Where did all those weeks go? I spent over a month at home just lazying around and doing absolutely nothing. It was wonderful. I haven't had a proper summer vacation in four years so it was nice to be able to relax for once. Then again, I discovered that long vacations don't suit me. They make me lose all my motivation and then I start hating myself for being so damn lazy. Ugh.

I also discovered that I should never go back to my mom's place for more than a couple of days at a time. Being there drives me insane and makes me revert back to my old childish self. I need to have my own place in order to act more like an adult.

I just moved to my new apartment two days ago and I've finally finished unpacking my stuff. My apartment is bigger than my old one and has a separate kitchen, but on the other hand it's farther away from the university (9 km) and I have a roommate. The rent is low though, and the area is beautiful, so I'm not complaining. I was a bit worried about what kind of person my roommate would be, but my first impression of her is good (she just arrived a half an hour ago). It's funny how I never really talked to foreigners before my exchange year, but now I can't seem to escape internationality. You see, my roommate is an exchange student from Germany. I'm afraid my German has gotten extremely rusty... But luckily she speaks good English. And she also seems to be interested in learning Finnish (in a year...?).

So, I'm currently in the process of settling down to my new apartment and trying to figure out what courses I need to take next year since they went and changed my whole major while I was gone. Thanks a lot for that, by the way. I still haven't managed to read anything in Swedish and I'm supposed to take a Swedish speaking class. It's so going to kill me. Luckily my motivation for studying Japanese on my own is still going strong.

Not much has happened in the last seven or so weeks, other than me attending Animecon/Finncon 2009 in Helsinki. It was a lot of fun, but I was a little sad to see that since the whole anime/manga phenomenon is still so new to Finland, I'm one of the few older people interested in cosplaying and things like that. I'm not sure if I'm that interested in trying to mingle with a bunch of 15-year-olds. I hear there's supposed to be some sort of anime club at my university so maybe I'll check that out. Because the con was also a sci-fi/fantasy convention, we had some international guest speakers there, like George R.R. Martin. Everyone is always recommending his books to me, but I still haven't managed to try them. I still went to listen to his interview just in case I ever happen to become a fan.

I'll try to update more often from now on, now that I've finally gotten away from my mom's and I can stop being so horribly lazy. I already regret not updating during these last weeks since it's now hard to put into words what I felt some time ago. It's occasionally fun to read my own writings and see if I've changed any from back then.

Yay! Someone actually filmed the crazy dancing moments at Akicon! The first one was really amazing because more than half the people in the room actually started dancing the Caramel Dansen and it was so much fun. I was too shy and just sat in the audience taking crappy pictures of it (just look at the flashing lights! How could I possibly take good pictures?!)



This next one was taken the next day and because there were less people I actually had the courage to go up there and dance along. I happened to be standing right behind the big speaker so you can only see something pink moving behind it XD. And thus I'm saved from the embarrassement.



Sometimes I really love youtube.

What a crazy weekend. I just got back (about 10 PM) and had to quickly finish a crappy paper for tomorrow and now I'm dead tired. I'll write more about Akicon later since right now I'm about to pass out, so for the time being you can have a taste of my weekend by watching this little video that someone has already managed to upload on youtube:



Round robin story telling with voice actor Vic Mignogna (his roles include Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist, Tamaki Suou in Ouran and Kougaiji in Saiyuki, among others). It was pretty insane, but funny. You can get a fleeting glimpse of my pink shirt at 1:27. Most of the pictures I took turned out pretty crappy, but my Spanish buddy Jose took around 700 pictures so once I get a bunch from him I'll make another picture post.

I reeeeeeeally need some sleep now.

Weeks sure fly by fast in here. During summer I used to really hate Mondays because they marked the beginning of another stressfull week at work, but here Mondays don't feel any different from the other days of the week. I have lots an lots of homework (mainly reading, 12 books in all to read) so school work takes up as much time during the weekend as it does during the week. I managed to get an A for my second paper (more ancient Chinese philosophers) though it beats me how. There are two other short papers and a presentation coming up soon too.

