on the eve of a long, long summer

Sat on the balcony, balancing a glass of cheap white wine on a wobbly old stool, and tried to plan. Looked at the clouds and got slightly inebriated. Thought about inviting someone to join me, but nobody suitable immediately came to mind. So I was alone, but not entirely lonely.

Rearranged the gauzy white curtains by the window and looked around the tiny flat. The furniture is old and ratty and I can't afford to renew any of it. I am alone and far from where I would really like to be. But I can look out at the sea and I feel so, so lucky to be here. Blessed, even.

Walked three blocks to the corner shop to get icecream. The evening sun was golden and the air was cold, much too cold for June. Walking felt good. I love the city streets in the evening and the comforting presence of strangers, other evening wanderers going who knows where, at the shop.

Came home, planted myself on the sofa and rented a film online. A slow, down-to-earth one that made me think and feel, while I ate icecream and drank pints of spiced tea.

Beauty is everywhere, all around me. I feel I should be old, frustrated, depressed, cynical. But how can I be, when life is drowning me in beauty?

the void beckons

I work so hard, these days.

I dive into endless texts and endless interviews in the morning (well, morning for me) and emerge with completed translations late in the evening when my brain finally shuts down. I have this previously unknown, desperate URGE to get the work done.

I don't recognise myself.

Of course, this is no great, new-found love for the job in itself. I just realised that I long to get it over with so I can get on with being unemployed.

unbought

Found in the Drafts folder on my blog dashboard this entry, in its entirety:

__________
* buy
__________


What might I have been thinking? Did I write it in my sleep? And why did I not post it? The plot thickens.

the croniz

The cronut has landed in this little Finnish town.

Although they call it a croniz. I tried one, purely as scientific research of course - somebody has to analyze the cultural and societal impact of American products introduced into foreign environments, after all.

The amount of sugar in it sent me on a high that will last until Christmas. So yes, I would definitely say there was an impact.

on minimalism, nostalgia and wet wipes

My mother is going through a cupboard with old stuff that nobody ever touches. I am a minimalist who loves, to the point of being obsessive about it, to get rid of stuff. My mother who has lived through some very rough times hardly ever gets rid of anything, ever. In case it comes in handy later.

Mother: "Here are some wet wipes. I'll hang on to them, might come in handy."
Me: "Mum! Those are 10 years old! They'll be all dried out by now, throw them away."
Mother: "Well, if you wet them a little bit, they will still work. I'll keep them."

Ten minutes later:

Mother (brings me a little ugly box that is falling apart at the seams, made out of Sixties' plastic-like material): "My father made me this. Should I keep it or throw it away?"
Me (nostalgia creeping into my hardened heart): "Keep it."

coloured pens and a prince

Ideas born in the quiet of a wilderness cottage,

           a.k.a. ideas that will look ridiculous in the light of day tomorrow:

* buy a deluxe set of felt-tip coloured pens
* drive for an hour to get to that particular treasure trove of a flea market, and not bring any of my friends who would love to go with me
* drift around town with eyes and heart wide open and for once really EXPECT to find the love of my life, for once really BELIEVE that there will be love ever after. And find him.

contrasts on a grand scale

In order to have  a Russian adventure,  you must:

* get on a bus in Finland, as a carefree student, with a girl called Annika who has golden curls and a fluent proficiency in Russian.
* for the next 544 kilometres, ignore the other passengers - mostly middle-aged men going to Russia for the cheap booze and starting to drink as soon as they find a seat in the bus, occasionally trying to chat up the two female students.
* find your hotel room, once you arrive exhausted in St. Petersburg, in a box-shaped, Soviet-era building with about a hundred miles of identical, depressing corridors. Gasp as you see the view over the river Neva.
* travel around the city on the metro, feeling completely useless among all those Cyrillic letters that you can't read. This is why you brought Annika (actually, it was Annika who brought you, but never mind). She can actually read the signs and buy the tickets at a much cheaper price that the other tourists do because she can pass as a Russian and get you places.
* get offered moonshine on the metro and feel sorry for a pet bear outside a museum.
* get exhausted and impressed as you wander through the literally endless Hermitage Museum. How can such a large and baffling place exist? Puts things in perspective, doesn't it, especially as you look at a Rembrandt painting that was once destroyed by someone grieving for a father banished to Siberia. The glory and riches of this place, paired with the tragedies of the past.
* endure while Annika the literature-lover browses Dom Knigi, House of Books, for hours (it doesn't help that you're a literature-lover too if you don't read Russian).
* go to the world-famous Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet, knowing absolutely nothing about ballet and not even recognizing the name of the equally world-famous work Giselle, and be suitably impressed by the glamour (and yes, the performance too).
* look up a night-club that is supposedly the place to be. Find yourself in a dark basement pub where men stare darkly at you. Leave in a hurry and realise you are lost in a very dark and slum-like neighbourhood where someone will surely slit your throat in a minute. Note that you must have exhausted more than your fair share of guardian angels when you finally make it back to civilisation alive.
* comfort yourself with some real Russian pelmeni dumplings and salyanka stew.
* gape at the size and scope of St. Petersburg - its endless (and sometimes eerily empty) avenues of palaces and golden domes, its stark contrasts between rich and poor, old and new, Czar-style and Soviet-style, and its people that are so rude and so fantastically friendly at the same time.
* return home with a ton of delicious chocolates and maybe a bootleg CD.

and for my leisure time: paragorames and elephant dung

Outside the library stood a serious-looking man, saying into his phone: "Paragorames, paragoremas. Paragorames, paragoremas. Paragorames, paragoremas."

