HB COLD

Well, here I am. I've finally got an opportunity to catch up. We left Joensuu on Friday and arrived in Helsinki an hour later - definitely my kind of flight, I was only able to read the in-flight mag before we were already landing. We went out to dinner in Helsinki at a restaurant called, VIA. Now, for lunch this place is really good and relatively affordable; but for dinner, this place is awful. If you aren't ready to order when they come to greet you, you will not be eating for many hours, and of course, we were not ready. The food finally came 2 hours later and they had got my order wrong. It was tasty, but after two hours waiting for the food and holding back from eating all the bread, they could have served me tuna from the can and it would have tasted like heaven.

We spent the night at Antero's place in Espoo, which is 30 minutes away from Helsinki and went back to town the next day for some shopping. We cut the shopping short because, first of all we are coming back to Helsinki and there will be plenty of sales and two, the place was an absolute madhouse. There is really only one main shopping area in Helsinki and everyone was there. It was worse than Macy's on 34th Street. Well, maybe not worse, but close.

We arrived in Turku later that Saturday night and had a relaxing evening. Sunday K and I went to our friends, Juha and Annakaisa's to have fondu. It began to snow when we left, at 6pm and continued and continued and continued. When we were waiting for a cab after leaving their place, 1:30 am or so, there was over a foot of snow on the ground and each step we took was a chore to lift our legs out of one foot of snow and to place it into another foot of powdery snow. It was hysterical. The cab was a little late and K and I cleared a circle in the snow where we could stand and wait for the cab to come. We felt so bad for the cabbie, having to drive in weather like this that we offered him to stay with us until the snow abated. He refused, thank god, and as we slept, another foot of snow came down on Turku. Which lead to Monday morning and a first for me.

The cars were completely covered in snow, as was the driveway, and since Anneli needed to get to work, the guys needed to get to work. Shovelling snow in the bitter cold is certainly good for a hangover, it is also pretty fun. All the old guys in the neighborhood were chatting with each other, talking about how this is nothing, and they remember when it would really snow. It took more than 4 hours to get the driveway ready and by the time we were finished, there was a wall of snow on the side of the street that was 5 feet high. The weather has remained pretty chilly, but it is supposed to warm up soon and rain, which is probably the worst thing that could happen, because all that snow will melt and flood the place.

We opening gifts tonight and will be going to the movies tomorrow night to see The Lord of the Rings. I'm very excited about this. A cool thing about movies in Finland is that you get to select your seat beforehand, so you can arrive when you want and there is no frantic search for the best seat in the house upon arrival - although there is some fun to that frenzy. We had to buy the tickets a week ago, so that we could have a good selection. Timo will be coming with us, which marks the 2nd time in 3 years that he will sit in a movie theatre. The first was for the first LOTR movie. I don't know what happened for the 2nd of the movies.

That's about it. I hope everyone has had and will have a wonderful holiday. I miss you.

hb

-4 (*9/5+32=25) degrees has never felt so warm. I broke a sweat on the way to work this morning. It was the first time in a few days when I was able to ride my bike to work. We have a simple rule, if it's colder than minus 10 (*9/5+32=14 degrees) we take the bus and let me tell you, it has been a lot colder than minus 10 these past few days and a ton of snow has been dumped on us. The snow is so fine and powdery, ski resorts would be extremely envious.

On Wednesday, when the snow was really coming down, I was taking the bus to the basketball game (still haven't lost while I been in attendance) and I missed the bus by like 10 seconds, because I was unable to run in the blizzard and since no one was at the stop, the bus kept going. The next bus wouldn't come for another 20 minutes, and so I waited and came to realize that the experts are right, no two snowflakes are alike.

Today is Friday and the last day of work and Joensuu for a while. This is just fine with me because the weather is about to make a change for the worse, or rather, for the winter. When we get back, it is going to be very messy, very very messy, very very very messy.

I don't know how often I will be able to keep updating the journal while we on break. I will try to do so, but I make no promises.

But before I go I would like to add that we received our first gift yesterday and it sure was tasty. Mom sent a package that contained some American delicacies, namely Doritos and peanut butter and let me say, damn. I love me some Doritos. I think I need to make a sandwich, on an onion roll (don't have em) with mayo (whose son are you?), mustard, turkey, muster cheese, lettuce and tomato and then stuff as many doritos into that puppy as possible.

I hope you all have a happy Hanukkah, a merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year. I miss you all.

Love,
hb

The past few days have been uneventful, and with a little break coming up, this suits me just fine. I am still trying to figure out how to post pictures to this journal, but this website is giving me some trouble. I've been thinking about trying to create my own webpage. It can't be that hard, can it? I just think that this reading experience, and the writing, would be more flavorful if there were some pictures to go along with it. I'll pick up a how-to for dummies over the break and start reading up on it.

