helsinki from the air, taken on sunday.

music news came in two forms this evening, good and bad.

first the bad, or to be more precise ‘unfortunate’. there is a mexican guitar duo called ‘rodrigo y gabriela‘ (pictured above) that have been playing in ireland for about five years. i first saw them when they supported damien rice about two years ago. they are fantastic, the usual fast spanish style guitar playing mixed in with metal and techno elements (everything done by guitar). live they are mesmerising and hypnotic (when i saw them live, everyone was in amazement at what they were doing), so when i was back home last week they happened to be on an irish telly show called “other voices“. i rushed around to find a blank video and i recorded their performace (i got the last 20min or so). so tonight i went to watch it only to find that it was recorded over by the top 10 british comedies. nooooooooooo!. ah well. rodrigo y gabriela play some gigs in ireland and england soon, so check them out if you can.

the good news. the jos� gonz�lez website has been updated. i checked this evening and saw that a turku/�bo date had been added for april 19th, so we started to plan going there, then i looked at the page again and saw that there was a helsinki date too! for the previous night (sunday april 18th). hurrray!. its done with the swedish music thing ‘accelerator‘. i cant wait!.

i finally scanned in some photos from almost 5 years ago. summer 1999 nyc. this was taken on the platform of 52nd street station the no.7 line.

everyword in finnish seems to have a dozen variations. i just found a flash site that shows the different names for all the different areas within the helsinki region. here is where i live: (pasila being the proper name, with the names in blue being other versions)

“el paso”! i like it

^— near copenhagen

i just got back from ireland a few hours ago, exhaustion is the flavour of the moment, i met most of my mates, ate loads of bread and got caught in rain a few times. i still have lots of finnish homework to do for the morning, aswell as my college appliction for friday, so not much internet time for me this week.

i came back with a few books, an english irish dictionary, lots of mp3s from my cds at home, scanned pictures from nyc in 1999, 6 (heavy) newspapers from the last three days, three looney tunes videos, a daft punk dvd, some cheese and lots of other small things.

if anyone wants to get in contact with me while im in ireland, use my old irish phone number, i got it reactivated: +353868218745.

i am off to ireland in about 6hours. gonna get some sleep, then the 0610 tram, then the 0625 bus to the airport, then the 0825 plane to copenhagen and then the something or other to dublin. i got a lend of a camera for the next ten days, so sorry in advance for all the photos. hyvää matkaa minulle.

its been thirteen months since i started to learn finnish. not once over those thirteen months did i ever feel as if i was beginning to master the language. every time i think i am beginning to get a handle on it, something crops up to upset things again. today was one of those days. the finnish we are learning is formal finnish, its the written language. what people speak is completely different, and today we spent some time looking at the spoken finnish.

in the spoken version, words are shortened, skipped, changed for russian/swedish/english variants and ofter just ignored. some examples: “missä sinä olet?” (where are you) becomes “mis sä oot” when spoken. “oletko sinä kotona?” (are you at home?) becomes “oot sä himassa”. (’hem’ being the swedish for ‘home’)

so after 13 months of language tutition it is still incredibly difficult to actually take part in a proper converasation. (that being said, it still an incredibly amazing language to learn, but i wont be anyway usefull with finnish for another three of four years yet)

oh yeah!