Outside the shop stood white-bearded old Jarkko, smoking a strange cigarette. His face lit up when he saw me: "I just read a fascinating book. Did you know there's an animal that makes perfectly round pieces of excrement? And the elephant, let me tell you what he does when he goes to take a dump..."

I borrow a book by David Nicholls, buy honey and frozen bilberries, and go home to write a bizarre blog entry. Can you blame me?

all in a day's work: Tupac and urinals

Woken by very loud sparrows this morning.

Now I'm googling Tupac and U.S. grading systems for work. I insist on sitting on the balcony even though my back is killing me and the chirping of sparrows is drowned by an even louder lawnmower somewhere in the vicinity.

Because here I can ponder questions such as whether that nervous white-collar man going to visit my neighbour, the prison, is a lawyer? And if so, shouldn't he be wearing a tie? Is it better for your car if you drive slowly on uneven cobblestones, or really fast? What about those people over there, are they tourists? Do tourists even come to this city? Ooh, another lawyer! This one looks serious, walking with purpose. Where are all the dog-walkers today? Is a flagpole uncomfortable for a seagull to perch on? Should I have another coffee?

And in the interview I'm translating, a man is describing how he was baptized to Christ in prison, kneeling in front of a stainless steel urinal. The world is full of wonders.

bit like Hogsmeade

I found an old village in the midst of the modern city of Helsinki.

Narrow streets wind themselves between ancient wooden cottages, lovingly restored or left to decay most charmfully. A corner pub, tiny and packed with people, is spilling light and noise and atmosphere onto the street. 

Image from rakennustieto.fi

A blackbird is singing nearby. Someone is digging in his little patch of garden under the light evening sky. If you look past the cottages into the lovely garden with its twisted apple trees, you can see the stark contrast of graceful, steely construction cranes in the distance - involuntary pieces of art.

In the middle of this picturesque neighbourhood called Vallila, the ancient granite bedrock has pushed its way out of the ground and formed a steep, narrow hill. Climbing up there awkwardly in our city shoes, we find a couple and a small gang of teenagers perched on rocks and talking quietly. Someone is passing a bottle to his friends. We find a rock of our own and sit down.

Looking out over city rooftops in twilight times. It must be the best thing you can ever do with your life.

seclusion and pretty milk-froth

Tried another café in my never-ending quest for the perfect hang-out spot.

Actually, I have tried it before, more than once. It was even one of my favourite lunch places, back in the day when I still had money to eat out. But cafés are different outside the busy lunch hour. I needed an afternoon test-drive.

The place had potential. Atmospheric décor. An excellent latte with a pretty milk-froth flower. A small but excellent menu of both sweet and savoury. You can even get a glass of something stronger, which is not a given in Finnish cafés. Plenty of walls, so I can feel secluded.

And interesting people. The kind of place where hippie meets preppy.

Predictably, I came up with a new criteria for the perfect hang-out spot. One which was missing here: a view over a busy city street.

So that I can sip my coffee while I raise my eyebrows at interesting fashion choices, sigh over cute dogs and ogle handsome men.

old tea morning

Status report:

* Waking up on Monday morning after a weekend in the country.
* Flat being a mess, clouds being heavy.
* Vague anxiety squeezing the heart.
* Curling up on the sofa, gathering courage for the day.
* Breakfast seeming excessive, there is fortunately a mug of mint tea that I never drank last night.

So, cold and stale mint tea - surprisingly reviving. Life being good and scary, simultaneously.

That was my Monday morning today.

when I was a fake Russian

I'm approaching the door of the famous Mariinsky ballet house in St. Petersburg, Russia, trying not to sweat.

My friend, fluent in Russian, managed to pass herself off as a local when she bought our tickets, thus avoiding the substantial tourist surcharge. But we still have to make it past the ticket inspector at the door. We tried to dress as the Russian ladies: expensive-looking clothes, lots of make-up.

The heavy-built, frowning matrona at the door looks at our tickets, looks at us. The frown deepens. She lets out a stream of Russian and shoos us off. "She made us," my friend whispers. "She says we have to buy the tickets for non-Russians."

We decide to try another door and carefully choose a busier one, where a thick stream of people are rushing past a harassed-looking, younger inspector. Success! He barely glances at our tickets and not at all at our faces, just waves us through.

We know so woefully little about ballet, we really should be ashamed of ourselves. My friend tries to pronounce the title of it, printed in Cyrillic letters on our tickets: "Zhisel?" We don't know much more about it afterwards than before.

But at the Mariinsky Theatre, Giselle is fantastic even to the pathetically ignorant.