Sorry I make you lush

I like seasons. One of the best things about living far away from the equator is is being able to spectate the yearly cycles of nature. I'm writing this since The Moment happened today. Today I first felt like that spring is beginning and taking over from winter.

I used to be a winter person, but that seems to have changed in the recent years. These days I look forward to staying up for ridiculously long in the midnight sun and watching the waves gently break against the rocky shoreline, or having spontaneous kick abouts with a couple of friends in the neighbourhood football pitch, or waking up incredibly energetic when the sunlight reaches your chin after being filtered through a bunch of birch branches and leaves in front of my window.

Even back in those days when I loved ice hockey and used to go out and play virtually every night during the winters, I liked spring. I wasn't sad to see winter go away. As much as I enjoy spring, I pay it some respect. While people often say that it is the time of happiness and hope and love and whatnot, I'm not entirely convinced. Surprisingly many of the people I've talked to seem to perceive spring as emotionally the most difficult season, just as I do. I don't really know why. Is there a similar effect as in the Christmas time? So many expectations about how great everything must be that it burns some people out?

Or is it just the fact that I know mostly Finns?

Anyway, that being said, my trek to the campus this morning was one of the best I've ever had. I barely got out of the door before realizing that this is the day. My personal spring. The sky was presenting all the bright blue shades in its disposal, the sunlight felt a lot warmer and personal than it has been during my stay in here so far and everything was sprinkled with dew. The combination of these did wonders to amplify the colourfulness of this country to even higher, previously unreached levels.

The red steel roofs looked blindingly bright and the greens were deeper than they've ever been. The metallic turquoise paint in a landmark jeep in Hallgrimskirkja parking lot was was shining like it actually was coated with the gems. The asphalt looked as if it was freshly laid, the oily glow shimmering on the surface. Light was being so playful with the moist surfaces that all the colours seemed ridiculously exaggerated, very reflective and slightly unreal.

The world was an oil painting and I was walking in it.

Chivalry is not dead!

Now when I'm starting to have some kind of a hang of the local language, I've begun discovering some words that mean something curious or funny in my own. I know this is the cheapest ever thing to write home about, and I know that pretty much every Finnish word means something like sweaty armpits in some language or another, but I can't not to, since I find some of these genuinely amusing and interesting. The fact that these two languages are from two completely different origin makes for some great mashups. And besides, I get an excuse to mention the term Cervantean English. So there.

First of all I need to refer to the title. There is one old and glorious profession that was thought to be extinct in the contemporary world, but it indeed lives on in Iceland, and is actually even more powerful than ever. This is ritari which translates to secretary. It just happens to be that it means knight in Finnish. So, I grew up with the show Ritari Ässä, literally "knight ace." And no, it was not about secretaries. It was about The Hoff.

Veski is a very common word in Iceland. In fact, pretty much everybody has one, as it is a wallet. In Finland most people need access to one every now and then, and failure to do so might be a source of major inconvenience. In Finland veski is a toilet. This has caused some excellent jokes among the Finn community. "I need to go to the wallet" has become a smash hit, and doesn't mean that they're paying for everybody. Sadly.

An often heard quick greeting, hæ, can also be traced to Finnish. It is pronounced "hai", which in addition to sounding exactly the same as the English greeting, means shark in Finnish. Very appropiate in a rotten shark eating nation, isn't it? This is also related to one of the most amusing inside jokes ever. That involves a couple dozen communications students, a sauna themed party with plenty of unforced singing, my oriental bathrobe, martial arts demonstrations and loud interjections. I will try to prevent further mental damage by refraining from going further though...

Hana is tap (as in water/beer tap) in Finnish, but in Icelandic it's the accusative form of hún, she. Kisa refers to cat in Icelandic, whereas for me it'd be a competition. The word láta, let or put is pronounced "lauta", which in Finnish is a plank. Peysa is one of the favourites for every Icelander, it's a sweater. When pronounced, it becomes the surname of a friend of mine, "peisa." I might start calling him "sweater" now.

I'm sure there's a whole lot more of words with similar character which just haven't entered my vocabulary yet, but I'm getting there. Meanwhile I keep myself entertained by thinking of the BAD MOTHER FUCKER toilet.

