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2008 May - Back to index |
Studio Ghibli has a theme park (similar to Moominworld, not similar to Disneyland) in a sleepy suburb of Tokyo, Mitaka. God is in the details, they say, and the Ghibli Museum has an overwhelming yet tactful abundance of them. The otherwise overly courteous personnel didn't let me ride the nekobasu - kissubussi, that is - claiming that I was too tall to enter; however, I had the opportunity to shake hands with a life-sized Laputa robot, play phantasmagorical instruments, and watch the most elaborate optical illusions. If there ever was movie magic, this lair is bursting with it. Let's lose our way together!
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The various malls in Shinjuku, downtown Tokyo, had boutiques with the cutest names you could possibly imagine.
One last1 picnic at Koffin puisto, a few more games of Smooth Moves, a couple of gifts of importance, and it was time to leave Finland once again. At this point I momentarily felt that my cup was full to the brim (but then again, little do I know).
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In Australia, car owners can buy roadside assistance service for their car from an association called RACQ. For as little as 62 AUD per year, you get a phone number to call in case you have problems with the car while on the road; the RACQ guys will come wherever you are and try to fix the situation if they can, or organize a lift for the car and the driver if they cannot. When the car I was driving started leaking brake fluid in the middle of the highway, I found out that for selected Finnish cars, similar service is available for free. That was nifty!
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Soundtrack of my life Nahkaruoska Mari Kaasinen/Johanna Virtanen/trad. |
I'm fairly sure that this was the first time ever I've seen the most famous Finnish folk band on stage, and it was about time; the show was truly captivating. Värttinä performed on Sunday, and the festival and I were there on Saturday as well (many thanks to everyone who showed up, and to some who did their best!) I've also been told that I won an old bet, however, I have no recollection of it at this time.
The conference banquet was held in a 14th century gothic hunting castle among string quartets and under crystal chandeliers. Appropriately, the fellow who had the castle built, Kazimierz III the Great, was also the founder of the Jagiellonian University (our host). I'm sad to say that I had to rush through the five-course meal to make it to the night train.
I spent most of the week in the EURASNET conference in Krakow, a storybook perfect town. Due to my tight schedule, I didn't have time to test whether I could stutter a single word in the halls of Auschwitz, but I did visit the Jewish suburb of Krakow, Kazimierz, which was abandoned for decades after World War II.
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Soundtrack of my life Hair Galt MacDermot/James Rado/Gerome Ragni |
Hair is one of the greatest achievements of the golden era of mankind, late 1960ies, but until today I had seen it on neither stage nor screen. The movie was every bit worth the wait; the decades had not taken their toll on it. The songs and the idealism make the most hardened cynic cry (not that there were any of those in the audience).
In the evening I kept company to some living legends, and watched the first semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest. Even the Finnish participant, Teräsbetoni (below), did not do as badly as they might have.
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Soundtrack of my life Atomiyökerho Wigwam/Aku Ankkuli |
Tonight: Aku Ankkuli! The gig at the club On The Rocks definitely rocked, although two things made me scratch my head:
Back in Eastern Finland, Mom and I went through some old stuff, threw some of it to fire (my old toys including a teabox full of fool's gold) and kept some of it (legal documents of 19th century court cases controlling the fate of our hacienda).
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The highway leading to Vaalimaa border crossing (and, incidentally, to my parents' house) is regularly jammed by hundreds or thousands of trucks queueing to be handled by the Russian border control that, like so many Russian institutions, operates only when it feels like it, or when it receives a nice little "gift." The truck queues regularly reach the length of fifty kilometers or more, and their presence forces all other cars to use the opposite lane. (Understandably, the opposite lane is occasionally used by cars coming from the opposite direction, so this isn't exactly the safest way to use a highway with a 100 km/hr speed limit.) This has been going on for the best part of the last ten years. The Finns have built numerous additional lanes for the stand-still trucks, but the more parking lanes they build, the slower the Russian border control gets.
Elephant Island is a World Heritage site located an hour's boat ride from Mumbai. The island itself is magnificent - basically a mountain that was burrowed full of temples two thousand years ago and is now like a Swiss cheese. The ferry trip to the island was impressive in its own way: we ran out of gas in the middle of the sea, so the captain had to ask a passing boat to tow us while he restarted the engine manually with the first mate. Unfortunately I haven't got a photo of the first mate's face when he was sucking the siphon to refuel the engine from a spare canister.
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Freshly squeezed sugar cane juice was 3 rupees, or 0.04 EUR, per glass. Watching the dudes operate the machine was included.
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Can you spot the kitty?
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In India, the engineels have an election evely molning!
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I had a two-night stopover in Mumbai on my way from Brisbane to Europe, and it was every bit as magical as the tales make you assume. The funny thing is, I really don't know why. The city is filthy, the infrastructure is nonexistent, the taxi drivers hit-and-run bicyclists without any consequences. Maybe it is some chemical evaporating from the Arabian Sea.
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Taj Mahal Palace has nothing to do with Taj Mahal, but it is the most upscale hotel in Mumbai and one of the most upscale ones in the world. They claim that the man who had it built, Jamsetji Tata, did it after some doorman with a significant lack of clue prevented him from entering a British-built hotel in Mumbai because he was colored. (The great-grandson of the mentioned Mr. Tata currently manufactures India's Volkswagen, Tata Nano.)
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Victoria Terminus, or Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, as it is politically more correctly called these days, is the apex of Mumbai's colonial architecture with an abysmal wealth of details, such as Rudolf the Red-Nosed Gargoyle below.
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I've seen people pierce their cheeks with spears before, but only during the Hindi Thaipusam festival that takes place in January all over southern Asia. If somebody knows why this happy bunch of dudes and dudettes was doing it halfway through May, let me know.
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Soundtrack of my life Call Me Debbie Harry |
Dear readers, as you seem to be interested in my whereabouts, why won't both of you come and join me for an afternoon picnic on Saturday 24 May in Kaisaniemenpuisto, on top of the hill? I'm the one in the tiger suit! (However, in the case of rain, hail, sleet, minor tornadoes, or other normal Finnish springtime weather, you will find me in Kaisla, instead.)
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P.S. My mobile phone number is the same as ever, so if you have problems finding me, you know what to do.