*snivel*

Yup. Most definitely ill. But, I bought rosehip tea, and guess what? I found the frozen berries, but it's no wonder I didn't see them, since I wasn't expecting them to be tucked away between the ice cream and the frozen desserts. It's especially hard to find them when the packagings for raspberry ice cream, frozen raspberries and raspberry cake-things are almost identical. I also went to a healt check today, everythings fine with me.

Hopefully I'll be feeling better tomorrow, we're expecting friends from London over for dinner.

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*cough cough*

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*zzzzzzzzz*

Naptime

This is the second time I write this post. Blogger just decided that I was logged out, and hadn't saved any recent drafts of it either. Luckily it wasn't a long post to begin with.


I accidentally fell asleep after getting home after school. I think it was a good thing, considering I'm slightly ill, and that my nighttime sleep was interrupted by a huge dizzy wasp, somewhere after 4 a.m. It was buzzing and flying/crawling its way up the wall, and probably falling off a time or two. Luckily it was slow, so it wasn't hard to get out.

Unintended naps are cozy, although a bit confusing.

Reading This Blog Is Free

All right. If a bank states on their website, that the international student account is without a monthly fee, you shouldn't automatically assume that this is the case. If Barclays say: "Monthly fee - free" they actually mean that it costs £7,50 a month. They certainly have an interesting view on the word "free".

Here's a couple of really bad jokes on the subject, to make this update look bigger:








*raging applause*




Seems like I caught a cold. Nothing dramatic, but slightly irritating. I also actually really truly found fresh yeast today! Thank you, Morrisons!

Guess who's gonna bake buns soon, yeah!

F Word IKEA

As today was the estimated delivery date of my online order from the Infinite Kompany of Errors and Agressions, and I hadn't recieved an email from them yet, I popped my old SIM into my phone (back when I placed my order I hadn't got an UK number yet). Well, turns out they've tried to call the old number a couple of times, and left voice messages in which they ask me to call them back in order to make sure that my house is accessible by truck, and to ask when I'd like to have the stuff delivered.

Many things baffle me about this.

Why not send an email when they can't make contact by phone, if they expressly state that they'll contact me by phone, text or email?

Why they don't have the option to tell if your home is accessible by truck right away when placing your order?

Why they suddenly succeeded in calling a Finnish phonenumber, when they weren't able to do that back when we ordered home delivery when we visited one of the warehouses?

Why they just couldn't deliver on the estimated day as they'd done when we ordered home delivery?


Well, guess when my stuff will be delivered?

Go ahead, guess!

It's before Christmas, yay!

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All right, 25th friggin' October. That is, in a month.

What the hell?

I can tell you that I'm not pleased.

Whatever, they'll probably send the wrong stuff then.


Aside from these aggressions I suppose the day was okay. I had Digital Media today, and we were supposed to go out and take pictures, and then play around with them on Photoshop. The taking pictures part went well, aside from the fact that the camera had decided to take some of the pictures as all white editions, so me and my pair had to go out and reshoot some of them. The playing around with the pictures on Photoshop part went quite well too, aside from the fact that I'd prefer not to touch Macs. Things like having to close windows from the wrong corner, having no right-click and having to use the "apple-button" instead of ctrl frustrates me greatly. I guess I'm just dull and conservative. And too much of a geek.


Oh hey, completely forgot to tell that we finally actually got to buy knives from an irresponsible vendor during the Kent Food and Drink Festival. Thank you very much!

I suppose that will suffice as today's good news.

Fly Fly Fey Flu

I feel this cold creeping up on me, and I hope it'll change it's mind. Drinking hot chocolate and eatin varm soup and doing other equally unpleasant things to scare it away. Do you think chocolate will discourage it? I'm absolutely positive that the delicious chocolate cookie assortment the neighbours gave us last saturday contains the right medicine. I might have to eat try my way through several different chocolate coated bisquits before I find the correct one. All in the name of health.

Speaking of chocolate I'm quite proud to tell you that I haven't touched my "Fazer's Blue" I brought with me all the way from Finland. It's quite possibly one of the best milk chocolates I know. I haven't found any with a similar taste yet. I however have to admit that me and my roomie bought a couple of Cadbury chocolate slabs (or big bars, whatever you call it), one Dairy Milk and one Caramel. They aren't bad either. In my defence I'll say that they were on a special offer.

Also, speaking of roomies, they both have their own blogs (we are three people living in the house). They also have deviantART accounts, so pay them a visit if you're interested in their doodles (dA) or writings (blog).