Remind me

Recent days have seen my cooking variety expand tremendously due to a couple of reasons. The first one was discovering a decent replacement for good old Koskenlaskija cheese. While these aren't quite as versatile in cooking due to slightly harder and hence not-as-easily-melting composition, they're good, very good. The other one was actually wandering into this Asian store I pass on almost daily basis. The window shows mostly oriental vases and different kinds of collectibles in all imaginable shapes, but it took me so long to actually go inside and discover all the grocery goodness. Thanks for the tip, E!

The weekend turned out to be fantastically refreshing, and helped to combat my lately slightly blue moods. A Swede from the Icelandic classes had invited me, friend N and an unclear number of other people to her birthday party on Friday. There we happily went, and it was probably the first time I've ever been in a room filled with archaeologists. While I deliberately formed the previous sentence to sound terribly exciting, well. Those archaeologists seem to drink quite like the rest of us. Maybe it's all the fresh air they get on the outdoor excavations. Nonetheless, the vibes were good and we got several good chuckles. Not least in expense of a couple late arrivals, one of which was a Finnish girl who had just graduated from high school. She claimed that she's able to recognize Finns everywhere yet it took her roughly 30 minutes to realize that I was speaking mostly Finnish with N. To be fair though, most of us can probably attest to the fact that there are times when perception just doesn't seem to kick in.

I've recently been pondering quite a lot about what will my Vaasa be like whenever I go back, since so much seems to have happened since I left. People seem to be moving away, moving together, leaving my old neighbourhood and doing whatever shenanigans they come up with when I'm not keeping an eye on them. Thus, it was incredibly delightful first to fall happily asleep after a great socializing Friday and wake up to a lazy Saturday morning and have the player instantly fire up Groove Armada's My Friend. Whenever I'm down / I call on you my friend / a helping hand you lend / in my time of need... It's a naive sounding little song, but there's also a lot of groove and fun. Another personal experience with the ultimate effect of music on us.

While I've never been good at making friends with everybody around me, that particular Groove Armada tune felt so completely fitting. I realized that while I'm probably regarded as the house oddity in our little community and haven't filled my phonebook with everyone's number, I've learned to know a couple of my kind of people.

Never stop learning, they say. It seems safe to assume that also applies to learning about yourself. This whole living over here thingy has proved to be excellent in that department.

There's been quite a lot of different movie experiences going on for me too. From watching the aforementioned and lovely Paris, je t'aime with Icelandic subtitles and understanding delightfully much of it to crashing lazily on the couch to witness penguin life and Emilie Simon's wonderful tunes in La Marche de l'empereur and yesterday's epic loudness and loud epicness of Frank Miller's 300. It's all good.

Plus, in the immediate vicinity we have this concert. And just a few days later in Ísafjörður there's Aldrei fór ég suður,which translates to I never went south. A rock festival named after an (apparently) popular Bubbi tune, with lots of Icelandic and a little international flavour as well, topped with a free entry. An excellent excuse to cram big masses of people into significantly smaller cars and enjoy some roadtrip awesomeness, West Fjords scenery and lots and lots of live music.

What's there not to love?

You're not the man now dog

There are times in everyone's life when change is inevitable.

There are decisions that may appear small, but later on you discover they took you into a completely different direction.

There are things that you do, even though you know beforehand that they will lead to another.

There is the kind of determinat... Geez, okay okay, I'll just stop rambling.

I became a goon.

No. I didn't accept a job offer for some shady security service representant neither did I plan to start being a football hooligan.

I registered a forum account to Something Awful.

At this point I know that one of the three readers goes "...", the second one is like "???" and the third says "uh, yeah, and?" Allow me to elaborate!

Something Awful is internet's premier community for things that:
- are geeky
- are angry
- are funny
- do not make sense
- most likely are a combination of most of the above

As the site describes itself: "Something Awful has been mocking itself and the internet since 1999, bringing you reviews of the worst movies, video games, and websites to ever exist. If it's something and it's awful, it's probably on Something Awful, where the internet makes you stupid."

So there you have it. If you don't find yourself terribly offended by all this information, you might be equipped with a suitable mindset for an awesome exploration in the world of nonsense. A few possibly good starting points might be either the Misspelled Movies II or Anagrammed Video Games Photoshop Phriday collections. Or the ubiquitous Your Band Sucks. I know I'm cheap, but I couldn't not laugh at the likes of Super Air Brooms or Gonad Farming. If you're adventurous enough, you might even wander to the forums. I take no responsibility for anything though.