Speaking of reading, I really need to get into gear with preparing for these lectures. February is creeping closer everyday and I still need to plan something. I have an idea in my head, but I need to flesh that idea out so that I can talk about it for at least 90 minutes, and with 7 more session after that, I need to be able to BS for 720 minutes. I know what you saying, that's a lot of minutes.

And now speaking of the break, it will be nice to get away from here for a little while. It will be nice see some good friends and family and to watch The Return of the King at a real movie theatre, maybe watch it twice. Joensuu has been better than I could have imagined, but it is still a small town in the middle of nowhere that has no restaurants to speak of - save an Indian food place that is decent, and by decent I mean pretty good, oh, and a pasta place for lunch that isn't too shabby - only has two movie screens - although they are building a multi-plex with 3 screens - and the grocery stores don't have peanut butter, applesauce or fresh spinach. And the salmon is so fresh it needs to be de-scaled before cooking and de-scalling a salmon is tedious and messy, but it sure does taste good.

When we get back, I am slightly frightened at how busy I will be. The boys and I will be playing basketball every Monday and Wednesday. I will be teaching on Saturdays and then once during the week come Mid-Feb. I have Finnish class on Wednesday's before b-ball and then I still have my job to work. I do think that this is a wise course of action to take because it should distract me from the snow dunes and wind freeze that is about to come. By the time my schedule eases up, I will be relaxing at the summer house waiting for the first batch of visitors.

Speaking of visitors, we are to have our first guests in January, for a couple of days. Kelly Grove's cousin Laura and her boyfriend Aron are making their way from Kiev to Joensuu, where Aron will lecture on sound for the polytechnic (which is the school that K works for and also the same entity which helps to support the Film Commission). I'm dying to see their faces when they arrive. It is sort of the same feeling I had when I was excited to see the faces of our guests from Finland when they came to NY and would take the A train from JFK to Park Slope. Is it wrong to get pleasure from someone else's shock? Who cares, I will anyway.

I'm going to bed now. Oh, I have to bitch about something. Sure the service they provide is necessary and the job they perform is thankless and tedious, but those bastards who clear the roads and make them ok to drive and bike on start doing their job at 4:30 in the morning. And the sound that the shovel makes as it scrapes the asphalt is like hearing someone scratch a chalkboard, except louder and at 4:30 in the freakin morning! In Brooklyn, if someone was doing anything that loud at 4:30 in the morning, people would be screaming and someone might even get hurt.

Speaking of getting hurt, remind me never to celebrate anything by shooting hundreds of bullets into the air. The fact that this is a common tradition held by regular members of society is absolutely insane. Unconfirmed reports from one town - I'm sorry I don't remember more details and I can't believe this doesn't get more news coverage - was that 8 people were killed and more than 80 injured from "celebratory gunfire". Has education slipped slow low in some parts of the world that people forget that what goes up must come down?

Hey honey, we're free, no one's going to come and hurt us anymore. Get my gun, will ya? I'm so happy I want everyone to know it. No, not the hand gun, the Kalishnikov. I'm really happy today. Sounds like the NRA has a highly effective global lobby.

Pikku Joulu = Little Christmas = Office Holiday Party = Where the hell am I?

I had that feeling a couple of times on Friday night at the Polytechnic Holiday Party? I think the first time it came into my head was when the choir was singing some Christmas songs and I did not recognize a single one. They were all traditional Finnish songs, hauntingly slow and of course in Finnish. I could barely keep my eyes open, until the medley I had been waiting for - well, not exactly. The songs were in English, but had nothing to do with Christmas. The medley started out with the "Imagine me and you, I do. I think about you day and night, it's only right" number and moved quickly into the all-time holiday favorite, "If you're going to San Francisco," and moved on quickly to the grand finale...the entire Doo Waa Diddy. I was trying as hard as I possibly could from not bursting out with laughter, fidgeting in my chair, looking around to see if anyone else thought this was remotely as funny as I did -- and since K was home with a bit of a bug, I was all alone.

As the night progressed, people began to loosen up and talk shop, which turned out to be a good thing for me, because it led to the idea of combining our potential film festival with the already famous rock festival that takes places in Joensuu every July - Sort of a North by North East rather than a South by South West. I think there are a lot of people excited about what we are trying to do. I want to keep things realistic and would like to get the festival started in July of 2005, so not this next one, but the one following. It should coincide nicely with the completion of a multiplex movie theatre (which means 3 theatres in one building). All things considered, a trip to Austin this March might become very necessary.

But I digress from the stories of the night at the Kimmeli Nightclub, where everyone and their mother goes to at the end of the night. Where to start? OK, my first humpa, which is the Finnish traditional dance music. The story goes that in the 30's, some Finns tried to start playing jazz, but all that came out was humpa. This woman interrupted me in mid-conversation to tell me that I was dancing with her now.

