New Year 2012

First of all please excuse me for this long break and let me explain… There are several reasons for this silence: first Robin came home from Finland and I didn’t want to sit in front of the computer at night but in stead enjoy his company after a long week of solitude. Then a wisdom tooth was surgically removed from my mouth and it led to more than a week of intense suffering. Honestly, I’ve never felt as horrible before, it felt like having a migraine in the left part of my head around the clock and I practically lived on painkillers (which I normally never touch). Now I’m finally feeling better, the stitches have been removed and I can even open my mouth to eat and brush my teeth! The forced soup and yoghurt diet is now over and I have to say it has been very effective if my goal would’ve been to lose extra weight… But so now it’s return to normal, enjoyable life again (although I’ve been to work every day never mind the pain – don’t ask me how I managed, I can hardly remember) and that means back to blogging! The below post was written  5th of January, I know it’s late to talk about New Year but I just have to because the night was so lovely and memorable…

And so another year ended and the new one was greeted with great weirdness and sparkling enthusiasm in Helsinki! During the day me and Robin hung out with Bella, whom I cruelly forced – after a cup of tea at a cute café called Fleuriste – to follow me shopping. I’d gotten these gift cards that were only valid in Finland so I absolutely had to spend the money on Saturday, a day before I had to leave. Bella was valiant and gave me excellent advice when I was choosing exciting things like a new pepper grinder – I chose the most expensive one, a Peugeot one. Then we had to separate, but in the safe knowledge of seeing each other later during the night. Me and Robin more or less ran home to change clothes and then proceeded to run and take the bus to Robin’s sister Tanja, where we had dinner with her family, Robin’s sister Helena and their parents. Very nice, a lot of interesting discussions on literature and philosophy, and nice port wine.

After that we had two parties to chose from – but didn’t end up going to either of them. What happened was very spontaneous: Bella texted that she and Jockum had decided to dispose of our Christmas present at midnight. Our Christmas present was two Chinese lanterns, a.k.a big paper hot air balloons that you light and then they sail away glowing a warm, yellow light. Unfortunately we got really late as Robin’s sister lives outside the city center and the bus was slow and the tram never arrived. So when the clock stroke 12 me and Robin stood on a tram station. But Bella, Jockum and their friends waited courageously on top of the Observatory Hill for our arrival. On the way there we met Samir, Sanna and Sanna’s brother who joined us. Up on the hill the lantern was instantaneously lit with two firemen who said they “just wanted to see how it works”. Then we stood and held the balloon straight, sang “Let It Be” and hoped it would take flight. It took what seemed like a little eternity, but then suddenly it started to lift, just a little and we let it go – it caught wind but in stead of sailing away smoothly it bounced away with us running after it to make sure it wouldn’t tumble, crash and burn. It bounced and bounced and then started lifting – not towards the sea but towards one of the houses nearby. We started shouting “Noooo” as if it would obey our orders, but just when it was about to crash in one of the windows it lifted and we – and a group of unknowns – just started cheering and jumping when it soared towards the night sky! It ended up really high in the air, visible to us tiny like a star, and then went out.

The lantern was a lovely experience, unexpectedly fun, and like Bella said: “For the New Year we lit up a new star in the sky!”

Then we were invited to a party at some girl’s place just around the corner. A nice apartment with a lot of new (albite exclusively Swedish speaking) people. One of the rooms had been turned into a club with a disco ball and a smoke machine. We spent most of the night on the dance floor taking ridiculous pictures most of which have been censored away from this post (have to keep it decent) and sometimes sitting a while in the living room talking with old friends and acquaintances. It was so nice that we completely lost track of time.

We finally left at 05:15 when the party was still going strong but I was getting tired. I don’t know when the party ended, but we walked home through the empty city meeting only random people here and there. It was a nice walk as it took us through my childhood neighbourhood which is honestly the only neighbourhood in Helsinki that still feels a bit like home…

A fantastic night!! Thanks to Robin, Samir, Bella and Jockum for making it all happen! You’re all very dear to me!

Have a great week everyone, I hope to be back soon (online I mean)!

2011 – A Year of Blogging

WordPress, the platform that hosts this blog, sent me a fun e-mail with statistics summarizing the past year on this blog! Here are some fun facts:

• The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 26 000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
• In 2011, there were 89 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 479 posts.
• The busiest day of the year was November 21st with 492 views. The most popular post that day was visbypart201.

The top referring sites in 2011 were:

• twitter.com
• fifingradu.blogspot.com
• koirahaudattuna.blogspot.com
• 36ohk6dgmcd1n-c.c.yom.mail.yahoo.net
• facebook.com

Some visitors came searching, mostly for bubuina, kosminen kotinurkka,www.bubuina.com, giorgio de chirico, ja valtteri kirpputori.

Most visitors came from Finland. Sweden & France were not far behind.

These were the 5 most active commenters:

• 1  Mini 83 comments
• 2 Bella 57 comments
• 3  Vilmis 19 comments
• 4  ida-slida 17 comments
• 5  hELMI 11 comments

These are the posts that got the most views in 2011:

• 1 Aquaboulevard & Oscar Night 6 comments maaliskuu 2011
• 2 Micro Korg 8 comments helmikuu 2011
• 3 Rodin ja muuta puuhastelua 7 comments helmikuu 2009
• 4 Helsinki päivä 4 8 comments tammikuu 2011
• 5 Published 14 comments marraskuu 2011

Thanks to everyone for reading!! And please do comment if you like or dislike something, I’d really appreciate knowing who you are!

Lots of hugs to everyone! Tomorrow I’ll be posting some crazy pics from our fantastic New Year’s Eve so stay tuned!!

