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.

And so it comes to an end. After nine months in America, I’m finally going home.

It’s been a crazy week. I’ve been so busy studying for my finals and packing up and running around trying to tie up all the loose ends that I haven’t had the time to update recently. But school is over now and in 48 hours I’ll be back in Finland. I moved out of the dorms yesterday (after a great deal of panic and stress over who had whose room keys and going over deadlines, etc.) and I’m currently freeloading at my friend’s house, waiting for Sunday evening when I’ll be flying home from Seattle (arriving in Helsinki on Monday evening). I did some major last-minute clothes shopping on Thursday and bought a second suitcase for all the stuff I’ve bought during the last year. I think both of my suitcases will still be over the weight limit, but in that case I’ll just pay that extra 45 dollars for each. I already spent a bit over 100 dollars to send most of the books I want to keep through the mail.

I’m not really as sad about leaving America as I thought I would be. I like the friendly atmosphere, but it sometimes gets on my nerves when you can’t go to a bus or a grocery store without having to greet somebody. I’m also tired of the fast paced studying that leaves you almost no time to yourself, never mind to your friends, if you want to do your school work properly. I’m glad I got to experience it at least once, but I’m so ready to put it behind me. I’ll be leaving behind a great friend, but she has plans to move to Norway permanently some day so hopefully I won’t lose that connection. Most of the other people I interacted with were other exchange students who are also leaving Bellingham.

Hmm. Somehow I thought this whole leaving America thing would make me more emotional and thoughtful, but I’m honestly just drawing a blank. I’m not sad about leaving and I’m not gonna really miss most of the things in here either, even though I rather like Bellingham. Maybe I’ll start feeling more strange about this after I get back home and have a chance to think about it more. The last few days haven’t really left me a lot of time to actually ponder on my feelings.

Gosh, I’m so tired I can’t think straight (like usual). I just wanted to update my journal for the last time from America before this year ends, so I wrote down whatever came to mind. I’ll probably write more about my experiences after I get home, but for now this will have to do.

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? )

Within two days I've had two odd things happen to me. One of them I can somewhat explain, but not the other one. In any case, both made me momentarily feel like something very mysterious had happened. It was interesting.

Yesterday morning at eight o'clock I received a text message from a friend. That would have been nothing special in itself, but the message was really confusing, like we were in the middle of a conversation, and at the same time oddly familiar. I realized that it looked exactly like a text message I had received from the same friend back in December. Huh. How is it possible to get an old text message to your phone again after four months? I haven't talked to my friend since I got the message so I don't know if she knows anything about it.

Secondly, today I received a surprise present from a vending machine. I was trying to use a certain vending machine for the first time and I was unsure how to work it. I gave the machine a one dollar bill and I put some coins into a slot that looked like it was meant for coins. I could see however, that my coins were still stuck just within the hole and they had not properly gone into the machine. I didn't know what to do so I tried pressing the big black button. No, I did not get the drink I wanted. Instead, the machine decided to spit out a one dollar coin. It literally came flying out of the machine. I was extremely mystified, because until then I didn't think one dollar coins even existed. I consulted my trusty old friend Wikipedia and that explained things a bit (there are series of minted one dollar coins that can be used in certain vending machines and such). I still don't know how it came flying out of the machine though. I spent 1,50 dollars on a drink and got a 1 dollar coin back instead. Huh.

Speaking of coins, I've been collecting different kinds of quarter dollars for fun. For my Finnish friends who might not know, there's a series of quarter dollar coins in circulation that feature each of the 50 states. I currently have approximately 20 different states. It's kind of silly to collect them but I thought it would make a fun souvenir. I don't think I'll have time to complete my collection though.

It's finally getting warmer and I noticed that I had only brought one sleeveless shirt with me from home. So, today I went on a bit of a spending spree (140 dollars on 7 pieces of clothing) and bought myself a new summer wardrobe. Amazing how new clothes can make you so happy. Part of it is of course due to the fact that I have lost weight in recent years and that's why clothes are finally starting to look somewhat good on me.

I'm finally done with my mid-term from hell. I don't know how they expect me to write a well-composed essay in 25 minutes... Yeah right.

By the way, friends back home, anything particular you'd like as a souvenir?

A week sure flies by fast. I'm so busy with my homework (and I will continue to be until the very end) that I really don't have time to do much of anything else (okay, fine, I do manage to squeeze in about two hours of manga and anime every day). It's taken me two weeks to catch up on my reading since I missed a whole weekend thanks to Sakuracon. And I'm reading like 50-100 pages every day (plus writing the occasional essay and Japanese translation). Mid-terms next week. Ugh. Right now I'm really glad this is my last quarter here and I can look forward to a couple of months of freedom after this. Then again, I do have a long list of things I both want and need to do over the summer.

