my own nation worries me

sometimes i worry for the standing of my home country
sometimes i wonder if it can make it in the world
sometimes i wish more were less emotional in their opinions
my greatest fear is overabundance of artificial dangerous fanatical patriotism

CCR rocks the house

i think lenka and trang have made their peace. which is good for all of us i must say.
we'll see, the building sauna is open saturday and they've both extended an invitation for me to accompany them. should be fun even though KOAS housing restricts international students to swimsuits as a rule of their saunas.... won't be the full experience but i'm sure i'll manage

as i'm sure anyone reading this has heard, there was a shooting at a college near tempre. wasn't here... though i've gotten quite a few calls
quite sad really but we live in a violent world.
i bet individuals can help make up for the tragidies institutions and other individuals inflict... just a thought

saturday partyday

i met up with my host family at about 13, we went out to their lot on the lake and did some work on their new sauna... (there are 6 million finns worldwide, 5.2 million in Finland and .5 million vacation homes/corteges/on the lake saunas) of course a picnic with tasty grilled peppers followed. quite a nice day. Pauliina drove me back to my flat. is quite lovely out there though. i got to taste some ligon berries straight from the forest floor.

later on Devan rang me up with an invitation to do what Devan does best, meet up with people and head to the bars in city center. i joined up and off we went barhopping. from the chic to the metal to the imitation pub we made the rounds. i kept well under my limit as i always do when i know i have to walk in excess of 4 kilometers home. Devan however, got wasted.

he was demanding food and whatnot around 1.30 so i offered o break from the group and walk with him home so that he didn't get hit by a car or anything. he lives in the same building as me so it works out fine.
that was by far the longest walk i have ever had, but quite an adventure in and of itself.
Devan is a sociable person to begin with and even more when he's drunk. we talked to maybe 20 Finns including a hippi/goth couple, EVERYONE in the line at the all night burger kiosk, a few trees on the uni campus, a guy on a bike he stopped to ask for a light, a fellow uni student from Helsinki and several others who avoided him.
Ellie and Margot (the Austrian girls) encountered us on their walk home and joined me in trying to divert his attentions from other people. at some point we stopped and moved aside for a bike to pass. lo and behold, it was the some of our party (namely Christan the cultured Swiss guy and the German girl whose name escapes me at the moment) who we had left at the bar long hence. eventually (at 3.30 am) we made it back to the flats.

a good night, got to meet new people and found a super nice pint glass and a silk scarf on side the road on the walk home....

i'm coming into my surroundings... getting the hang of this walking everywhere thing

Lenka is mad at Trang saying she didn't clean well enough as it was her week to clean according to Lenka's timetable. and even though she hasn't *been* here all week (she has a second appartment from the bug thing she raised hell about (which she says would be a national scandal int he Czech republic and wants housing to write her a formal letter of apology)) she expects us to live by her law. i get the idea behind it, trying to bring order to the situation but none of us had say in it. the only reason she asked me about it is because she didnt know the english for some words. she says i should be mad too since i have so much work on my hands now. quite frankly i don't care, her obsessive, controlling and racist remarks are starting to get under my skin.
would it be too much to ask for a peaceful living situation?
all in all a good weekend though.

dr. pepper (or lack thereof)

those of you who know me well know i have a slight addiction to the aforementioned tasty beverage
so i haven't seen any dr.pepper since i've been here
no biggie, i can deal with other forms of caffeinated goodness or (god forbid) none at all
but yesterday i found a 3 L bottle

devan (the american dude from WVU) and i were killing time downtown between classes, wandering around, popping in and out of shops and getting a mental map of the place down packed
off, off the city center, there was a hole in the wall asian/indian grocery store
both of us having a curiosity for such things popped in

there it was, written in chalk on the sandwhich board in the shop foyer
"DR. PEPPER 3,L 5,50EURO"

5,50 euro.... current exchange rate makes that like 8 bucks....

i wish i wasn't so cheap sometimes... but i'm glad i'm not that addicted

also! i have my bank card activated now... sweet sweet access to the little money i made this summer

i can go back to that lovely little grocer now and find some kick ass spices and whathaveyou

lenka and the bug

sounds like the name of a bad opera doesn't it?

