Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Finnish miscellany

For as long as I live here, I will remember hobbling around on Turku's streets in heels on my way to my interview and teaching demonstration last April. In Dubai, you can wear heels pretty much wherever. Turku: not so much. Oh my gosh my feet were dying by the end of the trip and however much I blogged about it already (did I?), it was not enough to capture the ridiculousness of it all. This is a forever memory now.

These are Finnish mail (Posti) trucks! This is how the mail gets delivered, seriously. I've also seen Posti people on foot.

I had noticed these strange racks outside of my apartment building, and I assumed they were some kind of bike storage thing. Then on Saturday, all my neighbors took their rugs out, hung them on these racks, and started beating them. I'm so glad I found this out before I locked my bike to the rug-beating rack.

Speaking of rugs:

This morning as I was leaving the apartment, this van pulled up. A guy took away all the industrial strength rugs in the entry area of the building and put nice clean ones down in their place. So Finns take their rug cleanliness very seriously. Noted.

This is what language learning is like

25km of books