the refugees made me do it

Fell in love today.

Have you ever seen anything more beautiful than this?

It says "Finland" in Arabic. A forest underneath a starry sky, yes? Or a city skyline, if you prefer.

I had promised myself, after forages into six foreign languages, that I wouldn't try to learn any more new ones (simply out of the fear that my brain will explode). But to everyone's bewilderment, a lot of Arabic is suddenly heard even in the icy streets of this backward Northern European town. I don't really know how to deal with this influx of strangers. Learning a few linguistic basics suddenly seems like a survival strategy.

So, headfirst into madness it is. A nine-hour intensive crash course into a language that wouldn't really be that difficult if not for a rule-loving teacher who refused to let us learn any useful phrases until we mastered the written letters (surely conceived in the brain of a lunatic).

I gave up after one hour or so and let the teacher fill the blackbord with pretty script. I would love to learn it but I had no time or brain capacity at the moment. I tuned back in when we finally got to the useful stuff, like saying hello and asking for food. At that point, the only real challenge was a few sounds that weren't made to be produced by stiff Finnish vocal cords. At the end of the course, a young refugee was assigned to endure my attempts at speaking a few phrases. As if he hadn't suffered enough by almost drowning on his desperate journey to Europe. He patiently listened, corrected and encouraged.

I went home elated. Tomorrow, 99 % of my newly acquired skills will be forgotten. But I have now in my possession the key to not just another language but an entire culture. I have opened a door, and through it I glimpse a marvellous world of Sufis, blue mosaic, dangerous men and hot desert winds.