Home sweet home. I've been back for a couple of days now, but was too tired and lazy to update until now. I had a major case of jet lag, but I'm mostly over that by now.

My flight home was absolutely horrible, due to PMS pains, nausea, tiredness, uncomfortable plane seats, a screaming baby that sounded more like a cat being tortured, and me sitting between two guys who talked to each other through most of my flight from London to Helsinki while I tried to sleep. One of the guys was from Texas and the other one from Helsinki and they apparently discovered during the flight that they worked in the same field and that they both loved blues and played in underground bands. It might have been kind of interesting to listen to if I hadn't been feeling so awful at the time. I actually talked to the guy from Texas for a while before the other guy got there and he was really interested in knowing things about Finland. Can you believe that the first American to ask me what "thank you" and "hello" are in Finnish is someone I meet on my way back home? During the last nine months no one else asked me that. Anyway, I was so happy when I finally arrived in Helsinki where my mom was waiting for me. By the time we got home I had been awake for around 30 hours (I slept a bit on the plane but that wasn't proper rest) and I just crashed into bed.

I woke up pretty early the next morning, still feeling extremely tired but not really sleepy so I got up. This is basically what happened when I got downstairs and saw my mom:

Me: *in English* Man, I feel so disoriented!
My mom: *looks at me weird*
Me: ... I said that in English, didn't I?
My mom: You know, I wouldn't even have commented if I had understood what you said.
Me: But I don't remember what that is in Finnish!

In other words, I'm having some major trouble switching back to Finnish. I keep using small English words and phrases in the middle of conversation and I don't always even notice it. My Finnish grammar is odd at times and I keep making stupid mistakes. I also still easily slip back into using English if someone surprises me. The books I sent through the mail arrived two days ago, but since I wasn't expecting it so soon I was surprised to see the package delivered to our door and when I opened the door I said "Hello?" in English. I really need to start reading those books in Finnish soon...

Other than that, I haven't really experienced a reverse culture shock yet. Of course, I'm starting to pay attention to some small differences between Finland and America, but it hasn't really been anything that shocking. Maybe the cultural differences will hit me when I start classes again in September. We'll see.

It's annoying that I bought lots of new summer clothing in America, but lately it's been so cold in Finland that if I want to wear them, I also have to put on a warm jacket (which effectively hides my new clothes).

Oh, I also got a new phone and a new number. I would've sent some text messages around notifying people of it, but apparently my sim card hasn't been activated yet (that's what you get when you try to get a new number right before the Midsummer holiday, I suppose...) so I'm still waiting... I like my new phone though. It's at least a lot more modern than my old one that I had bought in 2002.

Has it really been almost a month since my last update? Whoops. I can only blame homework, some stupid PC games that managed to distract me for a while and those annoying I'll-just-do-it-tomorrow thoughts that kept pushing it back. But here I am.

So. One thing that happened was that the baseball game trip to Seattle got canceled. I was extremely disappointed. Since the university doesn't have its own baseball team this would have been my only chance to go watch some baseball (and Major league at that!), but no, they canceled it because of the threat of swine flu. And when I tried to sign up for a hiking trip up to Mount Baker to console myself, that was canceled too. All in all, I've pretty much lost all faith in WWU excursions. Three out of four I was interested in got canceled in the last five months or so. I'm kind of glad I didn't update my lj when I first heard about it, or you would've seen plenty of angry ranting.

Since the university obviously wasn't sending me to Seattle, I decided to go on my own. That was too days ago. I got a friend to come with me and at least I had a blast. When I visited Vancouver some months ago, the trip ended up being really boring since we had no plans what to do when we actually got there. This time (I was with a different friend) we had a list of four places we wanted to go and we ended up running out of time so that we only managed a really quick stop at the last place (Daiso, which sells cheap Japanese stuff). I showed my friend around the Pike Street Public Market and the Waterfront and then we headed to Uwajimaya, which a huge joined Japanese grocery store and book store.

