Home, sweet home!

Moi and hello from Helsinki!

Made it home safe, moved in my bags to my new sweet home, visited my old sweet home in Turku over the weekend and got myself a job. Pretty good for less than five days! I am happy to be home, but I don't think I've fully realized the whole extent of it yet, been too busy.

The road trip with D. was great! I think I saw pretty much everything there is to see in between L.A. and San Francisco. The sceneries from the movie Sideways looked even better in real life and the wine and food served in the movie tasted really good in reality as well, Hearst Castle was pretty impressive, the elephant seals were the worst smelling animals I have ever encountered and the state parks in California were just beautiful. I truly hope Schwarzenegger's plan of closing 80% of them won't happen! I also got to show my sister and her family the Bay Area and then they took me to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. As far as I could see from the helicopter through my half closed eyes, the Grand Canyon did seem pretty Grand indeed!


So that's it I guess. Thank you and moimoi! I hope to see my Berkeley friends here soon :)

-virve

It's never too late!

So I made it after all! Even if I was getting a bit worried a few weeks back, I finally managed to get to Lake Tahoe. It was beautiful!

On Wednesday afternoon me, J.R, Kelvin, Alex and his friend Thibaut who was visiting from France, got our car from our usual rental place, after only a few minor difficulties - like them having lost our reservation. Luckily they still had enough cars and we left for Tahoe only an hour late. J.R. had booked us a great room in a cabin on the beach in North Shore Lake Tahoe.


It was a great trip. Mostly we just relaxed: read New York Times by the fake fire on the beach, went to the hotel pool and ate super well. We did also go on a crazy hike up a skiing slope (or actually next to it, in the bush, with ten million sticks and fallen trees to climb over, crawl under or walk through). I also learned a new word on the trip as the boys spent some "quality time" in a jacuzzi with the local hustler, ie. cocaine/drug dealer. They didn't stay long though, since we were too busy with our own, wild holiday plans: grilling marshmallows (or s'mores) by the fire, going to bed before 11 pm. and busting the almost loud youngsters spending their evening on the hotel grounds without permission to the hotel security. Me and Kelvin were slightly rebellious too though, and kept throwing giant pine cones into the fire to get some real smoke and crackling noise instead of the gas fire the hotel provided.


Then on Friday, it was time to head back to Berkeley. It turned out to have been a great idea to go to Tahoe in the midlle of the week, since the traffic going that way on Friday afternoon looked terrible; our 3,5 hour drive there on Wednesday would probably have taken us almost twice as long in that Friday traffic. And, I also got a new campus to add to my collection: UC Davis. We had a little break on our way back and said a quick hi to Kelvin's friend Melissa, who studies in Davis and frequently visits the infamous Berkeley restaurant Cheeseboard, where we have spent many a good night with and without her. UC Davis seemed really nice and flat compared to Berkeley. It was super hot however! And true, it can get hot here in Berkeley as well, so I think I'd better go and try out the Berkeley pools today, before it's too late!

It feels strange to think that the year here is almost over. Today we had our last Finnish classes and Saturday is the exam day for our course. I also finished all my own courses today. In a leisurely fashion it all happened: a little potluck, a little chitchat, a few relieved laughters and that was it.

Preparing to leave a place is always a little awkward, at least for me. At the same time you're happy and sad, relieved and anxious, in a hurry to go home but still wanting to stay and see a bit more. And in the end, what do you have left of the experience? Mostly memories, and if you're lucky, a few good friends. Mostly memories though. Fortunately, it's usually the good ones that one remembers.

And what have I learned from all this? Or from any of my previous years and trips and travels abroad? I don't know. I know I've learned a lot and that I wouldn't be the same person if I hadn't done all this, but what have I learned is a really difficult question to answer. I've written a few job applications in the past week and I think that is part of the reason I've been thinking about these questions. One possible conclusion I've come to, is that the things I've learned are things that could be labeled and put under the headline "hidden knowledge". I always seem to think that the things I know are things that everyone knows, and therefore I don't recognize them as something that has been learned and acquired.

