Giedre tyttö Ozista

Open Houses and other Maladies

We've been enjoying our new life in the East quite a bit. Its been sunny and rainy sometimes, but almost always very quiet (except occassional maintenance works, i.e. cleaning the drain for 5 hours just outside our windows, cutting grass or noisy "teambuilding" activities..) Overall, our new home is a very liveable place.

Our neighbourhood looks slightly different from where we used to live, - these are HDB (government subsidised housing) apartment blocks, - more packed, but it feels more real - this is how most of Leijonakaupunkilaiset live and when you walk down the street, there's a certain kind of laziness and "summer" feel to everything. Very different from Orchard road (that used to be the nearest place for us to shop!), where you feel that you have to dress up and put make up on if you want to drop by to the shop and buy some milk.

Kaj tried to play tennis with Giuliano, we went swimming to the pool and otherwise we've been just sleeping and lazing around doing nothing on the weekends.. Being able to stay in our apartment on the weekend feels like a great luxury. Yesterday we arranged cleaners to come to our old apartment - I went there for maybe half an hour and I can't understand how we really put up with this deafening noise for so many months!!

Othewise the week has been extremely busy for me - year 1 students were organizing the Open House exhibition and somehow I ended up being in charge of everything..

Lots of panicky people, late night calls - "we have a BIG problem now!", "they're stealing our sofa!", "we shot over the budget, what to do?!?"..

At the end everything turned out great - it was a good exhibition and I think the students were really proud of what they did. There's quite a bit of work that was done - they designed their own logos and concept of "Refreshing the Media" with bright yellow lemons everywhere, stamps (temporary tatoo type of) on people's arms, designed and printed their own Tshirts (I wish I'd gone through similar type of education myself.. :)...

And of course, the blue screen demonstration in a ghost story - a head of a woman (no body) appearing on the screen, etc.

So I was quite proud of my students and I think they also had good fun.

And there was some "legal grafiti" done in our school. I think it is quite nice that they allowed it, because normally you could be caned for "vandalism", if you do it "creatively" and randomly in the street without getting a permission first.

Right after that I fell sick though, some kind of upset stomach thing that lasts for a few days already. I'm contemplating my first MC (sick leave) day tomorrow. Lets hope my fever lasts.. :)

And we have Natalia and Borzin visiting again - they're trying to get Indonesian visa, so that they could spend couple more months in Bali.. More pics and stories on that later. Now - diner time!