True, I haven’t written anything in almost a month … and as all of you can imagine a lot has happened around here in all that time. I finally got to travel around Finland a bit, visited a couple of friends, met a whole bunch of new and interesting people, been to a brainstorming retreat as a part of my studies programme, had a few exams at school and experienced a plethora of other things. Which of course means that I have also been taking pictures, and a lot of them too, so do make sure you check out the gallery to get a visual glimpse of what I’ve been up to lately. OK, where should I start? Since I have not been updating the blog as things happened I will try not to think and write in chronological order but rather as things come to my mind. I hope that that won’t spell confusion for you.
I’ve probably already written at least a bit about how the university school system works here. Well, there are two periods per term and this change of periods occurred within the last month or so which means that there was a so called self-study week during which there were not supposed to be any lectures but just exams - or no school work at all for some which is the reason they end up calling this a vacation week. But this was not the case for me as I had both some lectures and a couple of exams during that week and could not really leave Jyväskylä for more than a few days. Anyways, to cut the crap, I passed both exams (Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Methodology and Digital Arts and Culture classes) … and yeah, it was interesting to see how examinations work around here. I especially preferred the open-endedness of examination as there are no multiple choice tests which was too often the case in my previous encounters with schooling. ’nuff said about that.
The more exciting part is definitely traveling, reuniting with old friends and meeting new people. It’s been fun and I have done a lot of it recently. OK, first a friend of mine invited me to her hometown of Kuopio where I’ve spent a day with her and her parents. Kuopio is a town located about 160 km northeast of Jyväskylä in the Savo region of Finland. The town is of about the same size of Jyväskylä so there’s really nothing too exciting there, but still, I have enjoyed the city as it has quite a few interesting galleries and museums. My friend’s mom had a week off at the time of my visit so she took her time to show me around town where we visited the Korttelimuseo - literally translated as ‘a block museum.’ It’s a block where they have gathered the most interesting buildings from the history of Kuopio, which almost inherently includes the history of town life in Finland as well.
But Kuopio was neither main nor the only attraction that week as I’ve spent the weekend in Helsinki. I was invited to spend a couple of days there with a professor that has been lecturing at our university about the Nordic archeology and prehistory (I wrote about him a bit already in the post about the trip to Saarijärvi in October if anyone can still remember that). As Brian is an extremely interesting and knowledgeable person I definitely grabbed the opportunity to tour the Helsinki with him. And yes, that was something as he knows a lot about the history of Nordic and Scandinavian societies, especially about Finns and Swedes, relations between the two nations and about many other local cultural peculiarities. As he is an archeologist, you can only imagine, that we have spend quite some time in the prehistory section of the Kansallismuseo (The National Museum of Finland). Yes, the artifacts are all there, and everything is neatly tagged and marked, but hey, how often do you actually get a chance to tour a an exhibition with someone who has actually researched these artifacts for several decades. Besides the Kansallismuseo I’ve also visited the Designmuseo and really enjoyed the exhibitions there as well. Of course, all the exhibitions had to do at least something with Finnish design: Nokia, Fiskars, Metso and contemporary Finnish designers. Overall impression: fantastic.
And as always, I do love to just walk the streets of any city and I have done a lot of that too just getting to know how Helsinki lives and breathes. It’s probably because of all the Art Noveau architecture that Helsinki actually reminds me quite a bit of Ljubljana, well, sort of, but it is quite a bit bigger and more definitely more metropolitan. During that first stay in Helsinki I also paid a surprise visit to my two friends who live in there and whom I have met in Jordan this past summer. OK, one of them actually knew that I will be coming to town, but the other one didn’t, so he almost crapped his pants when he saw me sitting in the bar with Olli. Imagine that. Yeah, we had a couple of beers together and as usual my evening ended up in the gutter … just kidding, I found my way to hotel pretty easily since it was 0400am and the air was rather fresh.
Then less than a week later I again took off to Helsinki. Yes, as you could tell already, I enjoy this city. Well, come on, it has more than one street, and besides that I have not been in a real city for two months. This time I’ve left Jyväskylä with one of the first trains in the morning and was in Helsinki already before 1100am (it’s a three and a half hour train ride). Finnish trains are really enjoyable, especially if you get to sit on the first floor from where you can really enjoy the landscape. Well, I did sort of, but since I had to turn in a paper on Tuesday for the Cultural Theory class, that also meant that I had to organize my time for writing the paper on the train - and yes, I have managed to finish it while traveling between Jyväskylä and Helsinki.
