Winter Holidays

It has been a long time again, since I wrote. The point now is not, that I am too occupied, the problem is that I am not occupied enough. Not enough happened to write about and somehow also there is a lack of motivation right now.

Anyways, some things happened since my last post.

I was on the Shrove Tuesday/Fastlaskiainen, which is a traditional student happening on the Tuesday before fasting period. Students come together in a park with a hill, which is pretty difficult here in Helsinki, because there are nearly no long or steep hills, and slide down the hill on self build sledges. It is great fun and there were the funniest sledges; the students were going down in a sauna, a pirate ship, on a sausage, a beer bottle, a dinner table and other things. This was all part of some kind of competition of the best sledge and the best sliding performance. Anyways, after that it was everybody's turn to go down the hill in and on whatever. There were students with plastic bobs, normal sledges and I even saw a pan and a wok going downhill pretty fast ;-)
Later that evening S. and I went to the ESN Quiz Night in Nolla, a bar here in Helsinki and nearly won a free cruise to Stockholm. The only thing, which was blocking our way to success was, that the others had more points than our team... but we nearly won ;-)

The rest of the week we spent having dinner at our place with other exchange students or at other exchange student places. On Thursday we went up five floors, where we were invited to a Greek dinner buffet party. One of the students, M., had prepared with the help of her visiting parents a humongous buffet with all specialties from "Hellas". We were eating feta cheese, drinking Ouzo and dancing Syrtaki. It was good to be around new people.

On Friday was my birthday and I got old!!!

Ok, well, I guess you wanna know what I did. Well, I was sleeping long, having pancake breakfast, made by A. and then went to the shops to buy stuff for the evening. Then A. and I were making Quarkbällchen and in the evening some people came over to my place and I was cooking dinner for them. It was a nice and quiet birthday, no fuzz about my person, exactly how I like it. I was with a few people, who really meant their good wishes and not with shit-loads people, who are just there, because there's an open bar! Here once again a big thank you to everybody who came.

Now I have winter holidays. I am off for one week and I am sitting around in A's flat in Turku. The weather is nice, even tho it was snowing a lot on the weekend. (These pictures show one hour of clouds, otherwise, there is just sun... nothing else!!!) I was using the time to finally put some of the batches onto my Halare, my Finnish student "uniform". Now I just have two left and actually it's great fun to sit down concentrate and sew.

Furthermore, my Swedish class is going on, I am learning a lot and can't wait until I really can talk in this language. I am pretty eager to finally participate in conversations of A's family and friends. I think it would be great to at least understand and speak some words in this, for me foreign, language, as this is my way to show respect before the people and the country I am in.

~M~