above: park near olympic stadium | below: the 3t tram arriving at its terminus

caught fish and sunbathing snake last weekend.

after five years, finally. i just payed back the final installment of my bank loan. i took the loan out in early 1999 when i was applying for my j1 visa to nyc, i then got more when i came back from nyc so i could do my final year in college without worrying about money. thankfully money was the one thing that didnt cause me stress that year. the loan ran out in early july 2000 when i had come back from interrailing in scandinavia. anyway, now the loan is gone and money is slightly less of a worry. fanbloodytastic. darren ignores his creditcard bill

i am of course waiting for my bank to send me a big box of choclates and maybe some flowers to thank me for giving them so much interest and never missing a payment. stranger things have happened

i am just back from a few days in a summer cottage near kotka (80minutes from helsinki). i rowed for the first time, went fishing for the first time (caught two small fish), saw a snake in the wild for the first time (st. patrick got rid of them a long while back in ireland), went for a few saunas and read lots.

friday night 2320

i spent some time this afternoon in kiasma (helsinkis modern art museum). it was my second trip in eleven days, and this time thankfully i had a camera to take pictures of some of the cool things i saw when i was there the last time.

one of the things that stuck in my mind was this piece by finnish artist jaakko niemelä, it was called “hidas esitys” (slow motion) and it involved a very large block of concrete being slowly destroyed and day by day the arrival of tiny dinky sized emergency vehicles to attend to the rescue (complete with flashing lights).

i will try to go back closer to the date that it all finishes to see how it ends up.

the next thing that i really enjoyed was a video/computer instillation by a british artist called charles sandison. it was a series of five video projections in which he used computer code to represent the life of a village. as you can see from the above picture, there was males, females, children, old people and at the end dead people. they were surrounded by random bit of food to which the “male” would head off. they returned and “mated” with the females to produce several “child” characters. time would progress and death became commonplace. fascinating!.

i’ll try to post more pics from it all next week. i’m off to a summer cottage tomorrow and back sunday sometime.