This second visit to Helsinki was rather different from the first one. In many ways, of course. This time I was actually visiting my friends Olli and Hannu (and stayed at Olli’s place, which I really enjoyed a lot) and spending time with them. So on Friday I visited a couple of exhibitions (Ensi Valtaamme Museot in Kiasma and Japan Pop in Tennispalatsi) and the rest of the night I guess we were drinking, if I can remember correctly. And yes, these two Finns (OK, it was not just the two of them) actually managed to get me drunk. The only thing I was really happy about was that when I woke up in an unfamiliar place in an unknown bed, I woke up alone. What a relief, one might think. Yes that evening was loads of fun for all of us. Which doesn’t mean that we did not have fun the next day as well. I am not really sure if I should admire these people or not, since the first thing they do in the morning after they have been drinking all night is, guess what, begin drinking the moment they get up and continue in this fashion until the next day. I was not able to handle that, but had fun nevertheless. But the weather was fantastic that Saturday and we visited Soumenlinna and had a few hours of fun there. Suomenlinna is located just outside Helsinki in the Helsinki archipelago and is one of the largest fortresses in the world and was built by the Swedes to show of their dominance in the Baltic region.
As I was in Helsinki at the time when the Helsinki book fair was going on I naturally visited the fair. I have to say that I was amazed and surprised at the same time that about 97% of all books exhibited there were in Finnish and that almost all (except for a few Swedish stands) all stands were occupied by Finnish publishers and book retailers. Finns really do read a lot, and I mean a lot. Just imagine this: there are a little over 5 million Finns and I have never seen so many specialized topics magazines in any other country, in local language of course. If you speak the language you can enjoy the numerous science, design, lifestyle, sauna, hobbies, literary, politics, computer, music and magazines on many other topics. And it is likewise for books: one gets an impression that if something was written, it was probably translated into Finnish as well. And that is one more motivating factor for me wanting to learn the language.
As I have already mentioned, the beginning of November the second period begun at school, which mostly means that I have some new courses. And this time I have actually decided to take a couple of courses in Finnish as well. To say the least, these really are amusing: I can sit in a lecture room, pay attention to what the lecturer has to say, read the slides and most of the time I type gazillions of words into my dictionary. It’s hard as hell, but I don’t think any of you can actually imagine how much fun am I having in those classes (aside from the fact that I can just chuckle when everyone is wholeheartedly laughing at some joke … and I of course chuckle at the fact that most of the time I have no clue why they are laughing). And it is such classes that tickle my brain. Got carried away there and almost forgot to mention what these classes are about; they are the Introduction to Software Engineering (yep, rather basic, but let’s not make it too hard, shall we) and Man and Machine or HCI. I’ll definitely take more of these in next term as well and hopefully will be able to keep my sense of humor and understand at least a tad bit more.
All the other classes I’m taking are in English. Nordic Mythologies: now this one is really fun and I was really looking forward to it (and yes, it’s exactly what the name of the class says it is). Then I am taking the Aesthetics of Everyday. A rather theoretical course, but I enjoy it immensely nevertheless. We’re mostly discussing the works of Barthes, Benjamin, Crary, Maffesoli, Vattimo and Virilio. Then just this week I will be attending a Nordic Net Art conference also known as Live Herring. This period I’m also taking Scandinavian Film, Internet Research and Suomi Yksi classes. So, again my schedule is rather busy.
But the best of all so far this period was the Digital Culture brainstorming two day retreat at the Konnevesi biological research station some 60 km east of Jyväskylä. This research facility is part of the Jyväskylän Yliopisto. And it was pretty cool as we didn’t really have to worry about much more than brainstorming itself: they cooked the food for us, the sauna was there and the company was enjoyable. Hm, I just hope that they will be organizing more of these kinds of retreats. Oops, almost forgot to mention what we were brainstorming on: about the topics of our MA theses. I guess it was more or less useful, but I already know what I want to research and write about and thus didn’t really expect that I’ll hear some revolutionary ideas about my topic.
I guess I could go on and on about what I am up to since there’s so much exciting stuff going on here. Here’s what I’ll do (but I definitely cannot promise that), I’ll try to write more often and thus include more details as they occur. Which means that you have to come back for more as there’ll be more interesting stuff to read about soon.
Mladen