It was the same thing when I started my last job. I was so surprised that they chose me over the other applicants, because I thought all the other applicants must have known so much more. I had only studied and hung out with the exchange students and been an intern for three months. But after a few weeks on the job, I realized that I actually had so much knowledge of the systems and procedures; that someone coming from outside of the university would have had to learn all that from scratch. All the things I thought were common everyday knowledge turned out to be information that has to be learned. It was pretty cool to notice, that there are these hidden things everyone can discover in themselves, when the right moment arises. One just has to hope that that moment comes around again someday soon!

No hätä

It was actually from Helsingin Sanomat that I learned today, that California officials have declared an emergency in the state because of the swine flu outbreak. Well, the emergency isn't too severe here in the Bay Area, since no one else seems to know about this emergency declaration and I haven't seen any mention of it in any American media I've looked at. It seems, that the most important outcome of this "declaration" is that it makes it possible to get federal funding to help the state fight the flu. And with 13 people sick out of the 37 million total population, I am not too worried at the moment.

Most of the cases (5+5) in California have been found in Southern California, close to the Mexican border, in Imperial County and San Diego County. The closest county with 3 confirmed cases is Sacramento County. So life here in the East Bay continues as normal. We got a reminder from the dorm to wash our hands often and they put some hand disinfectant for us to use before going to the dining hall, but that's pretty much it. And hopefully our very nice Mexican cleaning man is healthy and will come back healthy from his two weeks vacation in Mexico. And hopefully the flu will pass soon, so my last six visitors for the spring won't have to change their travel plans!

Campuses

Stanford & Berkeley

I probably shouldn't have started my writing by putting the names of these two universities in the same heading, because it can be considered almost as blasphemy. The competition between the universities makes me think of ice hockey games between Finland and Sweden, even though I think the rivalry here might be more severe. Luckily I was warned on the day of "the Big Game", last semester, not to wear anything red, because the yells that a person wearing anything red got were pretty intimidating.


However, my year here started actually at Stanford. My orientation was organized by the Stanford Language Center and I got to spend five days at the Stanford campus with 40 other new comers. I had been told before, that the microclimates in the Bay Area can make a huge difference in the daily weather, so even if you're going to a place not that faraway, the weather can be really different. Conveniently I forgot that, when packing my few belongings in Berkeley before heading off on my first public transport adventure. By the time I got to Stanford, my light sweater and walking shoes were way too much for me to be wearing, because the nice Berkeley day of about 20 degrees Celsius and a little breeze had turned into (for me) a hot and dry desert heat of probably more than 30 degrees. So the first thing I had to do was to go and buy sandals. Unfortunately the only sandals they sold on campus were Stanford sandals, so ever since then I've been trying to hide them. I only use them as my shower sandals, because I can claim the "S" really stands for "shower", not Stanford!


I had a really good time in Stanford and got to meet lots of very nice people. Most of them unfortunately flew away again after those few days, to start working in different universities all over the continent. Stanford campus, however, was in many ways confusing for me. It was really easy to find places, because everything was very ... angular. The campus is very beautiful in its own, English private boarding school type of way, but I felt like I was missing my tie and white dress shirt the whole time. The buildings were gorgeous, the fraternity houses looked like mansions and everything was clean. Since the semester hadn't officially started yet there were hardly any students on campus, which added to the slightly surreal feeling I had there. I'm sure it would be amazing to study in a university that has obviously a lot of wealth and such good premises and equipment for (language) studies, but I was actually pretty happy to head back to my "hippier" campus in Berkeley, where I didn't feel as much out of place and like "the common folk".


The campus in Berkeley is also really beautiful, but in a very different way. Lots of the buildings have an ancient Greek or Rome feeling to them and everything is very lush and verdant, even in "winter". My house, I-house, is right next to the campus and surrounded by lots of fraternity and sorority houses, so especially during the first weeks there were quite a few parties going on at pretty much every house. Berkeley is very much a college town, and without a car it sometimes feels really difficult to come in contact with any "real life". I've heard lots of people use the term "Berkeley bubble" and I guess it's pretty true in both good and bad. The campus is great and the atmosphere is really liberal, so people can feel pretty free to be who they are. The first presidential add I saw for McCain and Palin was on my trip to South Dakota; in Berkeley I hadn't heard anyone (dare?) support him before. I've seen boy couples and girl couples walk hand in hand on campus, which I at least this far haven't seen back home and the multitude of people and of their family backgrounds are overwhelming sometimes. People hang out on campus a lot more then what I'm used to, and they're usually glued to their MacBooks with a course reader in one hand and a disposable coffee cup in the other.

