Honey?! I am off to the Oilboys!
Lieve allemaal,
It’s been a week since I returned to the strong arms of Mr J. So here’s an update of my adventures in Jyväskylä sofar.
Jeroen’s dad waved me off at the busstop at 2am. Of course I couldn’t sleep, all though Ray laMontagne almost had me there. We arrived at Bremen Airport at 4.30, I had mentally prepared myself to have to wait at least another 1.5hours before I could check in but I guess RyanAir was hungry for money so they had opened up check in already so they could empty our pockets ASAP. I don’t know what the dealio is with this particulair price-fighter but once you are in the plane the service is OK and the landings quite smooth but before I enter the frigging flyer I ALWAYS feel ripped off. This time one suitcase was 1kg overpacked and the other had 3kg left but was full… I still had to pay 20 EURO. But at least I didn’t get as ripped off as the guy behind me in line… he had to pay 35 to get his hand luguage checked in as cabin lugage because it was 200grams too heavy!
The flight was fine… not bumby and a beautiful sunrise above the clouds. When landing I got a little bit worried because I saw about one house in 20 minutes and a lot of frozen lakes with roads on them but no cars.
When I was done with a 20minute embrace with Jeroen upon arrival at Tampere he reassured me that there are people living in Finland.
Two bus rides, a train journey and some complaining about hefty suitcases later, we arrived at our little house in Roninmäentie, Jyväskylä. Now we have put our name tags up on the door and signed our rental agreements, we officially live together. (I can just hear Iertje thinking.. yeah but you kinda already did in Groningen =P).
The appartment is less tiny than I expected. It is not big but it is spacious enough for two people to not get annoyed by each other. We’ve got a bathroom, a kitchen, a balcony on which we will never catch a ray of sun and two bedrooms. We only use one, the other one we use as a living room. I don’t really know how anyone could have used this room as bedroom because there is a streetlight most conviently placed right in front of the window. The appartement is really well isolated, we’ve got things like triple glazed windows and two front doors with no space between them. We don’t have the heating on because it just gets too hot.
The surroundings are very beautiful, there is a (frozen) lake behind our building and lots and lots of trees. There is so much space between the houses here that you can hardly call it a neighbourhood. As you can imagine, it’s quite quiet over here. That only goes for outside the building though. Sofar we’ve heard our neighbour cry like a babyseal for one hour at 2am, someone moving their furniture about at 7am and a very angry Finnish bloke at 1AM. At least it’s not the fire alarm at crazy times like in Oslo. The funny thing is that I actually have never seen anyone in the building since I arrived.
I was a bit frightened by the weather conditions in Mid-Finland but sofar so good. Temperatures during the day lie between -3 and -10 at night they go down to a chilly -20 -25. So far the days have started with bright blue skies and blinding sun which make the snowcovered landscape look like winterwonderland. Today it has started snowing and Jeroen has announced with a big grin on his face that there will fall about 20cm of snow over the next days. Snow is definitely better then rain but I am a little bit jaelous of the 15degrees they have back home. I think that once the snow has gone it will be really gorgeous here and we can go on lots of walks, cycling trips or take a boat over one of the many lakes here.
What is most interesting about living in Finland is the language that is not like any other I have ever seen in my life. It has no relation with other European languages (except for Hungarian I believe) and there is no way you can make sense out of it if you don’t have any knowledge about it. In a way, this is a bit frustrating… I always made a point about understanding the very basics of a language so you can at least have a polite conversation at the check out of a supermarket. This time I haven’t got any further than Kiitos (thank you). On the other hand it has got it’s funny sides. Shopping for example is an extreme adventure because you just have no clue what exactely you are buying. You hope it’s chicken =D. Because Finland officially is Bilingual, some packaging has Swedish descriptions on them aswell as Finnish.. this often saves my life and calm my nerves. Last weekend we’ve spent about half an hour trying to translate the receipt to see what is what and how much it costs. And of course we (read: J ;-P) have already made some mistakes. J has washed with fabric softner for two weeks and we drank non-alcoholic pear cider.
They’ve also got funny names for things here that sometimes make me giggle; we drank a perry light (pear cider), there exist such a thing as the kkk supermarket, they’ve got a garage nearby that is called the Oilboys and a large bag of crips is a MegaPussi. I am so mature.. I know.
So in conclusion, life is pretty relaxed over here. We have survived one week of living together without arguing about who’s going to take the trash out or do the dishes and we still love each other to bits and pieces. What makes life even more pleasant is our one hour prive sauna a week. What can you do, you have to integrate.
So far so good!
Tot blogs!
Liefs,
Fonzy
ps. Keep the comments and messages coming. I am terribly late with replying to emails (I am soooo sorry Swisster!) but it is lovely to hear from you all!
