One can feel that daylight is becoming a precious resource as the amount of time the sun is above the horizon is slowly diminishing. However the activities are still pretty much on the red side of the scale despite the fact that being here for almost five weeks now means that quite a few activities have become a daily routine. And I have recently realized that where-is-this and how-do-I-do-this-here thinking has mostly become second nature by now. Which is good, because I can concentrate on other matters which have now become more interesting, thus replacing the initial euphoria moments with new ones.

At the beginning of the week I have joined a Buddy group programme the purpose of which it is to make Finnish and international students mingle and eventually become friends. By a series of fortunate events I became a member of two buddy groups that evening. It is exciting enough that in my original group there are people from Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Finland. But no, I suppose that wasn’t enough for me, so after a few beers (for them) and a single tea (for me, the reason for which I’ll explain later) in a local pub, another group of buddies made me their adoptee. Not only did I end up getting home at 0200am on the launching day, but have already met my buddies the second time this week two nights ago. We are a diverse and thus quite interesting group and judging by laugh-o-meter it looks like we’re becoming friends. Let’s hope this continues as well as it has started.

I know that at least some of you are wondering why in the world have I had tea the other night when everyone was drinking booze? I didn’t see it coming, but I could have, I guess, because it looks like I began paying the interest for awake time borrowed from Mr. Sleep. But I ain’t paying much since I only got a mild form of influenza which has not had a big impact on my day-to-day activities but has kept me away from my running shoes and outside the pool that I have enjoyed so much lately. And it looks like whatever it is, it won’t last long in my body, especially after several therapeutic sauna-12°C lake cycles yesterday. It was an experiment for me, and it looks like it actually worked. And even though I haven’t been sleeping much I have actually managed to pull it off and am now back where I was before I contracted the disease.

Yes, the Digital Culture program people have been really making sure that we enjoy our studies here as we have had a five hour sauna party at a nearby Vuorilampi lake on Thursday. The actual time we spent in sauna was probably around one to two hours and the rest has been pleasant discussion and socializing. And yes, in between sauna sessions we did go for a swim in the already quite cold lake. The water is cold enough that one cannot really soak in it, but still warm enough for a nice swim, nice if you run straight back to sauna, that is. After the sauna we enjoyed some roasted Finnish sausages we made over an open fire and Chinese dumplings made by a Chinese student in our group. It goes beyond saying that it was fun and as you can imagine I am looking forward to more of these DGL “meetings.”

This week also lectures which I have been attending finally got a bit more active and interesting as we got our first assignments and readings to do. This doesn’t mean that Suomi yksi isn’t fun anymore, but it has definitely made important contribution to the morphing of Finnish from merely interesting or amusing to what is now a utility function of the language. It is slowly seeping into my gray matter which means that every single day I use it more in simple everyday interaction with people, myself and computers. I am eagerly awaiting the moment when I’ll be able to move away from the what’s-up-with-the-weather conversations and could engage in a real discussion about politics.

There’s one more celestial observation I should mention here. I believe that so far I have not mentioned anything about the Finnish twilight zone. When I arrived to Finland one of the first things that I have immediately noticed was the length of the twilight time: it was much, much longer than what I am used to at around 45° latitudes. After the sunset the sky was really bright for about at least an hour, however not bright enough to illuminate the forest ground, for instance. It really was quite a sight. But now as the days are getting shorter, even the twilight zone has become much less pronounced. After seeing these changes, I really became interested in experiencing the long Finnish nights. Bring ‘em on.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Culture, Finland, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.