This is day time however. Berkeley has it's own alternative history, which still reflects itself usually through the random street people and runaways who hang out on the (formerly) radical Telegraph Avenue and People's Park. The most activism I have personally witnessed this year, were the tree sitters, who stayed in the big oak trees in front of the stadium (and next to the I-house) for 21 months before finally climbing down in September. They had their own selected group of supporters, who were very active as well in trying to convince anyone passing by and being willing enough to listen of all sorts of things. Most of this type of Berkeley activists seem to be pretty harmless, but there is lots of crime here as well, mostly robbings, even if the number of crimes has diminished significantly since the 80's. The fact that Berkeley is situated between Richmond and Oakland, which have some of the highest crime rates in the country, can of course have an influence on Berkeley as well. Even the campus can be pretty unsafe, as I got to experience a couple of months ago, when me and a friend of mine were mugged on our way to the office. The campus police and the university, however, seem to be very well prepared for these problems and they offer all sorts of services for people on campus. They even have a special "escort service" for people who are working or studying late on campus called the Bear Walk. You can call the Bear Walk number and they'll send someone to walk home with you, or if it's after 2 at night there is a shuttle service. When I heard about the service in the beginning of the year it was such a strange thought that there would be a service like this, but I guess that now, after my own experiences on campus, it makes sense even to me.


Santa Cruz, Seattle and Columbia

I don't actually know that much about other campuses here, but I've seen a few during this year. They've all been different from each other, but at the same time they all share a feeling or a certain atmosphere, that for me make them feel American. Maybe it's the fact, that most of the campuses I've visited are pretty centralized and you need to have a car to get there. Whenever I visit a campus here, I can hear an announcer in my head saying "You have now entered a delimited campus area", and once you're inside those gates it's a different world and reality all together.


UC Santa Cruz campus we visited just really quickly. We had heard it's a huge area with mountain lions running wild! We didn't get to see any mountain lions, but entering the university grounds was like entering a Finnish summer camp site: random buildings in the middle of the forest and most of them so far away from each other that you had to take a bus in order to get from one class to another. But it was beautiful! And from the edge of the campus you got a beautiful view down to the Pacific Ocean, where I heard it's not too hard to get even with the public transportation. Luckily, we had a car so we drove down to the city and spent the rest of the day walking on the beach spotting dolphins and avoiding the ugly buildings of the boardwalk.


The campus in Seattle was also a bit outside downtown. The weather wasn't the best when I went there, but I got a really good and comprehensive guided tour by my private campus guide. Since Derek studied Finnish as well while he was in University of Washington, I got to see where I might have ended up if I didn't get to come to Berkeley. The building for Finnish Studies was in a really pretty area and the library next to it was just beautiful!


The Columbia Morningside campus I probably got to see the least, but that was from within! It was fun to see where and in what kind of premises Leevi was teaching. The part of the campus we visited was right off Broadway and in a very urban setting, so in that sense it had a different feel to it, than the other campuses I had visited. But all in all, for all the campuses, as well here as in France or elsewhere I've been, it's nice to notice that not everything is better elsewhere. Even with more money and more prestige in some other places, some things back home are still pretty good!

Places

As usual, time seems to fly. Lots of things have happened since I last wrote and now there's only six weeks left before the semester is over. There are so many places I thought I would've visited by now, but now I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever make it to Lake Tahoe or Yosemite! Well, thanks to my great friends who have offered me a place to stay (and driven me around), I have luckily been to quite a few places already and thanks to the many people who have visited me here in Berkeley, I have managed to get a pretty good idea about San Francisco and the Bay Area. And the wine country of course!

