HB COLD

Back from an 8 day trip that felt like a month. I am so tired of living out of suitcases. I think it must add an additional day or two to any trip taken anywhere. Let me think back to when it all began. Just a few days ago really, in Helsinki where we attended a Finns love New York night, complete with even a few real live New Yorkers. It was a pretty boring time to be frank. Whenever conversation died and it died often, we would all resort to talking about how wonderful New York is and how much we all miss it. Which is fine, it is and I do, but when the conversation is forced, and it was, it takes away from the nostalgia of it all. Although one thing that made the whole event worth it (well maybe some of the event worth it) was the real cheesecake that they served and not the Finnish imitation.

The next day I made an early trip out to the airport and found my way to Glasgow, Scotland where I stayed in a hotel, just outside the city for almost the entire time. It rained a lot, they served horrible, really, really horrible food and we never left the hotel. It felt as if we were on a boat for several days. Until, finally we left the hotel to have dinner on a nearby boat.

Accommodations aside I gained a lot from the sessions and listening to other, more experienced people speak to one another. Finally, Markku, Piia and I decided to play hookey and take a wee tour of Glasgow. A Hop-on Hop-off tour that included a wee Scottish man who told the story of the town. I use the word wee here because everyone used wee in Scotland, everyone. "You just take a left in that wee alley and go a wee distance and it'll be a wee door on your left." The town was beautiful in a really old and dirty city kind of way. The stone buildings were gold, brown and mud colored and everything had a bit of moisture attached to it. That's because it rained all the time. So much so that the Scots don't bother carrying umbrellas with them, they just take it. Similar to Finns in that way. You live where you live, get used to it.

Finally after many nights of provided food some of us were able to escape and have a proper dinner. Indian food, that was out of this world and decently priced. Other than that it was haggis and haggis and more haggis, which is like eating a perverted attempt at chopped liver, and sometimes rolled into balls and fried. I think each chef cooks their own version of it and we seemed to have happened upon some of the worst chefs around.

The last day we went on a bus ride to visit Loch Lamond or some other sort of national park. Where we were for 30 minutes, even though it took 90 to get there. All that was there was a crappy view of a lake, a good view cost money, and an enormous shopping mall. Then we were off to Stirling Castle, which was wonderful. But since we spent so much time getting to the mall-park and then onto the castle, we could only stay there for an hour, which was a shame.

Side note, on the way to the castle we passed by herds of dairy cattle. When we arrived at the castle there was an ice-cream truck selling local ice cream. What great advertising, having the tourists see the milk on the way in. It hit the spot, considering we had been driving for hours and had only haggis to eat for lunch.

Finally the trip ended with a traditional Scottish party, where some of the guys were talked into wearing a kilt. I admit I had my reservations, but now I wish I had purchased one. They were really comfortable, with and without the underwear. I chose with, it was a rental after all. The only thing that was not comfortable was the little man-purse that hung down from the belt - see attached picture. With every step or dance it made sure my steps were not that quick or long. Speaking of the dancing, it was easily the most violent dance floor I have ever experienced and filled with sweaty men in skirts. No wonder the dancing is so violent, considering the tour bus was filled with facts of whose head was chopped off where and where was is put afterward.

Eventually we left Scotland and I found my way to Turku. The travel was about 12 hours in the making and Karoliina had one of my favorite meals waiting for me when I arrived. Soon afterwards I was asleep and ready for the next day's event. A wedding in a tiny little Finnish Swedish town, Skaftung. I had been at the bachelor party with the guys and was not looking forward to a repeat. Fortunately the guys behave much differently when their girlfriends and wives are with them. Still though, I snuck out at 2:30 to avoid any late night craziness.

And now, here I am in Joensuu, with only a day left before I make my first trip to Helsinki for school, and I still have to write my column for the Joensuu University newspaper. I guess I should be writing it now, but I believe I mentioned that I am a procrastinator.

And to top it all off, a night of Scottish celebration, complete with costume and awful food.

Within the castle, me and a couple of friends from Hungary and Korea. I'll let you figure out which was which.

View of the castle from down below. The city that leads up to Stirling Castle was wonderful. No new buildings at all. By the way, the homemade scotch from the area was delicious. I brought some home with me.

Forgot to get one of me until the very end.

We only had an hour at the castle and so I had to hurry it up.

The bus drive was horrible, but the destination was worth it.

And just like that, the summer is over. Today is cold and wet. High today will be in the 50's and it has been raining since last night. Yesterday was decent, high around 65 and partly sunny and I am afraid, yet certain that that is as good as it's gonna get, at least until we get to Texas in October.

Man this summer was short. And when I check out the Dallas weather it is still nearly 100. I don't know which one is better or worse, but I do know that I would like to be somewhere in between.

