I saw two movies at the R&A movie festival last weekend: Pure (Swedish drama) and Arrietty, the latest Studio Ghibli movie. I enjoyed both movies and consequently both of them had good music, different but good. I think that kids are going to love Arrietty. The visual look reminded me of Howl's Moving Castle ( Read more... )

Åland Islands (Ahvenanmaa) was gorgeous. We went camping there last week (Monday through Thursday) with MM and Mary. Åland Islands is a big island or more like an archibelago southwest from Helsinki, between Finland and Sweden. The Åland Islands are pretty peculiar. They're autonomic and a demilitarized region due to historic reasons and the vast ( Read more... )

I'm so not going to bed before 10PM. But I certainly am tired enough. I slept for about three hours last night and six hours the night before that. Well, my exam week is now over and my Christmas vacation has started ( Read more... )

This morning I was daydreaming that I was daydreaming and listening to this song in the daydream:



Lange <3 ( Read more... )

*switches gears from Japanese to English* Writing my Japanese composition is sure taking ages. I worked on it for two hours last night, not counting the time that it took me to choose the subject, and today I've been working on it for about four hours. It's almost finished though. I just can't believe how little text I'm able to produce in Japanese ( Read more... )

I don't think that I'm going to get this Japanese composition done before class so I think that I'd rather sleep a little before leaving to said class. Hopefully sensei doesn't chew me out too bad, if I ask to return the composition later this day. I'm just too tired and it's making it difficult to juggle three different languages (Finnish -> ( Read more... )

I've had a high fever since Thursday, so for three days now. I also have a nasty cough, a runny nose, a sore throat and very little appetite. The fever rose really fast on Thursday. I went to lectures with a slightly sore throat and in the 2-3 hours that I was in Helsinki the fever rose. The trip home felt like it took ages. I was cold all over. By ( Read more... )

I watched the third season of Battlestar Galactica this weekend (and the webisodes that came before it). The third season didn't pack quite the bunch as the first two seasons did. There wasn't the same kind of desperate feeling to it, that is to not say that it wasn't good. But the season finaly was once again amazing. That alone is reason enough ( Read more... )

Have I mentioned Grooveshark before? That's where I've been getting my music fix lately. Today I found some interesting music sung in the Sami language by this Norwegian singer Mari Boine. The Sami people are to Finland a bit like what native Americans are to America. I've always been fascinated with the Sami culture and language (well actually it' ( Read more... )

My life does involve other things beside studying Japanese. I just write about it more than of other things so the picture that my blog paints is that all of my time goes to either studying Japanese of whining about how difficult and awful studying Japanese is. So today I'll write about the other things that I've been doing besides that thing, ( Read more... )