On a completely different note, this has been one of the days which warrant the Icelandic saying "we don't get weather in here, we only get samples." I woke up rather early to perform some finishing touches for my Icelandic history presentation, which I somewhat successfully gave today. At that time it was raining. When I was ready to start wandering towards the campus, I looked out of the window and saw a relatively clear morning, and it looked to stay that way. After ten minutes of frantic printing I moved into another building at the campus, and it had started snowing. After a few hours of classes, it looked rather clear again, although there were some rather gloomy grey clouds visible in the west. Well, they were moving towards us, and in 15 minutes it was hailing.

Although technically I'm not sure if it really was hailing, since hailstones usually tend to be pretty hard and these were definately not icy. Maybe the guy responsible for atmospheric convection was some sort of a bored summer worker today. They might've not been all that concerned with quality, letting the to-be-hailstones drop off the upstreams and out of the clouds before they were properly formed. Yeah.

After grocery shopping for five or so minutes it was clear again. When I began to write the previous chapter, it was snowing again, and now when I finish this, it's clear again. I kid you not.

Just for the kick

Some things never change.

One of these is a shortage of books necessary for classes. My presentation for the history class is due on Wednesday, and neither of the essential books have been anywhere to be found. Oh well. At least there seemed to be a reading copy of the more important one, so I can write the thingy in the library. Possibly a couple of long working days ahead.

The country is celebrating a French Spring, entitled Pourquoi pas? My awesome (terrible) French skills (babelfish) tell me that it means why not? which is actually pretty clever. The concept is rather cool, since the thingy really is running for most of the spring. It began in late February and ends in the middle of May so they indeed do have grounds for dubbing it French Spring. The program reveals that there's a variety of things going on. As an aviation geek the first thing I had to do was checking out the Airbus exhibition, conveniently located at our campus. After reading the description, it was quite a let down, unless I didn't actually see everything. I certainly didn't come closer to gradually understand how a plane can fly in a simple and interactive way. What I saw was just a couple of posters, a few ads for Citroën, a few small scale models of the planes, a couple of films and a genuinely terrible flight simulator. O'well.

There's also a few interesting French films being shown at the university cinema. One of these is Paris, je t'aime which seems to be getting the most exposure. I'm definately going to see this one, even though it will be subtitled in Icelandic. Chances are that I won't understand anything about what's going on, but I'll give it a shot. At least it's not spoken Icelandic and written French.

I jumped the bandwagon and went see Little Miss Sunshine on Thursday. That one's easy to recommend, it's been a while since I watched something so genuinely funny. Also easily recommended is the new album from Air, which I picked up on said Thursday. One thing that makes me chuffed is that they are apparently playing in Iceland in July!

Sweeeeeeeeeeeet. I'm goin'.

I also had to neglect my dislike towards band/music/whatever shirts, since Amon Tobin put a couple out. This was an excellent display of postmanship, since the package was shipped to me from Canada just five days after I placed the order. I was prepared to wait at least three weeks. And, just how cool are these?

Motion detection

One of the small interesting details of how things work in Iceland is how lighting is in many places controlled with motion sensors. The first time I stumbled into a public restroom and had the lights automatically switch on for me left me a bit confused, making me wonder that "ok, so who's that watching now?"

The usage of these isn't only limited to toilets, since The Museum of Photography was also equipped with these. There was nobody in when I visited for the first time. It was quite a fascinating afternoon moment to enter the museum floor, lit only by the fading sunlight from the few windows. After a few eerie seconds of listening the soft purr of the ventilation system and looking into the dim but not dark museum the lighting kicked in. I felt a little sad, since the little filtered sunlight made the place look incredibly beautiful and atmospheric. Maybe the level of interaction with the automation will eventually reach a point where I can tell the lights to stay off if I'd like it better that way, but as of now, I didn't have that option.

After the initial befuddlement it became obvious that this is a smart way of conserving energy, and in the toilets the lack of a light switch is one step closer to the perfectly hygienic relief experience, for those concerned. Still, the urge to test how well these things actually work and how far can I sneak in undetected may become uncontrollable at some point. So should the unlikely happen and one of you readers ever bump into me in a Háskóli Íslands toilet or other applicable enviroment and find me crawling on the floor like I was stalking a prey, don't worry. I've probably neither dropped my contacts (as I don't use any) or finally went completely bonkers (hopefully). I'll just be observing the limitations of technology.