I've been putting off admitting this one, but the time has come to face facts, I am a bit of a procrastinator and I am about to get my comeuppance. It's been more than a year since my last Finnish lesson and beginning Oct. 5th I will begin again. The book "From Start to Finnish" has been sitting on my desk for a long time and it has been sitting quite idly. However, soon the book's time will come.

News from this weekend:

It rained, a lot. The kind of summer rain that comes down hard while the sun is still shining and it is darn near impossible to tell where it's coming from.

Also, the front tire on my bike gets flat every night. I have to take it to the shop is a few minutes, but I am waiting for it to stop raining, because I will then have to walk everywhere.

I am getting a hang of this jazzercise thing. Yesterday's Body Pump was not as bad as previous Pumps and for this I am extremely grateful. Or I should say today's post-Pump was not as bad as previous post-Pump days.

Tomorrow morning Karoliina and I will be meeting with Markku, the director. I think he is going to officially ask us to translate his new script. This is excellent news because it means that we will soon be able to buy a new computer.

On Friday, we will go to Helsinki and this will be the first time in many months that we will have done so via airplane. And this is a very, very good thing. That train ride is horrible. 5.5 hours at 85 degrees and we are well-done by the time we reach our destination.

I've posted a couple of pictures from this the last holiday of the summer. Getting back into the swing of things is a little hard and it's made that much harder by the fact that very soon, my normal routine will be anything but normal. In 10 days I will leave for Scotland and when I return I will be in full-time travel mode. Back and forth from Joensuu to Helsinki every week. Fortunately the weather will get a little cooler because right now those trains are damn hot. Usually around 80+ for 5.5 hours with no breaks and no AC.

I'm breaking everything up into little parts, because otherwise the fact that we will be living in Joensuu for another 4 months will increase the burn out factor. I can compare this feeling to that of a high-school senior who has already been accepted into a college and has very little else to do at school and therefore has a difficult time getting or staying motivated - otherwise known as senioritis.

Speaking of high school, if any of you all have hotmail or notice any other ad banners for a website called Classmates.com, keep an eye out for one of the banners that had none other than Julie Denton on it. At least I am 99.9% sure that it is her. Tricia has yet to confirm it, but I am pretty certain about it.

Our plans for Dallas are shaping up right now and it is conceivable that we will arrive in Dallas on the afternoon of Wed. Oct. 12, which is only a few hours before Yom Kippur, and we will stay until Sat. Oct. 22. This is a great deal shorter than I was first envisioning, but then I was accepted into school and I would not like to miss too much. And I will take what I can get when I can get it.

We got to spend a little time with friends and babies this trip. We saw Lilleri and Bjorn at the grocery store with both of their babies, Emil and Espen (Espen is our Finnish godson) and they were a handful.

Last trip to the summer house for 2005 and fortunately, we had some good weather. The water was warm and most of the mosquitos were dead - just the way I like 'em.

Been on vacation again and one thing I have noticed is that the Finns love heavy metal. I've been looking for some new music lately and in the record shops are literally dozens of rows of Iron Maiden. And this is in every record shop around. The first time I saw this I thought it was a one-off kind of deal, a sort of blowout sale of their entire Iron Maiden inventory, but then it continued and spread and now it is everywhere. Jethro Tull is also quite popular at the record shops, but nowhere near the status of Iron Maiden. Who'da thunk it? But isn't Iron Maiden really old? I can't think of a single one of their songs and this doesn't disappoint me in the slightest.

Other thoughts from vacation - the summer is on its way out. It was only 2 months ago when the weather started getting nice and now it is gone again. I don't really know what to say about this except that I am glad that we had a few weeks of really nice weather, which was a few weeks more than we had last summer.

I just returned from a Media event in a town in the middle of Finland called Jyväskylä - 10 bucks to whomever can pronounce that one correctly back home. I was there to present my Film Finland project. One-on-one when discussing the idea it proved very rewarding, but I was also to present the project to a group and so I created a power point slide show for the 5 minute show. I thought it smart to create the presentation in Finnish just in case people had a difficult time understanding me in English. Theoretically, this was a good idea, but in practice it proved to be a bit of an obstacle. Because for me, the presenter, I could not look at the big screen and speak about the words written, I had to look down onto the paper translation I created and this slowed things down considerably. It was silly really, considering I have been saying the same things over and over again for the past several months, but when on stage and with only a few minutes I was trying to stay in the right order. Oh well, better luck next time I suppose. And I guess it was a good thing that the strategy was written in Finnish, because I thing I wound up being rather hard to understand.

We will be back in Joensuu next week for 2 weeks and then the craziness begins. We have a party for New Yorkers on Sat. the 20th, the next morning at 8am I leave for Scotland, I return that Friday, and the next day we have a wedding somewhere in a Swedish town in West Finland, and then it's Sunday in Helsinki for my first day of school on Monday. It is simply going to be crazy here for a while.