Wine Country
My first visit to the Wine Country was in late October/early November when Mari and Jarno were here on a visit and with them we got a pretty good taste of the Napa Valley offerings. Since then I have been back to the Wine Country numerous times (no surprise I guess), but instead of Napa Valley we've been to Sonoma Valley a lot more often.

The wine there has of course been great, but what I like even more is the scenery and the atmosphere. The feeling, when you're driving from one vineyard to another surrounded by the hills, usually in beautiful sunshine is just so relaxing. To sit down on some terrace with an amazing view and a glass of champagne in front of you at ten in the morning just gives me one of those "elämä on ihanaa" (life is wonderful) moments that some of my readers are probably familiar with already :)


And then of course the learning about wine side is also interesting. I would not call myself a wine freak let alone a connoisseur, but it is a rather inspiring feeling when you get a tour of the manufacturing process and lines by a very excited and knowing guide; I wish I was as excited about something! And believe me, modern technology is a great thing, because if we still had the yeast at the bottom of our champagne bottles when we bought it, I don't think it would be considered as such a luxury!

Cities
Even though I do love the nature here and all the "natural" places I've been to during these past eight months in the States, I must say that the big cities are quite amazing as well! Even if cities basically consist of big and tall buildings and plenty of shops and restaurants, they all still seem to have their own feeling and atmosphere, and are in someways very different from each other.

In addition to San Francisco, the first (for me) new "big city" I visited this year was Seattle. I went there for a long Thanksgiving weekend with Derek, who drove me around the city and its surroundings very patiently. I got to see the Fremont Troll and the "flying fish" at Pike Place Market among other things. It was kind of fun noticing that I'm not the only one having a hard time coming up with touristy things to do and show in a place where you live or have lived permanently. I guess everything just looks so familiar and sometimes uninteresting when you're the guide, but at least I really enjoyed my time in Seattle. Probably unsurprisingly, one of my favorite places, after all the coffee shops, was Richmond Beach where you get a beautiful view of the sound and the mountains. I must admit though that the Seattle skyline after dark is pretty amazing as well. Walking among the fancy (five) million dollar houses in Queen Anne, imagining my life in one of the 10-bedroom, 7-bathroom homes while looking at the Space Needle was a lot of fun, even if it may not be the most realistic outcome of my life with my future plans of an unemployed ex-student...


Before heading home for Christmas I also got to get a little glimpse of the life in D.C. Me and all the other Fulbright FLTA's (Foreign Language Teaching Assistants) gathered to Washington D.C. for a few days in December. Our program was full of different workshops and sessions and workshopsessions and all kinds of educational things. The FLTA staff had obviously put a lot of effort into the planning and we had lots of speakers with various backgrounds (eg. government officials, CNN reporters, rap professors, etc.) so all in all it was a "versatile" three days in D.C.

Since our program was super busy and I didn't know any locals I can't say I would've got to know D.C. that well at all. My very superficial impressions are of a bureaucratic administrational city with lots of symbolic landmarks, but not that much "real life". This is of course because I didn't really have time to see anything else but the Lincoln Memorial and the White House, still inhabited by G. W. Bush. After the first two rainy workshop days we were however lucky enough to have sunshine on our only afternoon off, so me and Leevi tried to make the most of it and walk all over downtown before sunset. I did like the city, but somehow I left with no special impression of the place. I know the city is filled with controversies ("the chocolate city with a marshmallow center and a graham cracker crust of corruption" as Stephen Colbert once put it), but I guess as a three day tourist with no local friends to tell you stories, it's too short a time to get to know a place.



After Christmas however, I got to visit New York with an almost local friend. One of the other Finnish FLTA's, Leevi (already mentioned above), who is also from Turku, is performing her TA duties at Columbia University in New York City. The same day I arrived there was a little bit of "excitement in the air", because another plane had to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River, but luckily I didn't hear about this until I was already in the subway trying to find my way to Leevi's place.


