Giedre tyttö Ozista

Last night a herring saved my life

Today we don't feel very healthy - yesterday we cooked with an attempt to give Kaj's colleagues a sense of "a true Finnish party". I have a hunch that Kaj's colleagues don't do too good today as well... For the Finnish friends, I guess, I don't need to explain why.. :)

Of course, of course, you have to start with a shot of Finlandia on an empty stomach "to warm up". We're actually very proud of our friends here, because we found an empty bottle of Finlandia after the party and today we got to know that everyone survived. It must be the herring, pickled cucumbers and nakkileipa (dziovinta rugine duona) that helped, thanks to Ikea.. As I didn't try the raindeer stew and am still alive, no credit goes for the raindeer..

It was great fun, the sad thing is that Gary will be sent to Vietnam for half a year... They will have a company's opening party in Ho Chi Mingh next weekend. Kaj and everybody are going to Vietnam on Thursday and I will be joining him there on yet another weekend (we have a term break, but I can't take much of leave... :() We'll go to the beach where I can finally try out my body board!!! Can't wait for this holiday!!! I have been quite busy at work lately...

Otherwise things are pretty normal, the sales haven't ended yet, so Orchard road is a "no go" zone for us on the weekends (except yesterday, when we went to the Batman Begins movie.. I'm so easily impressed these days, that I really liked it.. :) People are funny here, they, for example, bring todlers to the movies and they start screaming "mommy, mommy" some 15min into the movie.. Besides the fact that kids don't like to sit in the darkness for 2 hours, this Batman is quite a gloomy, scary and loud movie, it can't be good for small kids. What are these parents thinking, I don't know... )

We have to be very creative to stay away from our home on Saturdays, yes yes.. because of the construction noise.. Sundays are a bliss... So peaceful...

There's more of army show off going on here. We had an "army day" in our school, so there were a few tanks, a few hunks and a bunch of comandos jumping from the 6th floor into the pool on their ropes.. Pretty entertaining. Some kids came from the kindergarden to play in the tanks, "so cute" my colleagues say.. :) The people in the photo on the right are not demonstrating (no no, no!), they're competing for some Samsung prize. At the time when I took this picture, they were 23min into this competition standing in the scorching sunlight... In Leijonakapunki you need a police permit if there's more than 5 people gathering outdoors (actually, I wonder if the same applies to tai ji classes, or if you have some kind of sales event or competition...hmmm...). In any case, you are not allowed to have banners and use megaphones. In relation to the IOC meeting here (about the Olympics), some London businessmen that are being forced to close their shops, because of the plans to build a stadium, wanted to come here to express their discontent and dissuade people to vote for London. However, they were warned that police will not hesitate to take them away if they try to demonstrate without a permit (ha ha.. ever wondered if they got a permit to demonstrate? :)

And this time everybody managed to fit in the picture... :)