Fair enough and so we went onto the battlefield that is a dance floor. Now, I play basketball twice a week with some rather tough guys and elbows do fly in a game. This was all out elbow war and they know how to throw them. I could tell the experienced veterans from the rookies. The vets move where they want, when they want and with relative ease. The rooks, like me, are trying their damdest to get the hell out of the way and are relegated to the far corners of the dance floor, unless a veteran couple decides to be cruel and shoves, the rookies (read: me) into the mush pot middle of the melee. Two dances later and I ditched this woman.

I moved down to the calmer regions, where - get this - the younger people are. Played an hour's worth of roulette and broke even. I was up like 20 euros until my friend Harri Mikkonen told me to bet 32 and some other losers, all the time because, "It will hit. Yes it will." Well it didn't but since I didn't lose any money I could not hold it against Harri, that would come later.

Harri's son was going to pick us up and take us home whenever we made the call. It was getting close to 3 and Harri wanted to leave, which was just fine with me. I had been waiting around for a while, waiting for Harri to finish up on the dance floor. He finally did and we went upstairs to have a hotdog. This was the most unique hotdog I have ever had in my life. Pickles, dried onion, ketchup, hot sauce, mayo and mustard. I probably wouldn't like it right now, but last night it looked great. Which is obviously what another person thought.

After I took my first bite, this girl came up to me and told me that she wanted a bite. I looked at her as she stumbled to stand and I asked her if she was serious. She said she was. I checked her out to make sure she didn't look diseased and gave her a bite. While this was happening Harri was talking with some friends and told me that he needed to walk them home because they were too drunk to get home on their own. These are all men and women who are 45 years old and they were all tanked, Harri running in front of everyone. I was not about to join this party and so I got in the cab line, and there I waited for over an hour. Now I was a little upset with my too drunk and no longer anywhere to be seen friend, Harri.

The line for the cab was very long and rather uneventful, except for one stroke of pure comedy. A guy sauntered up to the cars parked directly in front of us and positioned himself to pee. His back was facing the line and he was going to pee over the small hill that the cars were parked in front of. The ground was so icey that when he unzipped his pants and readied himself, he lost balance and fell forward down the little hill. His feet were dangling above the curb, with his pants now draped over them. He got up a few seconds later, pissed and returned to the line. I guess I was the only one who saw him, because no one else burst out into laughter when I did.

Finally i got home at 4:45 in the morning and spent this whole day eating and relaxing and enjoying the few hours of sunshine that graced our day today.

And now I go to bed. Lots of love to Jen and Mark, your brother, how.

-9°C (*9/5 + 32 = 15°F) = ICE IN THE NOSE

But this isn't even close to being cold, or so they tell me. They also tell me something else and I wasn't prepared for this one. On my way out of the office today I spoke briefly with the co-planner at the Film Commission, Antti, who asked me if I was riding my bicycle home in this weather. I answered that I was and he gave me a bit of advice, "Be sure to protect the prostata. In the cold and against the metal, it can get infected."

Now, I had a hunch that he was talking about my prostate, but I wasn't sure until he put it into context. I told him thank you and that I had never heard that before while on my way out of the office. We shared a nodding of the head and then I left, a bit more puzzled than I had been just a few seconds before. I don't really know how to respond to prostate advice, especially from someone I don't know so well. I'm sure he's just being helpful, but still.

Today was a good day at work, we spent over an hour crafting the logo for the EFFC and I think we came up with something really cool. It'll make a great T-Shirt in addition to a pretty cool and black business card. I also had my first bit of it's-a-good-thing-we-have-an-American-on-board-otherwise-we-never-would-have-noticed-this-and-we-would-be-up-shit's-creek today when I corrected the spelling of commission. Everyone was a little shocked and a little embarrassed, while I kept going over it in my head to make sure that commission was indeed spelled with two m's, and it is.

Oooh, I almost forgot. There's another International Party going on tomorrow night. I wonder if my friends will be there.

hb having no ears, they fell off on the way home.

So I would like to wish my nephew Samuel a very happy birthday. I would also like to wish Tricia and Wes a lot of luck over this next year during which Samuel will finally be able to act his age, the terrible two. Not that he isn't terrible already, terribly cute and delicious and sometimes, just sometimes - especially for those of us who can leave when it happens - a little terror.

K and I really wish we could be there to give him way too many kisses and hugs and then perhaps, when he's asleep, to sneak off to Dos Charros and have enchiladas and salsa and a tall glass of iced-tea. Or maybe to the Blue Goose, or Chuy's, anywhere were they serve Mexican food without pineapples or blue cheese or canned guacomole.