We were in a hurry by that time so we skipped the grocery store (man, I would've liked to buy some Japanese food!) and spent like an hour at the book store (and I would've gladly spent another hour but we still wanted to make it to Daiso before our bus left). I bought the second book in a kanji learning series (the first one teaches the basic meanings of kanji, the second one how to read them in Japanese), a bunch of manga (English translations) and also one book and one manga in Japanese for practice purposes. I'm still really slow at reading Japanese so I didn't have the time to pick out a book on the basis of the story synopsis (it took a lot of time just to find the section of the store that had novels since all the section names were written in Japanese, half of them in kanji). I ended up buying a random book (はじめてのことがいっぱい) by Yoshimoto Banana, who is a popular, contemporary female author. I had heard before that she uses a lot of casual, everyday expressions in her writing and that's what I'm really looking forward to since the textbook we use in class was written in the seventies and mainly uses the kind of formal Japanese that you would only use if you're trying to impress your professor or something. You wouldn't use it when talking casually with Japanese friends. The book I bought also seems to have quite a lot of hiragana and a relatively low amount of kanji so it should be a good choice for my first proper reading experience in Japanese.

There's only three weeks left before I go home so I'm busily finishing my homework and packing up all my stuff at the same time. I've bought a lot of new stuff, but I should be able to fit everything I want to keep in my luggage (I'll buy a second suitcase soon) as long as I send a part of my books in the mail. I've also been lazy about looking for a new apartment in Tampere so I'll have to fill my application today. I tried sending an email to the Student Housing Foundation to see if I could move in with a friend, but apparently I'm a couple of months too late. Darn.

I know there have been a lot of small stuff going on in the last month that I meant to write about, but I can't remember most of it anymore. Hmm...

It's amazing how I've been able to adjust to the American study style. In Finland we're used to relatively small amounts of homework but we still complain about how much stuff we have to do. When I was younger I spent a lot of time on FFN.net and I always thought that the American writers, who usually mentioned their homework as the main reason why they couldn't update so often, in reality had about as much homework as I did. Boy, was I wrong. Compared to your average American high school or university student, a Finnish student has lots of free time. I only found out the true meaning of being busy when I came here, and I know people here who are taking much more difficult and time-consuming classes than I am. Recently I visited the website of a Finnish newspaper and by chance I saw an article titled something like this: "Every fifth high school girl in Finland says they can't keep up with classes". Honestly, every Finn should be required to spend a couple of months in an American school so that they could understand how easy they have it. And Japan is still a lot worse than America when it comes to the amount of schoolwork. I'm not trying to insult anybody with this, it's just subjective observation.

I remember how I used to be so stressed out about having to do one piece of homework every two days or so in Finland (no matter if the homework could be completed in half an hour or required six). When I first started taking classes here last September, I took the first two weeks pretty easy and when I was forced to realize that it wasn't nearly enough, I spent the next month trying desperately to catch up. A couple of weeks ago I realized one Wednesday morning that I had two days to learn 70 kanji, read the last 60 pages of a book which I also had to write a one page essay on, and do my regular Japanese homework which takes about an hour every day. Had this situation happened a year ago in Finland, I think I would've had a nervous breakdown or something. But now I wasn't even stressed out. I managed to do everything just fine and even managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of anime watching. If there's one thing I've learned this last year it's how to manage my time. I'm just hoping I don't fall back to my old lazy habits when I go back to Finland.

And that's all for today, folks.

( Trying to get a suntan? )

It's currently 6:00 am in the morning in Bellingham and I can't sleep. Jet lag's a bitch but fortunately I have a couple of days to sleep it off before classes start.