 

X-mas in Helsinki

First of all I’d like to wish all of you a wonderful, surprising and adventurous New Year! I’ve been away for a week spending Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Helsinki with friends and family. We left the 23rd with Robin and travelled via Malmö and Copenhagen. At the airport in Helsinki both of our parents were waiting for us and there we separated: Robin left for the countryside while I went straight to the pulsating city of Helsinki (this is irony – Helsinki in the Christmas is very much dead). Christmas was great, calm, cozy and very traditional. We had some delicious food, watched movies (ranging from classics like “It’s a Woderful Life” which brakes my heart and the fills it with happiness and gratitude, to nostalgic craziness like “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!”) and just talked. Of course I also enjoyed the sauna (my favourite pastime, without a doubt), was overwhelmed by all the lovely present I got and played quiz several times and lost every single time. I also met some of my great friends, enjoyed the newly renovated shopping galleries and cafés of Helsinki and marvelled at how the city changes each time I visit. The poor, gray Helsinki of my childhood is definitely fading away and disappearing.

All in all, great times!

What follows now is some very christmasy pictures, I hope I don’t bore those of you who’ve already gladly moved on to the new year… There’s a lot of explications under the pictures again, so please click on them and then on “permalink” down to the right to see what I have to say – if you find that interesting.

Thanks to everyone in Helsinki, I love you!

Kluuvi

The Kiseleffin Gallery

Café Engel

Hope you all have a wonderful first week of the year!!

Christmas Festivities

So the weeks before Christmas float by, super fast every year… Yesterday there were some festivities at Hyper Island and the students could bring with them an avec – so I was there, acting as the DJs assistant as Robin was playing records almost all night. It was nice to sit before the audience and look at people chatting, it was mostly like a cocktail party, almost no-one was dancing (people are boring where ever you go, have to get used to it). The decorations were cute: on a screen behind us there was a huge projected fire that lit up the room and on one of the walls people could leave Christmas wishes. There were some classic ones like “Happiness” and “World peace”, but also some funnier ones like “iPad 3″ (3 underline) and my favourite “Peace on the Moon”. Larger quantities of alcohol were forbidden, so everyone just got this welcome drink that they claimed was champagne (it definitely wasn’t) and then you had to make do with “julmust” (sweet soda like Swedish Christmas drink) – except that one of my favourite Hyper Island people (not Robin) had brought with him and hidden under our chairs a bag of smuggled drinks, which of course were my doom. I had thought I’d go home around 10pm when Robin stopped playing, but I found myself first at John’s place and then at Playbar, discussing neuroscience and cosmology with Alex and Robin – having a lot of fun, too much fun to care about the following morning!

We got home way too late and today has been… difficult. I’m so tired my eyes are falling out, but luckily it’s a slow day at work so I’ll survive. Below are some pictures from the event, not many because I forgot my camera and then at some point I forgot all about pictures…

Have a nice week and promise to refuse all Christmas stress, it’s supposed to be fun!

Lucia

So last Tuesday all of Sweden celebrated Lucia-day. It’s quite a strange tradition if you haven’t grown up with it: each year the 13th of December a girl, often a blonde one, who can sing and at least appears to be kind, is selected in each city and also in schools, to become “Lucia” and wear a white gown, a red belt and carry live candles in her hair. Lucia is always accompanied my other maidens called “tärnor” that form a choir because Lucia’s most important task is to, with her maidens, sing songs in churches, schools and to the sick and the elderly and to thus, with her candles, light up the dark and bring some light to the darkest month of the year. The strangest thing is that Lucia is actually a Catholic Saint, St Lucia, who died the martyr death allegedly because she carried food to the persecuted Christians who were hiding in the catacombs underground. She wore candles in her hair so she could carry the food and still find her way in the under ground tunnels (no flashlights at that time). And of some reason this saint is the only one celebrated in Sweden and the Nordics, were the state religion is protestant and thus there shouldn’t be any celebration of saints…

Nevertheless it’s a nice and cozy tradition. We went first to the cathedral were Karlskrona’s Lucia was crowned and were she sang with a quite good male choir, and after that we got to witness a strange Karlskrona tradition: Lucia visited the swimming pool (same place where we always go to the sauna and the jacuzzi). It was very cute: children were sitting with candles around the pool and first there was a show with kids swimming with candles in the water. Then Lucia arrived with her maidens, sang a few songs and then the climax: Lucia stepped into a boat (a rubberboat covered with white sheets) accompanied by one guy dressed as Neptune (?) and another dressed as a sailor. Then they were pushed around the pool by some boys and people were taking pictures. Very sweet but very strange.

The rest of the week was busy, Robin got the flu and I was feeling super tired, probably got the same bug as Robin, but the weekend has once again been great. On Friday we hung out at one of Robin’s class mates but came home already around two o’clock. On Saturday we went out to town into the Christmas craze and ate lunch at our closest cafés with John, Emil and Kristoffer. Then we came home and were supposed to clean up and build our bookcase, but it so happened that I fell asleep and slept for two hours – and oops then it was too late and we went to the movies. Sherlock Holmes 2 was nice entertainment but I haven’t thought about it once since last night. Today Robin left to Stockholm early in the morning with his group from school, they’ll be presenting a project for Folkoperan (The People’s Opera – sounds so communiste!) and he won’t be back until tomorrow night. I’ve had my first day alone in Karlskrona and so far it’s been nice: I went to the sauna and the jacuzzi and spent a couple of hours there in total relaxation, then went to do some Christmas shopping and now I’m just chilling at home for the rest of the evening. I think I might go out to get a movie… but we’ll see about that!

Lucia in the church

Lucia at the pool

Our usual café

My lonesome evening

Have a nice week everyone!!