Pastelfoxhunt, her deviantART is Santih.

Engelska knackorvar, her deviantART is pemmi.


We had our first proper lecture in Critical Histories today. It was really interesting, but the enthusiastic lecturer spoke with the speed of light, so if you even thought a second about how to phrase my notes, he'd already rushed a couple of textmiles and powerpoint slides further.

I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.

Soup-dee-doo

Today's menu - Soup de la Frankfurter. Frankfurters are these slim sausages, like wieners.

I really love soup.

I also bought new headphones today, they are bright green and awesome. What's especially awesome about them is that they cost £5 less than I expected them to cost. I didn't protest.

Afternoon Tea

Today we had our neighbours over for afternoon tea, and I'd say it was a success. They liked our carrot cake and apple pie, and didn't seem to mind our lack of a cake slice, a pitcher, a tea pot and the fact that we only had an assortment of mugs in different shapes and sizes instead of proper cups (I think that made it rather cozy).

We also made a gigantic, no, gargantuan wok for dinner. It was good.

Monty Python's Flying Circus provides us with high-quality evening entertainment. I can't seem to stop laughing at the zooming head of the moustached gentleman in the intro. Every single time. (At 0:23)

Free Food Forever

There's a Kent Food Fair or something like that going on right now here in Canterbury, and my first glimpse of it was really promising. There were a lot of delicious free samples to taste, and we even got free chips from a very lovely vendor! And my Gosh does cheese taste lovely after you haven't had a proper tast in a couple of weeks? Okay, I did recieve a free pizza slice earlier in the school, since there was this happening over there, but it's not just the same as Fancy Cheese.

Cheers for cheese. Har har.

Ööhööhöösmö

*IMPORTANT NOTICE*
Now my Finnish phone number doesn't work anymore, as I've switched to an English SIM.
*END OF IMPORTANT NOTICE*

Today school started for real, and I'm quite excited. Or, I suppose it's called uni nowadays, not school. We had the task to bring an image, an object and a text to the studio, and then we recieved a couple of tasks. For next thursday we got the task to produce at least five drawings. We're supposed to. . . what was it? Explore drawing or something. Try different things out. Something like that.

There's also a cornucopia of films in the school library, all kinds of them.

I also marvel at the lack of certain products. Why don't they sell frozen berries in the supermarkets in the UK? Why? Is it because I'd like to buy some? No fresh yeast either. It's okay, I've nothing against dryed. But, I really like the smell of fresh yeast. It smells like "soon you'll eat something delicious" or something like that. Otherwise I really enjoy shopping for food, since it's still new, exotic and exciting, and lightyears cheaper than Finnish food (which isn't an achievement really, since Finland is in the top five or something most expensive countries in the EU).

The days fly past really fast.

The people in my group had had some difficulties getting their heads around my text for today:

Ö ö,
hö ö.
Hö ös mö.

It's a beautiful poem, and a punchline from a Finnish joke (the poem is in Swedish). It did make a very, err, sweet drawing.

(It means Island island, grassy island. Grassy islands bride.)

Apartmentshots

All right, here you go!

The entrance.

The kitchen

The Tidy Table

The living room

The Best Room. I mean, look at those curtains.

I mean, look at this mess.

The bathroom, or the most interesting part of it. (There is also a toilet seat.)

The battlefield. As you can see that desk is missing a vital plastic leg-cap-thingie. (It's the guestroom/workroom normally.)

And finally, I suspect that this is our free gardener.

That's it, pretty much. We also have a fireplace we haven't been able to even open. A mystery.

Superspider

Food is really great, especially when you are really hungry.

We bought a 5 kg sack of rice from an Asian grocery store.

Out of over a hundred students me and my roomies were the only three to attend the student union meeting today. Are we proper students or just geeks, I wonder. xD

I promise, tomorrow I'll post the compulsory shots of our apartment. Speaking of the apartment, I let a truly gigantic spider out this morning. It was approximately seven centimetres long, and thicker than our usual home spiders (there is a lot of them, by the way). Little birds told me that it's spider season right now.


Now, excuse me as I'll watch a movie (Babel) with the roomies.

The Devil on The Phone

(Place your bets. When I become a rich and famous artist, will I Studio Ghibli sue me for copyright infringement?)


My roomie called IKEA today (they didn't have queue-music!), and if we are lucky, the right missing part should now be sent to us. At least something is supposed to be sent to us. Maybe we'll recieve a puppy instead. And we're not even supposed to have pets. And then we'd have to feed it to the cats in the backyard.

Mousepad pictures are the one and only true form of Fine Art.