so last week lenka found a single solitary bug.
she saved it in a ziploc and found me on campus to show me.
she had been getting little bumps for some time and thinks she found the culprit (though i think they might be from her detergent... since she won't shut up about how allergic she is to everything.. and the bug just came in on someone's clothing or the like)
she decided it was a bedbug... it looked kinda like one but i'm hardly and expert on the topic of small crawly critters.
so she started looking up bedbugs online, reading about them, backing myself and both other girls into corners to tell us all about them.
about how you couldn't see them during the daytime.
about how they could fly through vents.
about how there was never just one but always a colony.
we humored her, helped her search her room with a fine toothed comb for more and promised to look out.
none of us found any more.
none of us have been bitten.
(though she says we have and just can't tell because our skin isn't as senitive as hers)
but lenka insists there are more. we just can't see them. like wmds or the democratic/republican party's sense of self.

so she called housing, and got in a fight with them. she called the internaitonal office and got them involved.
since then she's been sleeping in the kitchen or in temporary housing, coming by daily to ask if the maintence men have come to inspect and going on and on about how this would never happen in the czech republic and finns just don't know how to live. i dont know if they have come or not.
still none of us has been bitten.

last night at about 2200, she came to everyone's room, knocking on everyone's door telling us we had to be out by 0900 the next day and couldnt return till 1600.
why?
because they are coming to fumigate the place.
yes... fumigate.
and we have to have all of our clothing and belongings out.
where? not her problem... put them on the balcony.
so i did... and sealed all my foodstuffs in the fridge.
didn't matter that i was busy sorting out some bank stuff (U.S. account got hacked, had to get new card lines up) nope, had to drop my life for her delusions of bugs.

what really gets me more than anything else, she put her mattress out there.
kinda defeats the point even if she had bedbugs....

all.over.one. little. bug.
nice as she seems to be, she is (pardon my french) batshit insane.

i have the overwhelming urge to get some very potent south lousiana mosquitos shipped in and seal them in her room.


on a much lighter note, i met my "friendship family" last night (awesome program the uni puts on for exchange kids... help them meet finns and experiance the true culture more) but i will detail that more when there aren't bugs afoot.

course selection

for sure i have:
survival finnish
intro to intercultural communication
intro to finnish history

hopefully i have:
game theory and applications
programming for mobile terminals
global information systems

we shall see though... the semesters are divided a little funny. courses start at different times. case in point, intercultural com and history dont start until the end of september. apparently the semester is divided into 2 periods. i'll roll with it. on the downside, most of the courses i really want to look into taking, although they are done with lectures in december, all have their exams in mid january.

when my visa will be expired.
and i will be in arkansas....
yay.

week one

I got lucky enough to get out of New Orleans before the airport closed. As did my luggage (somehow). That was quite surreal, waking up at 4 for a flight at 12. Then having heavy traffic on the way down Airline Highway. Surreal indeed.

so yea, i made it over here. Got into my flat, has that very 60s blockish feel. Everything from the ancient stove top right down to the mustard yellow curtains give it that ultra-student-housing vibe. but I really didn't expect less. I would post pictures but a) there isn't much to see and b) that would easily tick my over my 3000 MB quota for this period between now and this time tomorrow. bummer. Lucky enough, I have my own room.

my 3 flatmates are from Japan, Vietnam and the Czech Republic. The Japanese girl has a separate entrance to the landing and doesn't come out of her room much (thus I don't know her name). The other two seem nice enough though Leinka is very clean oriented and very pissed at the other two for not cleaning the kitchen which I have yet to use. I have a tendency to end up in roommate situations like this. meh.

first week was orentation. I think it went as well as a bunch of lectures can go. Except the first day during the coordinator of the international student exchange was giving his speill me running out of the huge lecture hall sick. Yea, smooth jetlag. After that most all was fine.

Signed the lease for this apartment, got my bank information set up, found myself a buspass, fixed my power convertor, settled in some and whatnot.

went shopping with on of the other american dudes i met. sure it wasn't as fun as this but i made it out for 15 euros which isn't too damn bad. the grocery stores make walmart look small. there's prisma (whose logo is the tri-force) and K market (the more k's in the name the better, thus kkk market is best)

now I get to try and figure out course registration... yay.