My preconceptions of New York were mostly reinforced, but some things were different from what I had expected. First and foremost probably, that I didn't really get to meet any of the unfriendly and tourist hostile locals that I had so often heard about. I did overhear a couple of table conversations about how annoying the non-locals are, but for the most part I found people very friendly. Before I even got to Leevi's place from the airport at least three people offered me their help and asked if I needed help finding my way (and not in the mean "I'm going to lure this naïve tourist around the corner and take all her stuff" kind of way). Maybe I just looked so lost and pathetic with my back bags and silly beanie, that people felt sorry for me.


It was a very fun, eventful and COLD visit in every way. I got to see a play on Broadway after having queued for more than an hour in about -14 celsius. I don't know if I've ever been as frozen in my life! Well, at least I got to see Daniel Radcliffe in all his natural beauty in Equs, which was actually a really interesting play, even if I was a bit too jet-lagged to fully appreciate it. We also went to an absolutely amazing Gospel Service in Harlem, visited Ellis Island (definitely worth it!), had a pancake breakfast at IHOP (International House of Pancakes), got dinner and drinks in smokey jazz clubs and had coffee and cheese cake at Seinfeld's diner. The coffee was ok, but the service and cheese cake were, well..., you can just look at the link ;) So thank you Leevi and Hannu for having me there with you and taking me to all these places; I wish I could return the favor!

Finnish

Why did I come to Berkeley in the first place? Well, to teach Finnish. And now I notice that to learn Finnish as well. What I thought in the beginning, has been proven true quite a few times here: my expertise in languages doesn't really cover Finnish. But I've been busy learning and teaching and I must admit (a bit reluctantly, since I'm still unsure of my future plans, and don't necessarily want to admit that my career might be in teaching after all) it's been great fun!

UC Berkeley

My main "job" for the year is to work as a TA (Teaching Assistant) for Sirpa, the Finnish lecturer here at UC Berkeley. She has been living here in the area for about 30 years and knows the Bay Area extremely well. She has been an enormous help and support in every way during these first six months: she's a great tour guide, has the best hints of places to see and restaurants to eat in, knows where to go to buy cheap jeans and she knows pretty much everything one needs to know about local history and of course of all the Finns and Finnish things in the area.

Sirpa has been teaching at UC Berkeley, or Cal, for the last twelve years or so. This year we've had two groups in the fall and two groups in the spring (1st year and 2nd year Finnish), which both meet twice a week for two hours. In addition to that I organize a Finnish Café once a week. There we gather for an hour to talk (or try to talk) in Finnish and read horoscopes and all kinds of articles on current issues, which can include anything from the Finnish communal elections to women's confessions on sex addictions; practically anything that MeNaiset decides to tell us about. Today however, I had to print out the horoscopes from the internet, since my last two magazines haven't arrived for some reason...

I must say it has been very interesting to work with Sirpa. Her approach is a lot different from anything I have been exposed to as a student and her teaching is a lot more communicative than the "traditional" grammar oriented teaching that is still pretty prevalent in many class rooms in Finland. It is true of course, that it is a very different thing to teach a group of three or ten people than a big group of 25 or 45 students, which unfortunately often is the case back home. In any case, I've already got a lot of good ideas and inspiration from our classes and I just hope I will remember even half of the things we have/she has come up with during these two semesters.



Evening class
In addition to teaching at UC Berkeley, Sirpa teaches in quite a few other places as well, including her own house. So even today, after I finish writing this, I'll go to her house for our "Winter Finnish". This spring we have groups on three different levels: beginners, advanced beginners and superadvanced Finnish speakers (this is my personal interpretation on their level of Finnish). Sirpa is very involved in her teaching and with her students, and she always tries to get her students involved with the Finnish community here in the Bay Area. For example for Kalevalanpäivä ("the Day of Kalevala, the Finnish national epic) , the Finnish American Heritage Association (FAHA) organized a Kalevalanpäivä/Shrovetide Day celebration in Sonoma, where almost all of our evening students went and performed great skits based on different scenes from Kalevala. They were a huge success!


Also, last fall, we organised a Finnish evening at the Finnish Hall in Berkeley where we invited all our students, both from Cal and evening class, as well as all the Finns from the Bay Area. We were expecting to spend the evening with a dozen people and were very surprised when the turn out of people was closer to fifty! It was a really fun evening with lots of good food and music, thanks to our great students who were almost as talented in karjalanpiirakka-baking as in their excellent kantele-playing skills. It was a great way to spend my birthday!