So cruel. Such innocence, soiled and ruined by the place that shan't be named.


I also gave in and finally ordered my Out of Stock items online today. You won this round, IKEA. But just you wait, there will be a time when I can afford desks that cost more than £100.


There will, won't there? :<

Proper British Sunday Lunch

I feel so pampered. The neighbours treated us to such a delicious meal. Now I'm completely stuffed. They also had a very nice and cozy home.

I think I shall resume pampering myself with a warm bath later. Yes, I definitely shall.

My head is really empty of thoughts now, I think my brain has been replaced with crumbled apple.

So that was their plan all along.

Evolution

Now the broth from yesterday and more vegetables are turning into a soup. We had traditional English weather today, so the picnic was apparently called off, or at least we weren't able to find it in the park. And the park isn't That huge.

Well, we'll have wine with the dinner tonight, so everything is fine. And the chocolate milkshake got switched to a packet of ridiculously cheap double-chocolate cookies, which is also fine.

Now I shall continue attending the soup.

Chicken Broth

I am now an officially enrolled student at the University for the Creative Arts. We also did an English Language Needs Test or something like that. We were to write a 500 word essay in 40 minutes. Ten minutes magically disappeared somewhere after our supervisor said we have twenty minutes left, because suddenly she said five minutes. You could say that I took the wrong approach, silly me. I had only begun to write my essay into the actual test when the five minute warning came. I think I've never written that fast. I still had to link to my draft at the end. I don't know, the worst case scenario is that I'll get a lot of language support, and that doesn't sound too dangerous. I am quite confident that the level of the language itself in the semi-finished essay is okay. I actually used synonyms. And 'essential'. Essential is an advanced and complicated word.

I have also managed to magically transform a chicken, some vegetables and spices into chicken broth, and now I'm waiting for it to cool down. The chicken and the broth, that is. My roomie is eating the vegetables right now. Chicken soup is on the menu tomorrow.

We also finally presented ourselves to our neighbours. A kind lady already presented herself to us days ago, but now we got around to saying hi to the rest of our neighbours. A kind couple(?) next door even invited us over to lunch on Sunday! Neighbourship sure is magic.

And tomorrow we'll attend a "Fresher's Picnic" in as nearby park like any proper students should do. I think it'll be fun. .. .. I think i'll buy chocolate milkshake tomorrow just to celebrate that.

Sounds like a plan. I have officially named the creature at the beginning Raspurgi. It might have a connection with that fabulous twin beard.

School's In

First day of school, accomplished!

We did manage to enter the wrong building at first. Luckily we had reserved a lot of extra time for getting lost and running around, so we did, ultimately, end up in the right place at the right time. The school building is, as my tutor quite aptly described it, a labyrinth. There were a lot of different rooms and it seems like there is suitable equipment for almost any project one would like to realize. Will be interesting, trying to find my way around for the first days. I'm the only foreigner in my group, so I'm really in for a proper language-bath of different dialects of English.

Magically Disappearing Things

Our IKEA stuff arrived today. Apparently we managed to lose a couple of things on the way to the counter, since those things were not even to be found on the receipt. Or maybe someone saw our magnificent selections in the cart, and decided to snatch them for themselves.

I also built a A1 portfolio out of cardboard and duct tape (the former taken from my beautiful package which arrived safely and soundly with the mail yesterday). It was supposed to be A0, but I pretty much ran out of materials and drive before meeting that goal.

Oh, and guess what else you can't buy unless you're over 21? Glue. Apparently all sniffers are twenty or less, and resort to violent use of knives and forks in order to get their fix.

Wow, I just saw our oven pancake. . . I've never seen anything like it. It was maybe a little too much mixture in a slightly too small form. It is, however, quite beautiful.

And school starts tomorrow. Gack.

Underage Again

The morning is incredibly beatiful.

Do not think that will make me forget yesterday, IKEA! I suppose it's okay and understandable that one thing or two are out of stock, but I mean do I have a great taste, or am I just unlucky?

- No tabletop of the kind I'd desired, one was visibly out of stock in the viewing area, and when I settled for another colour they didn't have that one as well in the storage area.
- No drawer unit for my desk.
- No chair of this kind.
- No chair of that kind.
- No worklamp of my preferred kind.
- This almost starts to sound like a poem.

I suppose it's practical for them to earn extra money through forcing carless people to order things afterwards.

Oh, and did you know that you can't buy knives there if you're under 21? Not. Even. Effing. Cutlery! Has someone sued them because a young criminal stabbed someone with an IKEA fork?

