oulu update

i feel like lots of time has passed since my last blog... as follow up, the manhattan short film festival was really amazing! there were 12 shorts from around the world and strangely 2 of the shorts involved adoption and both were very creepy, and two others dealt with losing a parent as a child... one of my favorites was called new boy, which was about a little boy from africa who saw his own father get murdered by a militia and was flashing back to this memory on his first day of his new school in ireland. overall, the 2.5 hrs was well worth the 3€!

on sunday, i got to meet my kummi family! they are a young couple, maarit and jarkko... maarit works at a technical school as the media specialist and jarkko is a chef of some kind for a wholesale food shop.. they are in their 30's with no kids, and they are quite eccentric in their love for heavy metal and country music and jarkko's dream is to buy a harley davidson...they are not quite typical finns in that they are both rather outgoing and talkative, which is nice!

for our first meeting, they picked me up at the bus stop and took me to the sea here in oulu. the beach is really nice, but it was rather blustery and cold. we walked along the coast on different little islands and talked about lots of things. they both are really easy to talk to and are very enthusiastic to practice their english... then we went to their house and maarit's mom, merja, came over to meet me and we had some tee (you guessed it, tea) and leipa (a dry hard crackery piece of bread that has a lot of fiber and rye flour, very tasty with tee) she was also very excited to meet me and had to see on a map exactly where i was from. it was really a great day and we had good conversation about finnish and american culture, food, politics, history, ecology, military, music and i even learned a finnish swear word... it is nice to spend time in a real house and get a glimpse of how non-student finns live...tomorrow, i am going to maarit's sister, sari's house and we are going to cook a traditional finnish meal together!

last night was city rally (all incoming freshman at oulu do city rally) for exchange students, which consists of teams of exchange students tromping around the city looking for 5 different check points where we had to do different tasks for finnish student judges (who could be bribed) in order to learn all about finland. my team was my main group of 15 friends and we had a blast making fools of ourselves acting out charades (at one point i was one of santa's reindeer...santa lives in lapland), singing in finnish, dancing traditional finnish dances in the street, answering finnish trivia, and trying strange finnish food... overall, our team had the most team spirit and had a lot of fun even though we didn't win the challenge...

school is going well, too.. i am a bit stuck on one of my ideas for my design competition class...but i know i just need to spend more time drawing and sketching out ideas and something will click.

overall, i am feeling good and am finally over my cold! i have to get to some work now, but i would love to hear from more of you.. i will post some new pics soon. here is my address if you want to send me a note!

yliopistokatu 16 as 510
oulu, finland 90570

peace°

lia