Because I was gone for one weekend and after that my mom has been out of the country for two weeks on a vacation, I haven't had the chance to speak any Finnish in three weeks. It's funny how the less I get to speak Finnish, the more my inner monologue reverts back to Finnish. It's like an addiction... 7 weeks, 7 weeks, 7 weeks! *chants*

I accidentally overheard a pretty strange fight earlier (they were talking right outside my window!) between who I assume were a gay guy and a straight guy (since I heard them mention both a girlfriend and a boyfriend). It was really confusing and I could only hear one side of the conversation, but I couldn't help listening in when they started shouting things like: "you have no right to talk to my boyfriend like that", "you are nobody to me", "I never want to speak to you again", etc. At the end the assumed-gay-guy was repeatedly shouting at the other: "Hit me! Hit me!". It was so weird.

And here's a little something that happened in my Japanese literature class:
(on discussing tall tales)
Italian professor: "Have you ever heard that saying that the bigger the lie the better it is? I don't know who said that, but it's true, don't you think?"
Student: "Actually, that's a quote from Hitler's Mein Kampf."
Italian professor: "What?! Really?!"
I found it kind of funny how he was exitedly talking about an idea that he agreed with and then he found out that he had just quoted Hitler of all people...

By the way, I was pretty miffed to find out that this last week the weather has been warmer in Finland than in here. Grr.

Once again, please excuse the randomness of this post.

Went to to the theater to see "17 again" without much expectations (we decided to see it on a whim), but I was pleasantly surprised. I'm no fan of the High School Musical films so it was nice to see Zac Efron redeem himself. The audience consisted mostly of high school girls, which in some other situation might have been extremely annoying, but since most of them were probably there to see Zac Efron, they were really into the movie and the mood in the room was amazing. I laughed at so many parts that I probably never would have laughed at had I been watching the movie by myself. It was nice to see I can still enjoy teen movies.

On the way back the bus driver was apparently trying to be funny and was doing some kind of a game show imitation. It was rather funny until one passenger (I assume he may have been drunk) started swearing at him in a rather scary tone. The bus driver reacted by threatening to throw said passenger out at the next bus stop. Thankfully the scary guy was quiet for the rest of the trip, but he was sitting right in front of us so we were too scared to say a word.

Oh yeah, I watched Twilight too. Why is it that I always like movies that everyone else hates? It didn't exactly become my new favorite movie or anything, but I didn't see anything that wrong with it. And I don't even like vampire stories.

I am a Finn in America taking a Japanese literature course taught by an Italian. Funny how life works sometimes.

A random funny thing of the day: a bunch of people were rowing a rubber boat in the campus fountain with one of them dressed up as a pirate. I think they were advertising a Pirates of the Caribbean movie night or something.

And now the real reason for this update: I am going to be insanely busy for a bit over a week and will not be updating again until after Sakuracon. Because I'll be gone for that whole weekend, I have to do all my homework beforehand and there happens to be quite a bit. In the Japanese literature course we have to do presentations and when we drew lotteries, I was unlucky enough to get the Monday right after Sakuracon as my presentation day. Which means I have to prepare for it now. I'm going to spend the whole day tomorrow on my Hakkai cosplay costume, but I'm afraid I might still not be able to finish it. Right about now it's really starting to annoy me that a small amount of sewing that would have taken an hour or two with a sewing machine takes me a couple of days by hand. And I don't have that much time...

Anyways, I'll be back in a bit over a week and then I'll post pictures :).

Where did my spring break go? Pretty much the only things I remember doing are my short trip to Vancouver and reading manga for the rest of the time... And I had such a big list of things I wanted to do during the break too. Darn.

Tomorrow begins my last quarter in America. I'm going home as soon as the quarter ends even though I've heard that many of the other exchange students are going to stay in the US for a while longer and travel around. I don't know why that possibility never even crossed my mind when I set the return date for my plane tickets, but after giving it some though, I don't think I regret missing that chance to travel. My recent trip to Vancouver showed me very clearly that I'm just not cut out to be a tourist. I lack the enthusiasm for it, and every big city just looks the same to me. I would have been a lot more interested in touring national parks and stuff. But yeah, I think I'm ready to go home sooner rather than later.

I got back from Vancouver on Friday, but didn't find the energy to talk about it before now. It wasn't a particularly pleasant trip, but worth doing regardless. Crossing the US border was as nerve-wrecking as the first time, but we got through the customs guy's questioning without any big mishaps (I'm damn glad my friend remembered the name of our hotel, because I sure didn't!). Vancouver itself wasn't all that pretty because the whole city was busily preparing for next years Winter Olympics and there was construction work everywhere. We also realized that we didn't have a plan what we wanted to do in Vancouver so we ended up pretty much just wandering around the city's downtown area and stopping by random shops. It was pretty annoying that Vancouver seems to have the exact same kind of souvenir shops on just about every street (with all the same products). My favorite finds were a Japanese grocery store and a Moomins book (didn't buy it, just liked seeing it in the book shop). I also discovered that if you go to an organic food store in Vancouver, the only liquorice you'll find there is made in Finland (they had both Panda and Halva too!). It was kinda weird walking around in Vancouver since it seemed like half the city's population is Asian. There was Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing everywhere and even some of the street signs (mostly in Chinatown though) had the street name both in English and in Chinese. So weird. My Indonesian friend took me to an Indonesian restaurant (which was playing Chinese music for some reason) and I thought the food was pretty good.