I had my first two tests last Friday. The first one (the religion course that seems more like a philosophy class) I was sure would go badly, but in the end I was pretty happy with my answers and I think my essay was at least okay. The second test, however, was a total disaster. First of all, I hadn't properly prepared for the map question because I thought the teacher would give us a list of places which we would have to place on the map. Instead, she gave us a blank map and told us to name the marked places - not exactly easy when you have to remember names like Huangzhou, Tianjin, Chang'an and so on... Missed some easy points there. Another problem I had was the fact that there tend to be many different ways to romanize Chinese names, and the teacher's handouts used different forms than the textbook, which was my primary resource. So if there's Mencius (Meng Tzu), Mozi (Mo Tzu), Xunzi (Hsün Tzu)and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) among others, how on earth do you expect me to remember who is who when Xunzi and Zhuangzi sound the same to my ears? Had to leave a lot of empty places because I just couldn't be sure I knew who the question was about. The test also contained fill-in-the-blanks type of questions which were so vague that half the time I wasn't sure whether they were looking for a person, idea or something else. There were also some true or false sentences which at times used such difficult English terms that I couldn't understand the questions. All in all, it was one of the worst exams of my life. Once again I'm glad it doesn't matter all that much what kind of grade I get, and at least now I know what to expect in the next exam.

I spent the week before my exams sick so I only had two days to cram for them (obviously it wasn't enough). While I was sick I spent my time happily watching through all the seasons of Bones, which is the most brilliant TV series I've seen in years (Jose disagrees and says it's the second worst show he has ever seen... then again we've noticed that we have very different tastes in both movies - not counting our anime obsession - and food). I immediately downloaded a bunch of new Bones icons to show my life for Booth/Brennan *squee*.

Jose and I have made plans to go to an anime convention (aki-con) in a few weeks. I'm trying to get two of my Japanese friends to join us (it's funny that I know a lot more about anime and manga than they do) so that we can split the hotel bill between us (we've reserved a room for four). The convention is actually from Friday to Sunday, but we have the hotel room booked only for one night. The plan is to leave on Friday after classes, to stay awake through the first night (they're showing anime all night long) and to only sleep during the second night. It's going to be pretty crazy since I'm really bad at trying to stay awake for more than 20 hours, but in the worst case I can just take a nap in the anime room. Jose actually plans to stay awake for the whole three days if he has to (he's nuts!). I'm so taking my camera this time. I really want to cosplay, but I don't really have either time or resources for it. Halloween is also coming up and I don't have a costume for that either. If I could just manage to find pink overalls somewhere I could go to both events as Kyoko from Skip Beat (my favorite shoujo manga ever), but where on earth can you buy pink overalls? I'd also like to dress up as Sanzo from Saiyuki, but that will have to wait until I get back to Finland and have access to my mom's sewing machine (plus it would require a lot of planning and work).

What else... Well, aikido is proving to be really intense. The more I learn, the more intense it gets. In the beginning all new moves are taught to me in slow motion, but today I got to the point where I knew some of the simplest moves so well that my more experienced opponents could do them a lot faster with me so that it felt a lot more like a real fight (which it wasn't, but still). The problem with being up against more experienced adult males, however, is that they're freaking strong, and they no longer seem to feel the need to hold back their strength as much when they go against me. I'm surprised I don't have bruises on my wrists after all that squeezing and twisting. My bottom and thighs are really really sore though, from practicing my forward rolls, and I managed to scrape my elbow pretty bad on Tuesday. I also managed to get a cramp in my foot in the middle of practice and had to stop for a moment. The teacher said it usually takes around two months for the body to get used to the training, which means I still have another month of suffering ahead of me before it should get easier. Joy. I'm still determined to continue aikido for the rest of the year, but I'll very likely quit when I get back to Finland. A year (well okay, eight months) should be enough to teach me the basics and that's all I really need.

I hate the fact that my English doesn't seem to have improved at all during my time here. I still stammer and get stuck all the time and just can't find the right words. I was trying to explain lanttulaatikko to someone yesterday, but I ended up being completely lost for words and had to give up (the other Finnish girl pointed out to me today that I should've used the word "casserole" which I had completely managed to forget). It's just really frustrating. It's not really helping that I talk the most with the other exchange students who all have their own weird accents (a Dutch guy commented that I sound like I have a Scottish accent. How totally weird) and most of them speak less English than I do which forces me to use simple words when I talk to them. Luckily, I get to talk a lot with my roommate and there's also a girl in my Japanese class who I talk to a lot (she studies linguistics and is also interested in hearing about cultural differences). My roommate uses the words "totally" and "sweet" a lot, and I'm trying my best not to pick up the habit of using them...