Yesterday morning, with a little bit of a hangover, we spent hours upon hours listing off all the places we would love to be eating at instead of sitting in our house, with no breakfast restaurant for hundreds of kilometers.

By the way, this town is small, some 50,000 people, but on Friday night it seemed as if this was New York city. Every place that we tried to get into had a huge line, even the smaller pubs. Not that K or I wanted to go out to a bar. We had spent the night having drinks and watching Idols with some new friends - nice people all of them - who insisted that everyone always have a drink in their hand regardless of how many you had already had. This turned out to be a good thing - for a while - because it loosened up some of the new people that were only speaking Finnish in the beginning and wound up speaking wonderful English.

OK, I'm tired. I will stop now. I was trying to kill time in order to call to wish Samuel a happy birthday. Hopefully he will be up from his nap. Probably not, but I will try.
hb

I had my first lesson in teaching last night and that lesson is, prepare next time. I think that the preparation that I did consumed all of 30 minutes of the 3 hour class. The remaining 150 minutes were spent in feeble attempts to get the class talking.

"What's your favorite movie? Oh yeah, mmm... I didn't see that one, waiting for the DVD to come out with English subtitles." Followed quickly by the time consuming, "OK, what about television, what's your favorite night of TV? Oh, you don't really watch TV, OK, so does anyone have any questions that they would like to ask me?"

Yup, next time I think I will bring in a little bit more to work with. Not that it was entirely painful, the last hour or so was filled with decent conversation about the winter time and how pretty soon the whether will drop to minus 30 degrees and the snow on the ground will approach close to 4 feet. But, they tell me it's quite lovely.

One of the students in the class (adult students) is a reporter for the North Karelia newspaper and he wants to write a two page feature story on me and my work and ideas for the East Finland Film Commission. I will send copies to whoever wants one, but even I won't be able to read it.

The job is going quite well. I'm trying to create a formula to involve students from all over the area in our location scouting project. We need to create a photo library of possible film locations in the region, which is too large for us to do on our own, and since one of the goals of the commission is to educate the area, I think utilizing students as our photographic work force will be advantageous to all parties.

Gotta grab some lunch.

First day on the job here at the East Finland Film Commission (EFFC) and I have this to say, "Gambling is legal in Finland!" Last Friday night I went to a party that was sponsored by the studio here; we hung out a while at the studio, went to a bar and then on to a night club, where there were blackjack tables and roulette tables gallery. I could not believe it, a little Reno in my own town. Certainly not Atlantic City and a far cry from Vegas, unless a new casino opens up there called, "Not much to see here in this cold as shit place, but hey look, here's a blackjack table. Come one and all, losing money keeps you warm."

Well after several drinks and perusing this extraordinarily unique nightclub, a few hands of blackjack was a welcome diversion. I made a couple of friends, as always happens when a group of guys is sitting around a table throwing their money away. Some of the guys asked me what I do here and when I told them I am working to bring some films to the region, they laughed, bought me some beers and told me that I was lying. After explaining to them that I was not, they couldn't believe that this was in fact a job, let alone my job - this guy from New York in Northern Karelia is going to be bringing movies here? They worked at the lock making factory, ABLOY and told me how that is a real job. Of course it is, buddy, keep passing the beer and make your locks.

The nightclub was hysterical. Top floor was rather subdued with the older folks dancing the Finnish humpa - which is a cross between polka, tango and classic ball-room dancing. People were all dressed in evening wear, and looking as done up as possible. Whereas downstairs, the kids were partying to house music, dressed like crap and getting crazy.

One of the older folks that was with the group at the party, he did not go to the night club with us, was the Mayor of Joensuu. It turns out that we have befriended some rather influential people here in the city. The party we threw last week had 3 members of the city board in attendance, which shocked everyone including K and I. was just talking with this nice couple about nothing in particular and when they left, someone came up to me and said, "So, you have met the Mayor." I guess I did.

LIke I said, first day on the job. Fairly regular, except for the fact that my computer is in the Finnish language, so all the commands I try are accomplished through trial and error.

I have a meeting tomorrow with the director. I will be going over my new ideas and then I will try to convince her to send me to Texas in March for SXSW, to Santa Monica in April for a Locations Scouting convention, London in May for a Production Conference and later that month to Cannes for the festival. I will be lucky if I get 1 out of 4. I'm not going to ask for anything, I will simply plant the seed in her head and work it from there.

Ideas are coming fast and furious and if I can generate some excitement for them, I can use that as a means to get sent to these conventions and festivals.

Good news. I will be sending pictures this week, next week at the latest when I get some time here at the office and when I get a permanent computer, which should be quite soon.

Gotta run. 4pm and time to go home. How bout that? I will be home by 4:30 at the latest which is a far cry from the 7:30 timeframe I was so used to in NYC.