Suomi-koulu/Finnish School
During this year I have also ended up helping out the Finnish School here in Berkeley. On Sundays, a couple of times a month, children of (half) Finnish families from the Bay Area gather at the Finnish Brotherhood Hall here in Berkeley. This year we have two teachers: Kati and me. Kati has lived in Berkeley for quite some time now with her Finnish-American family and has taught at Suomi-koulu for at least a couple of years already. Most of the children who come to Finnish School are under eight years old, so when Kati and the other Finnish School organizers heard last semester that Sirpa had a new TA, they asked if I would be interested in joining their "Sunday school" and organize program for the older kids.

I must say I was surprised how nice it was to work with kids again. After my au pair year in France eight years ago, I was ready to abandon all ideas of ever working with kids again. This far I have quite succesfully avoided any such activities where I would have been in contact with school age children, but I must admit that I have actually enjoyed my time with the kids in Suomi-koulu. Also professionally speaking, it has been very good to notice how complicated the question of bilingualism is and that Finnish isn't always as easy to write as we grown up Finns sometimes like to think. It is interesting to notice how many "degrees of bilingualism" there can be and I believe it is always good to be reminded, that everyone is different: everyone has their strong points and weaknesses when it comes to learning a second language. The nice thing with Suomi-koulu is though, that it doesn't really matter how much or little one knows about the language; it is just nice that they come and get to spend some time in a surrounding where their second language can be put in use outside their home.

Life: health, money and people?

I've been thinking a lot about my life lately. In good and in bad. This is probably because my dad is not doing well and I find it hard being all the way here. I don't know if it is hard more because I'm worried for him or because I feel seperated and alone. Probably both. Luckily, I know he is not alone and I am also fortunate to have both modern technology which enables me to be in contact with everyone back home (and to fly me home over spring break) and also to have people here, who are very supportive and helpful.

I've been talking a lot with quite a few people about all sorts of things during the last few months. Despite all the worry I have for my father and my family, I still cannot help but to be happy how well things have gone for us for the most part. I don't think life is ever supposed to be all fun and games, but despite all the hard times and difficulties we have faced, lots of things have still turned out for the best. Not everything and always, but for the most part. Having met people, who have in my age already experienced serious illness, first personally and then with their younger siblings, or people who have lost not one but both of their parents to cancer before the age I lost my mother, and who still lead as normal and happy lives as life can be, just makes me appreciate all the possibilities there are, even after a life of difficulties.


I do realize not everyone can necessarily be as lucky as me or the people I have encountered, and many things in life depend on the simple fact of where one is born. At the moment, I am reading a book by Pamela Constable, Fragments of Grace, for my journalism class. Especially in my current situation many of the stories have hit me pretty hard, not least the autobiographical sequences. Some of her experiences and thoughts awoken in "exotic" lands I can relate to based on my own travels, even if my travels have of course not been anything as extreme as her travels in war torn areas. But it is also interesting to notice how easy it is to be blind to one's own familiar surroundings and the evils in one's own society. Maybe it is so, because elsewhere one is usually more of an outside observer, with not that many personal attachments to the occurences in the surroundings. Maybe that's why it is easier to observe more objectively elsewhere, even if the impressions are somewhat tainted by one's own frame of reference.


It's been interesting to notice in the book for example, that when she is comparing the other places she has lived in with the U.S., the author doesn't really bring up any issues related to the poverty in her own country (at least hasn't this far in the book). She does tell about other "evils" she notices every time she returns home, but most of them have to do with the ever more consumeristic and entertainment appreciating culture in the States; usually things related to having and spending money, not the issues that arise when people don't have it. However, for me (and even more so for my friend living in New York) it has for example been very shocking and sometimes unnerving to see how many homeless people there are here and this just in the downtown areas. Also, all the personal accounts I got to hear last semester in my education class, the inequalities in the public school system, the huge difference between the students' home neighbourhoods' income levels and violence statistics is just something inconceivable for me.


