Back to Joensuu

More or less a month ago we came back from US to Finland. There is no so much to tell about his, but just that the return has been a little bit hard. We returned to an apartment that we have to set in motion again after we were 5 month away. And we have to battle the jet-lag, that it’s really something when you return from US to Europe. For me it wasn’t something new, but that doesn’t make it any easy. We were almost for a week out of the game, not every day, but at least with some minor problem. The third day after the landing for me was the worse, and I even have some dizziness and nausea.

All of these was nothing that we didn’t expect, but on top of these was also something else. It was the return to our little street and our little apartment in Joensuu. Don’t get me wrong, we are really and perfectly happy here, and we missed a lot of things while we were in Corvallis (for starters, our privacy, our bed, our TV and entertaining system, our sofa and our kitchen). But, there is no more drama and craziness, and not more great landscape and diverse people, and no more easy understanding of the people surrounding you or spontaneous talking.

We came straight to the Finnish fall / winter without almost any transition in the middle. Well, it’s true that we were in NYC for almost two weeks and with the best of the companies we could have expected. A really unforgettable trip that I hope to write about in the future and that it was a great colophon for our trip. However, the weather there and the landscape was even more south that it was in Corvallis. It was hot and nice, even when we were in the beginning of September, and instead of mountains there were big valleys made of glass and steel. Life, urban life.

Now, we are almost in the brink of the dark winter here in Finland, kaamos as Finnish people call it. Not the best to be cheerful and positive about life, since probably until end of November or December we aren’t going to see any snow, which give some bright to the lack of light. The problem for me isn’t the reduce amount of hours of light during the day, but the totally lack of Sun. This country is beautiful when the Sun shines in the sky, even when it’s that low like in this period of the year (it creates a stunning light, really), but the clouds really block almost any hope to see Lorenzo (Lorenzo is the given name we give to the Sun in Spain). This is really depressing, even for me that I come from a really rainy region in Spain.

We have to sum up to this, that these last days have been quite something in the Spanish political scene, being almost in the verge of the its greatest political crisis since the 23-F, that attempt of coup d’état Spain suffered little before I was in this world, in 1981. Even the King was on TV, to the astonishment and confusion of some (they thought that Christmas came earlier this year), to the disappointment of others, and the pleasure of many.

This time the culprits weren’t a handful of militar personnel that have a old and cheesy vision of Spain, but a bunch of politicians that doesn’t have an idea of what they were doing and the guts of take aside what separate them and sit on the table to negotiate. Not to talk about defend they position in a referendum and debating and developing ideas and stating facts.

Anyhow, I think we’ll survive and soon I’ll write more.