Before leaving Finland, I'd been telling people that for some reason the thought of leaving wasn't really making me feel nervous at all. Seems like all that nervousness was secretly piling up and it decided to hit me right before we arrived at Helsinki-Vantaa airport. My whole body was shaking and I was biting the insides of my cheeks (a normal sign on nervousness for me). Even my voice was shaking and I kept dropping my things. Most of my nervousness had to do with my worrying about whether I would find my way around the various airports and whether I would get through the customs in Seattle in time to catch my bus to Bellingham. Luckily I calmed down after I got seated on the plane and the flights didn't have any problems. I only saw London from above (was that big castle I saw the Buckingham palace?!) and was annoyed again that I didn't have a chance to go out and walk around. I settled for walking around Heathrow and bought something to eat. I was shocked to notice that although I've always loved British accents, most Brits working there had such strong accents that I could barely understand them. I nearly burst out giggling when one of the flight attendants on my plane came up to me when I was trying to find my seat and asked: "You all right there, my luv?". I was so taken back at suddenly being called "my luv" that I momentarily forgot all my English and just pointed at the seat number on my ticket. Luckily he understood. It's been pretty obvious these past two days that I haven't been speaking in English for months. My pronunciation sucks and I keep pausing to think all the time. It really annoys me.

Another moment of nervousness hit me after we had arrived in Seattle and I had to go through the customs. The guy at the customs gave me a really incredulous look when I told him that I'd come to America to study Japanese. Apparently I managed to convince him though as he let me through. I was really anxious about getting to my bus in time (I'd paid for it in advance) so it was really nerve-wracking to wait for my luggage to come through (I wish people would stop telling me horror stories about losing their luggage!). Everything went fine though, and I made it to my bus in time. The driver assumed from my name that I was German and addressed me in German. I probably gave him a rather weird look. I almost fell asleep on the bus (even though I was in Seattle, I wasn't sleepless at all *waits for people to laugh at her rather pathetic joke*). Seattle looked pretty in the dark, with all the lights on.

In the morning I was picked up from the Inn I was staying at by someone from the University and he drove me around campus (looks really pretty so far, as I expected) and then took me to check in. He dropped me off at my new flat and I was left alone to settle in. The flat looked rather comfy at first sight but I nearly started panicking when I saw my room. It had two really high, creaky bunk beds with vertical stairs. And I've always been really really scared of bunk beds. I gathered all my courage and climbed up one of them. Then I spent another ten minutes before I had enough courage to get down from there. I think I was almost ready to start crying at that point. Luckily, that was the moment when my one of my flatmates, Kailey, arrived and saved my day (I haven't met the other two yet). She's super nice and helped me take down one of the beds so that it's now a normal height. She then drove me with her car to the supermarket to buy a bunch of necessities (pillow, blanket, frying pan, plates, forks, internet cable, etc.). Thankfully things like that are cheaper in here than in Finland. I got everything for like 60 euros or something. After that I gathered my courage to go grocery shopping alone and that's when I got my first taste of a culture shock. As I already knew, there were no familiar products I could buy and even finding suitable equivalents proved to be rather hard. Even though I knew to expect it, it still hit me a lot harder than I had thought it would (or maybe I was just really really hungry and afraid that I'd die of hunger because I couldn't find anything familiar enough to eat). After more than an hour of circling around the store, I settled for some bread (as dark as I could find), cereal (a 20 meter long aisle of cereal products and I barely managed to find one that looked healthy. Most of the others had things like sugar, honey and chocolate added to them. No wonder americans are so fat) and some random meal that I could heat in the microwave (Kailey said I could borrow hers). After that I felt like I'd spent all my energy and went back to my flat (from now on referred to as "home") to sleep off my jet lag. Woke up at around 5:30.

Today is also a free day and then we have two orientation days starting tomorrow. I heard that there is another Finnish exchange student, from Helsinki, so maybe I'll get to meet him/her.

It'll be fun to read this first entry again in a few months, after I've gotten used to things. Hopefully I'll be able to laugh at my current self then. It's odd how just setting up an internet connection and finding someone local to talk to have managed to calm me down.

That's all from Bellingham for now.