As you have noticed I have made a few changes to my blog. I gave it a facelift, moved it to its own domain and what you’ll notice as you read it here, the content will from now on be a bit different too. Yes, it was about time I change a few things. And changes are both welcome and necessary.

I have decided to expand the scope of my blogging. Hence the change of the name. So it won’t be only about life in Finland. True, that was not the only topic I wrote about on Suomessa blog either, but was more or less it. It’s not that life is not interesting in Finland anymore, or that my ideas are running dry, but rather I think it might be more enjoyable for me to write and for you to read about something else too. I hope you agree with me.

Come back, come often, spread the word. Hope you enjoy it.

Mladen

Have you ever heard about the two Suns effect? No? I’m not surprised. Neither have I, until last night. You can experience it while you stand right at the equator. I mean, right on the equatorial line; one foot on the northern hemisphere, the other on the southern hemisphere; right above the spot where the halves of the egg shell connect, not a millimeter further. You have to be really precise about this as when you move just a bit, both Suns disappear.

When you stand at that exact point, positioned precisely as I have instructed just now, look up towards the sky, right down the equatorial line and you’ll see the two Suns not far from each other: one floating above the southern hemisphere, while the other doing the same thing over the northern hemisphere. You don’t even have to look far away, or with the two eyes staring apart in different directions (which not many people are trained to do, anyway)–you’ll see both Suns right there in front of you, with both of your eyes. One eye, one Sun, the other eye, the other Sun. Does that sound familiar? I feel like I’ve just been there.

But, equator is far from me, really far … Too far, in fact. And so is that one Sun–not to mention how far you’ll have to go to reach the other one. Far. The equator actually is reachable rather easily. The Sun? Well, that’s a different story. You can see it, but you can’t really ever get there and experience it first hand. The equator is an agreed line. Tyhmä juttu. The Sun is all scientifically explained and real. Tosi juttu. Or is it? I guess it’s like going to the origin of the rainbow. Have you ever been there? I have, but then, surprise, the rainbow disappears. Does someone know if the same happens with the Sun when you actually get there? Could be. Let me know.

So, what about that other Sun? That one is just as hard to reach and it might just as well disappear when you get there too. I don’t know. All I know is that they are all a rainbow.

I’ve been writing on this spot for a bit over a year now. And it has been a very pleasant and sometimes even rewarding experience. It is especially rewarding when I’m reading about my own writing in digested and reinterpreted form, like for instance here and here. In one word: fun. But not fun enough, though. Why?

When starting this blog in August 2005 I opened it up and wrote my post with mixed feelings. I perceived it both as an experiment while I was at the same time also curious about the blogging experience since before I’ve only been reading other people’s blogs. And then again, I set a very ambitious goal for the blog: to keep in touch with friends on a regular basis and possibly to make some new acquaintances in the process. Ambitious.

Despite the fact that I’ve been reading quite a few blogs on a regular basis, I really saw the whole blogging phenomena as a new television: you sit and read (instead of watch), you’re entertained and when you’re done reading, you almost forget what the hell you were reading about. Of course, it was not always exactly like that, but quite often it was. You left with a smile on your face and many saw it as way of wasting time. How could it be different from the television?

And I never really put much thought into what makes those blogs interesting, at least what brings me time and again to those same places. I guess there were so many different things that amused me, which made it so much more difficult to put my finger on something more specific. Then I’ve opened my own vent and suddenly I was in the position of all those bloggers whose interesting writing I’ve been reading before. Although I have to admit that I never had any problems with finding the topic of my writing; there has always been plenty of stuff that I’ve had in my little head that I wanted to discuss in either a dialogue or a monologue (read: a blog). No, the problem lied somewhere else: what would people like reading about, or what would make people like me keep returning to that very same blog on a regular basis.

On this spot I’ve discussed many things from daily trivia, to politics shit, I’ve been writing my travelogues and talked about art shows and cultural peculiarities. I even posted several hundred pictures. And believe me, there’s a lot of stuff still in the pipeline. But before I return to the old rut of writing the blog my way and begin discussing some dull politics or how cultural this-or-that baloney, I’d like to hear from you, you who read this blog. Whether you’ve been reading it regularly or whether this is the first post you’ve read, it does not matter at all. I want to hear from you.

Drop me a line or two in the comments department (think of it as letters to the editor). Tell me: what you’ve found to be fun; what entertained you; what you’ve been missing; what I should write more about; what pissed you off; what made you happy; do you like reading long posts or are you a snippet type; do you love your grandma’s cooking or are your clients full of it. It doesn’t have to be blog or blogging related at all, but if it has something to do with me and you or you’d just like to tell me something, I want to hear from you. Knowing who my readers are will hopefully help me keep it fresh and fun to read in the future too.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Mladen

Sun is a rather peculiar object here in Finland. I’ve already mentioned this peculiarity in several of my posts, but even when I have it was more or less a side note. But now things have become different, radically different. In fact, different enough to make me write all this.

Finland is a northern country. It’s way up north. In fact, it’s so far up north that one third of the country’s land is located above the arctic circle. And people have still chosen to live there. Simply being there might not seem like anything, but I find it to be quite amazing. Why? Here’s why!

One of the things I’ve been thinking about before coming here was winter. Not so much because it can be devilishly cold, but primarily because it is dark like in the cave. The temperatures can be really cold, or not, but the darkness is guaranteed every year. And I’ve lived through winter without being bothered by the lack of sunlight that much. It sure is weird to wake up at 10 o’clock in the morning and outside it’s still practically night. The same goes for the noon when the sun is barely above the horizon casting long shadows like the evening sun usually does. And that’s what it is: by local standards it is evening. I could almost say that from late November until late January the four hours of sunshine make the daylight time look an eternal evening. It was peculiar, unusual, weird, but I found it to be quite OK.

Now, where I am it’s not even the middle of the country. Several hundred kilometers up north the situation is completely different. The sun there does not even rise above the horizon for full eight weeks. Which makes these places pitch black for quite a while. In this case no sun doesn’t make it just look like the weather is bad, but it really is dark all the time. I think that would be pretty tough to chew and swallow.

However, the situation right now is completely different. Currently there is plenty of daylight and sunlight. But just how much is plenty of sunlight? Today in Jyväskylä plenty is 18 hours and 48 minutes as the sun rose at 3:52 am and has set at 10:40 pm. Even though the sun officially sets for five hours, the sky remains light all night. Which renders this short night into an eternal twilight which lasts for a few months. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining, but this has stirred me more than the darkness in the wintertime has. It’s weird to go out for a run at 10:00 pm (which is a usual time for my runs) and the sun is still shining. One loses the sense of time and the need for sleep is skewed too.

So what’s it like in the north where the sun doesn’t rise in winter? I don’t really know, but the newspapers that publish daily information about sunrise and sunset in three different locations in the country now show only two places. While the Finnish Meteorological Institute politely explains: “Aurinko ei nouse eikä laske tänään.” or “The sun neither rises nor sets today.” Now how cool is that.

Enjoy while it shines!

Mladen

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

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