finnisch!

Ich kanns nicht glauben dass ich fast schon die Hälfte meines Praktikums hier in Tampere gemacht habe....die Zeit vergeht so verdammt schnell. Alles was ich weiss ist dass ich überhaupt nicht bereit bin Finnland zu verlassen....und ich glaube dass es immer noch das gleich in 5 Monaten sein wird. Mir gefällts so unheimlich viel hier, in so vielen Arte und Weisen...

Kyykkä fame

For the benefit of my Finnish friends, the following link is to the article on our work's participation in MM-Kyykkä at the weekend: http://www.studiamedia.com/Kyykkae-houkutteli-myoes-entisiae-teekkareita-pelaamaan.509.0.html

The article has been published in the TTY's student magazine!

MM-Kyykkä 2008

Today I'm mostly just chilling out and recovering from yesterday's epic Kyykkä "World Championships" held right here at the TTY (Technical University of Tampere) in Hervanta! Literally on my doorstep. 3 teams were competing from my work; my team: JPT (Myself, Kirsi, Emmi, Juha and Yatzy), OMA team (Vito, Sanna, Vähis, Matti and Marjut) and Intelligent machines team (Harri, Vesa, Mirva, Jouni and Iiva)!

JPT WON BRONZE MEDALS!!! or I should say "Karttu"s, Yee ha! I had a good feeling about our team, strong throwers and with 3 women, it means you always have a slight advantage against the teams with only men! At least 2 of us were 1st time players too, what a result!

It was a long day but loads of fun and great for our team spirit, let's hope we can take it back to the office...at least we still have our 2 bottles of sparkling wine to drink this week, ahem ;=) After the games ended we headed to the sauna for the company after party and then into town to see a hummpa band in Tullinkamari (a nice venue in Tampere). They were pretty awful and I can understand that the only place they are popular outside of FInland is Germany, haha! No, seriously, they basically just murder classic tunes in some hummpa style, and all in Finnish. Actually I think it was more enjoyable for those of us who couldn't understand the words! Otherwise, the disco/club part of the venue is really good, some quality tunes were played!

I've just been swimming since I figured I should drag my ass out of the apartment at some point today, anything else is just not healthy. My plan to go swimming in the mornings before work has still not materialised, funnily enough...I'm going to try though. I'm nursing a sore calf muscle just now so thai is out of the window this week, swimming will have to take its place!

Off out for dinner tonight with some Aiesec people, Marin the former trainee from Bulgaria is back in Tampere until tomorrow I think so it's mostly to catch up with him. Should be fun! Oleg (from Russia) incidentally was most entertaining yesterday too, spontaneously throwing himself at a hill of snow....etc!

Ok, well I'm off to get ready now....