However, at the same time it is very much likely that I am just as oblivious to similar things back home. It is true I don't pay much attention the "professional" or less professional drunks that disturb D. so much in Finland. Also, I don't know what it is like to be an unemployed single parent or how difficult it can be to live in Finland as an immigrant. There are so many realities in this world and only one of them is the one I know. In the original sense of the word, it is an awesome thought.



Enough of my outpouring. All of this is of course in honour of Friends' Day, which we have back home instead of Valentine's day. To save you all dear friends from having to read any more of my deep thoughts on life, I will leave you now by wishing you all Hyvää ystävänpäivää! You are the people mentioned in the headline, I just never got that far, when trying to save the best for last :) So thanks to all of you for being so great! I honestly don't know what I would've done or would do without you in my life. And of course, a special thanks to my four devoted readers; it's nice to know some one else besides me might some day read this text :)

J.R.'s Mission

Dolores Park

Our San Francisco / Bay Area / Danville local, J.R., promised to take me and Kelvin out on a food tour in S.F. We all agreed on a Saturday that turned out to be a really beautiful "wear your flip-flops and a T-shirt" day in January. As usual, Kelvin had however forgotten that he couldn't actually go on that specific day, so me and a few other friends from the Ihouse decided to participate J.R.'s guided tour of S.F. without Kelvin and headed out to the Mission.

We started out by visiting a free market. It was basically like a flea market, except everything was free. Since I personally have too many things already I didn't really put that much effort into collecting even more stuff, but almost all of us ended up leaving with something(s), whether it be a book on racquetball from the 80's or a hair straightener. After we were done "shopping" we were already getting peckish so we decided to go to an ice cream bar where, J.R. boasted, they would serve the best ice cream in the world. Well, he wasn't wrong. I wouldn't say it was better than the chocolate and blueberry ice creams I have had in Rome, but I wouldn't say it was any worse either. I pretended to be healthy, so I had my hot fudge sauce with a kid size pomegranate sorbet - delicious! The best description I can give for the yumminess of their ice cream is probably that I have NEVER liked banana ice cream, but I am seriously contemplating on buying a scoop of their Roasted Banana when I go there the next time...

After that it was time for a little lunch nap so we headed for the close by Dolores park to hang out and chill. It was really nice to just enjoy the sun and the people around us. We could've got us some more dessert, since home baked cookies and brownies seemed to be really popular in that park. Based on the vendors' appearances and the price of the pastries we decided however that it is probably best not to buy any, or our "trip" in San Francisco might have ended up being totally different. They looked good though, and based on the busy trade they probably tasted good too. Who ever said that the American small businesses are suffering nowadays?!

For the rest of the day we did pretty much the same, walked around, ate, and walked around some more. One of the pretty strange curiosities on the way was the Paxton Gate shop of Treasures and Oddities. They had all kinds of things gathered and "further developed" from the nature, such as small animal skeletons (mice, skunks, etc.) dressed up in Victorian clothing or a bird with a crocodile head. They also had all kinds of fossils, my favorite being the one we thought may have been fossilized poo. It is however very much possible we were mistaken, but considering all the other things they had for sale, it might very well be we were right after all...


My other favorite for the day were the Mission murals. According to my other SF-guide, my weekly MeNaiset -magazine, the murals have been painted to demonstrate and tell about indigenous peoples' struggles, political resistance and immigrants' experiences. I could very well imagine that looking at the colorful and sometimes really powerful wall paintings.


After the murals it was time to eat again, this time at J.R.'s favorite pizza place, Little Star Pizza, where Kelvin finally joined the rest of us. The deep dish pizza was great (kind of like "pannu pizza" except slightly crispier) and the Mixed Salad was even better (I thought). With full stomachs we finally headed back downtown to end the night with some stand up comedy. That was a great way to postpone the eventual return to Ihouse, where the Welcome Dance for the spring term was taking place the same night. We got quite a few good laughs before BARTing home and sneaking upstairs to our rooms without being lured into the dance. (Ending stories with cheesy and stupid puns has always been one of my experties, so here we go again:) Mission accomplished! :D

Handsome men in the Mission

South Dakota

My friend Mari was on a road&air trip in the States and stopped over in Martin, South Dakota for some time. I was lucky enough to have been invited there to visit her in October and to see some of the areas I had read and heard so much about as a child. It turned out to be a very thought awakening trip. I will write here about thoughts and things I was told of; whether or not all of them are accurate in every aspect, I do not know (some of the information on the ever so trustworthy Wikipedia differ somewhat of the impressions I gathered during my short stay).