It's so ridiculous that we all were completely baffled at the counter. Why stop at knives and sharp objects? Can you even imagine how much destruction and suffering we will achieve with that huge wok-pan? Not to speak of the umbrella.

I just wonder, why twenty one? Is there a massive peak of stabbers at the age of twenty? How are you supposed to live on your own if you can't even buy basic household objects?

Just wondering.


P.S. Here's some pictures of the house.

Good Night.

I just came back from an almost 14 hour trip to IKEA. Expect to hear about it tomorrow.

Well, what do you know!

I feel a bit like that guy up there, borrowing someone's unsecured network. I will get an own asap! I wouldn't anyways dare attend to any important matters across someone else's connection.

Well, the trip was, quite hilarious, in retrospect. Everyone was struggling with their huge bags, mine tried to rip my arm off. It had the cool special feature that it was practically impossible to switch arms when dragging it, since if you tried with the "wrong arm" the bag would hit your leg half of the time.

We already had quite some thrill at the very beginning of our adventure - the scale they used at the airport showed several kilograms too much, rendering all of our luggage overweight. Hence we protested, and eventually the grumpy personnel reluctantly let us test another scale, and all of a sudden we only needed to adjust our hand luggages a little bit.

The security check was interesting too. I had forgot two pairs of scissors in my backpack, one of which I had to let them keep. Otherwise it went well, I probably carried around three kg of extra stuff in my pockets. Did I mention I was wearing my winter coat and shoes? I can tell you it got quite warm from time to time.

It might have been because of that, plus simply undergoing a lot of stress and extreme physical tension, when I officially blessed our life in England through throwing up on the train. In a leaking paper bag. Dropping it on the floor (from where some friendly spirit - I don't remember which one of you did it in all the ruckus - threw it into the waste bin). Then continuing with another leaking paper bag (see last bracket). And finally, finishing into a plastic bag. Luckily I had freshly drank water and just eaten a handful of peanuts, so we didn't all smell like puke when signing the contract. Now I'm feeling better, so I hope it wasn't stomach flu. I doubt it myself.

Well, all of us survived in the end. I will not pack my bag as heavily on next time I bring a load from Finland. Okay, I will at least try to remember what kind of hell I went through when the time comes again.

This Is The Last Post

Before flying away to England!

I'm very much on pins and needles now. Glub. I hope the trip will go as planned, and that my bed in England is soft and cozy. I also can't seem to get this Swedish masterpiece out of my head. With shoes like that, everything is guaranteed to be awesome at all times.

I'm going to wear my winter coat and -shoes to the airport tomorrow, since they take a lot of extra space. Thank me, oh Britain, for because of this you will experience a sudden heatwave tomorrow.

Well, this is it. I'll be back whenever I have internet again, I hope the word has spread, and there are some readers to get back to by then!

Efficient Packing

I might as well spam you with a couple of messages before I'm internetless, and try to get some substance to this blog.

So, today I posted a package to my future address in England. The greatest weight I would have been allowed to send was 30 kg. My package only weighed 29 kg and 930 grams. What a waste! I could easily have crammed another 70 grams of t-shirts and underwear in it (I was just about to accidentally type underwar instead of -wear. Sounds like a dangerous word). The package was by the way a lump beautiful creation perfected with corrugated cardboard and several metres of bright orange duct tape.

The bags I'm taking with me on the plane are also bordering on being too heavy. I have managed to get my hand luggage to weigh exactly the maximal 8 kg's, and after writing this post I will proceed packing my check-in luggage, aiming for 23 kg.

I have not yet realized I'm going away tomorrow. I will probably realize that somewhere during next week.

Tetris

My aim is to post a semi-daily sketch here, after settling down in my new home, England. (Practically, after I have managed to establish an internet connection over there.) Moving away from Finland on the day after tomorrow.

While packing I realized I'm a natural-born Tetris-master. When the bag was only half-full I realized it weighed a couple kilograms more than what would be allowed on the plane, resulting in me having to repack the whole thing.
Speaking of packing, more serious, or time-consuming, art can be found on my deviantart account, while this blog becomes flooded with doodles of. . . mostly various critters.

Feel free to spread the word about this absolutely dazzling blog (I'm especially talking to you, friends and relatives. Please spread the news among yourselves, so you can check if I'm alive and well through these writings (that will be a more reliable source of information than analyzing the pictures, I believe). I am too ancient and stubborn to have managed to obtain a facebook-account.)


The banner is the most beautiful thing I have made. (I will create a real one after settling down in England)