Here's one of my favorite moments during our trip:
Passerby: "Do you know where *** is?
My Indonesian friend: "No, we don't, sorry. We're from America."
Me: "..."
Depends on how you look at it, I suppose XD.

My friend didn't buy anything during the trip and it became clear to me very quickly that her main purpose in coming with me was that she was hoping to see Robert Pattison, who was supposed to be in town last week filming New Moon. Predictably, we didn't end up seeing him or anyone else famous for that matter. I was glad that she was with me though, since she didn't have any problems asking people for directions whereas I've always hated doing that. I took some random pictures, but they're honestly nothing special so I think I'll refrain from posting any this time. The weather was so bad during the trip that I didn't even get any good pictures of the surrounding mountains.

I bought my new course books today and it looks like I'm in for a busy two and a half months. I'm taking on a bigger workload than in the previous quarters so I'll probably be extra busy. I'm taking the kanji course again so that means another 450 kanji to learn. Besides that I'm taking another course in Japanese, East Asian history in Early-Modern/Modern era and Japanese literature in translation. I have 9 new books to read just for the last two courses.

Sakuracon is less than two weeks away now and my cosplay costumes are still in the works. Looks like I'll have to do some last-minute sewing again. My wigs arrived in the mail, but I still need to go buy some shoes and a white shirt... Busy, busy.

And that's all for today, folks.

Why is it that whenever I do have free time I don't feel like updating my lj, but when I'm up to my ears in homework I get the strange urge to write... *sigh* I finished my finals last Thursday (they went pretty much as expected) and right now I'm enjoying my spring break. It's hard to believe that soon I'll begin my last quarter here and right after that I'm going home. I'm both happy and kinda sad about that... But I do know that no matter how much I'm going to travel from now on, I probably can't ever leave Finland completely. It's where I feel most at home after all.

I didn't originally have any particular plans for spring break and I was just gonna take it easy at home, but it seems I'm going to make an overnight trip to Vancouver after all, yay! I've been wanting to go to Vancouver for ages, but either the timing was off or I couldn't find anyone to go with me. It's so ridiculously close (only 72 km!) that I would be insane not to go there when I have the chance. Luckily, an old aikido buddy of mine (an Indonesian girl) wanted to go too so we're heading over there for two days! And we might also make a day trip to Seattle next Monday before my classes begin. Oh yeah, did I mention I also signed up for another trip to Seattle (in May) which will include getting to watch a Major league baseball game? I can't wait!

As usual, for the past few days I've been working on my cosplay costumes and reading manga and watching anime and random Asian movies and dramas. I recommend watching "Fly Daddy Fly" (a Korean movie) if you ever feel like watching a good family centered story. A good example of how you miss great stuff if you just stick to watching Hollywood productions :).

It's sometimes pretty annoying that I can't seem to watch an anime without seeing potential yaoi pairings everywhere and innuendos in everything they do. Gah. I've just finished watching Initial D, a story about car racing (I have no idea why I love watching random sport anime...), and there were some things in it that I just couldn't help but see with my slasher's eyes. In what world does a guy challenge his rival to a contest by sending him a bouquet of red roses? And later on said rival keeps blushing when the other guy compliments his driving... Egads.

No matter how much anime and manga I watch and read, I always come back to those few that in my eyes stand far above the rest. Saiyuki keeps breaking my heart and Skip Beat keeps mending it. The latest Saiyuki Gaiden chapter made me cry (No! Konzen, don't die!!! I know you'll be reincarnated and all, but still don't diiiiiiieeeee!!! *sob*) and I've long since lost count of how many times I've reread Skip Beat...

Oh, yeah! And I finally figured out how to use Japanese letters on my computer. 私は、やっと、日本語で書けるようになりました。すごいでしょう。^_^

I sure seem to love rambling on about random things...

I've never believed that Friday 13th is any more unlucky than any other day of the year, but today I'm not so sure anymore... You know how you sometimes wake up in the morning with your neck so stiff that you can hardly move your head? Well that happened to me today. And it hurts so much I seriously just want to cry every time I manage to irritate my neck muscles by moving my head a tiny bit in the wrong direction. I dragged myself to my first class but had to stay home after that because the pain was accumulating. Right now I'm feeling all fuzzy because I took some painkillers (and it still hurts...). You wouldn't believe how many typos I've already had to correct in this post because my brain isn't working properly. I'm just glad that the pain usually only lasts a day so I should be healed tomorrow after a night's sleep.

I almost failed my last kanji quiz yesterday (you have to get 90% right) because I repeated the same tiny mistake five times. Lame...

Next week is finals week and then I finally get a week of blessed freedom before my last quarter here starts. Luckily, I managed to register for all the classes I wanted to take, so that's taken care of.

Gah, I really need to just stop typing before I start writing something completely incoherent because of the painkillers...