Friday, August 05, 2005
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.
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.
// posted by Howard @ 11:52 AM 