Healthy local food in
Nebraska, ie. fried green beans

People and Economy
South Dakota, and especially the area I visited, are among the poorest, if not the poorest, States and counties in the US. Also, it is very scarcely populated and the towns are small. One of the smallest towns we passed through, we found in the state of Nebraska, where the population was an amazing 33 people. Martin, the town we stayed in, was rather large with a population of more than 1000 people, but most of the towns we passed had around 100-200 inhabitants.

The town of Martin is situated between two reservations. I was told that many of the people living on the reservations live in very poor conditions, some of them earning about $2000/year. Also, the questions revolving around the Native Americans and the reservations are not only in the past, but even today there are many issues related to Native American peoples' rights, including land rights. Sometimes the reservations might be concidered to have too much "unnecessary" land and this extra land might be redistributed for some other use and taken away from within the original reservation limits. Often times it seems, however, that the lands removed from the Native Americans seem to be the areas with the most fertile soil. There are of course many efforts put into trying to develop the reservations as well, but not all the plans are thought through. For example, a nearby town got funding for a youth center that was built outside the city center. The young people, however, didn't have any means to reach the center without a car and therefore the center's capacity is largely underutilized.

Vanha intiaaniputka

The mother of the family I stayed in had a saying, that poverty is a lifestyle in South Dakota. When the gaz prices were at their highest, some of the people took their horses and rode to the grocery store to do their shopping. The state has also suffered from drought for the past eight years, which has also significantly weakened the economical status of the Native Americans living on the reservations and who often don't have other sources of income besides agriculture.

School
The family I visited had four children in the house who went to school. However, they only went to school four days a week. There was no school on Fridays, because the county does not have enough money to keep the school open more than that. This way they can save on the staff salaries (teachers and other school staff), school bus rides and heating expenses, since they won't have to heat the school during weekends.

However, since there are limited options for pastime activities in (at least those parts of) South Dakota, the reading scores for kids actually went up after they changed into a four day school week system. Also, since many of the children live on farms, they often help out at their family farms or businesses on the extra "free day" and thereby also gain work experience. I wonder what would happen if they did the same in New York or here in the Bay Area...

Nature

Even if all of the above sounds somewhat disheartening, South Dakota was great! Luckily for me (and unluckily for Mari) I had a private chauffeur for the whole three day roadtrip, because I forgot my driver's license in Berkeley. But oh, all the things we saw!

We visited a couple of national parks where we saw the buffalo roam (a bit too close, I might add) and also plenty of really gorgeus views. We did see Mount Rushmore (the mountain with the president's faces carved into it) and I took the perfect shot of it from a moving car. That was how much we wanted to see it, after having visited the Crazy Horse Memorial which is situated about a half an hour drive from Mount Rushmore. Carving the Crazy Horse Memorial started as a one man task in 1948 when sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski and Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear officially started the project. The carving work still continues and is done by seven of Ziolkowski's ten children and some of his grand children.


On our last day of driving we saw absolutely beautiful places, such as the Badlands National Park. Despite the amazing scenery we were quite preoccupied with other things, like keeping the car on the road! During the night it had snowed in some areas we had visited just the day before, but luckily we didn't have to use any of the roads that had been closed on our last day anymore. However, the whole 250km that we had to drive to get back home to Martin, there was a terrible wind that occasionally reached hurricane force gusts (about 30 m/s). After having tried once, we didn't even dare to open the car window, let alone the door, to take pictures, because it honestly felt like the wind coming in the window could've lifted the whole car into the air. Luckily our car was heavy and low enough and my chauffeur so unbelievably brave, that at the end of the day we reached Martin safe and sound. Kiitos Mari!!! :D