By the way, do you remember me mentioning Mount Baker? The one I had a picture of? I just found out a couple of days ago that it's actually a dormant volcano that belongs to the Cascade Volcanic Arc. I'll quote Wikipedia for a bit:

"Some of the major cities along the length of the arc include Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and the population in the region exceeds 10,000,000. All could be potentially affected by volcanic activity and great subduction-zone earthquakes along the arc. Because the population of the Pacific Northwest is rapidly increasing, the Cascade volcanoes are some of the most dangerous, due to their past eruptive history, potential eruptions and because they are underlain by weak, hydrothermally altered volcanic rocks that are susceptible to failure. Many large, long-runout landslides originating on Cascade volcanoes have inundated valleys tens of kilometers from their sources, and some of the inundated areas now support large populations." Link to the article

And that's exactly where I currently am, between Seattle and Vancouver. Now it feels really weird that it doesn't really scare me even though I used to be scared to death of volcanoes when I was younger (I had a lot of nightmares...).

And that's all for today. Ja, mata ne.

If you walked around Tampere today, you probably saw a lot of strangely dressed people. Yep, they're all anime/jrock cosplayers dressed for the 2008 animecon. I've always wanted to go to an anime convention, but I don't know anyone who would be interested in going with me, and I always seem to find out that they're being held only after they're already over. But today I finally got to go to my first ever anime convention.

I only went with the intention of checking it out, but I immediately regretted that I wasn't prepared to spend the whole day there. There would have been so much to do there, but I only stuck around for a couple of hours because I had other things to do and all the merchandise looked way too tempting... I settled for buying two volumes of manga and two pins that say "Otaku; stay away" (in Finnish) and "Sex is good but anime lasts longer". There was also one that reminded me of a certain someone (I know you'll recognize yourself ;D) that said in Finnish "Otaku do it with tentacles". I nearly burst out laughing.

The whole place was filled with cosplayers. It was really fun trying to see how many of the characters I could recognize. I probably saw the whole cast of Naruto (times many, there were so many Akatsuki members that I lost count), many characters from Bleach, D.Gray-man, Inuyasha and Rurouni Kenshin, to mention just a few. I also saw characters from many series that I never thought were even popular in Finland (I didn't think anyone knew Meine Liebe!). For some reason I nearly burst out laughing when I walked by three cosplayers who were portraying Echizen, Kaidoh and Tezuka from Prince of Tennis (and they really looked the part too!). I know I've always been priding myself on the fact that I'm familiar with most of the popular animes, but today I saw a lot of costumes that I couldn't recognize. Shock. Well, I've finally seen proof that I'm not the most dedicated animanga fan in Finland. I'm definitely interested in trying cosplay myself, but first I'd have to figure out which of my many favorite characters I'd like to portray and I'd have to find someone to go with me, as I probably wouldn't dare to go alone. I've been talking on Facebook with one of the other future exchange students at WWU and he said he's interested in going if there's an anime convention close enough to Washington. I certainly hope there will be.

I stayed around for the first half of the cosplay competition (why did I have to leave my shiny new camera at home? Grr.) and a panel where Finnish manga translators discussed their work. Imagine my surprise when I recognized one of the translators there as a girl who has been sitting next to me in Japanese class for the past year! I've even talked to her every once in a while but she never mentioned that she actually translates manga! It was mentioned during the panel that she translates Oh! My goddess and NANA, to mention some. And I was even more shocked to learn that she (and one other translator there) has only studied Japanese by herself for around four years and she's never even been to Japan. Is that really how little it takes to get to translate manga? As a translator-in-training I'm a bit disappointed that the Finnish translators of manga don't have better training. They said their work is always proofread by this other translator (he's currently translating One Piece) who has spent most of his childhood in Japan. But still, I wonder about the quality... Well, at least it sounds like I also have a chance to become a manga translator after a few more years of study. I saw some other manga-translator wannabes there too so there is competition...

After leaving the convention, I did some clothes shopping for my uncle's wedding that's taking place next Saturday. I've been on a diet this whole summer and it's finally beginning to show. It felt awesome to go buy clothes when they actually look good on me! Most of my old clothes are getting too big for me and I'd like to buy a whole new wardrobe but alas, I have no money to spare. Then again, I heard that buying clothes should be a lot cheaper in the US... I did get my visa, by the way. Still 53 days to go.

Phew, maybe that's enough for today.