back in Finland

that's it. It is beginning of September and I am back in Finland. I am still experiencing some kind of culture shock. Feeling the fresh sebtember air, looking at the ugly automarkets, understanding people in the public transport etc.

The second shock is that the summer of 2008 is irreversibly over. I hope that Stef, Julia, Michel, Saskia, Zack, Chen, Shuo, James, Royce and others do not fade away and that at least I keep the memories of awesome time when I still was young, if not so wild anymore. Thank you!

night at the castle

Night at the castle 20 kilometers away from Vienna, stranded by a rolling thunderstorm. Alone in the dark castle while the bell tower rings for quarter to midnight, only to be drowned by yet another thunder, which illuminates the windows. I would be scared to meet right about anybody here at IIASA tonight. I seem to be already too tired to work, but not tired enough yet to collapse on the carpet to sleep. Hence, I am finally updating my blog. The last month has been great and I am sad to think that the end of this Summer is very near. Lots of things happened since I last wrote, besides getting stranded at the Airport, I witnessed my little sister Minttu getting married, went to paddle at the Danube nature reserve, did clubbing and a heurigen crawl with bike, met a gay couple, learned Taiji, watched an opera recording from a big screen and probably did many other things which I should have written down while I still remembered. I planned to write off course, but I've been working a lot and coming back home in Simmering quite late and usually I've been too tired to do much.

Lets see if I can get some sleep despite the conditions.

24.7. Orpheus & Eurodyce

I am forced to upload this entry quite late as I wrote it in the plain to Finland and was not able to get online. Since then my girlfriend was around and I did not have time to update the blog. on the 25. I should have requested to get into the Finnair business lounge, as I was forced to wait additional six hours at the Helsinki-Vantaa international airport, as they jousted me out of my flight. Hopefully, they really do compensate as much as they promised. Well in the previous day I was enjoying some modern dance...

After many difficulties I finally sat down in the third row of Theatre and der Wien not really knowing what to expect of the next two hours. but what a show it turned out be. erotic yes, that was to be expected from the description on the Impulz dance web page, but still I was baffled by the strength of the presence compared to any recorded shows. This feeling was stipulated even more by few sequences where some of the dancers danced within the audience, especially eurodice who passed me by within arms length in those golden micro shorts and skimpy bits barely covering the nipples... whoa I am getting carried away here :) besides this don't look back episode there were many others more explicit ones, but trying to describe them here is pretty pointless. all I can say is that I enjoyed the show for all the money I paid for it.

going out in Vienna

My last weekend was dedicated to clubbing, and in Vienna, it is quite easy. From the Finnish perspective drinks are cheap in bars and nightclubs, the public transport starts again before the clubs shut down and there are plenty of places to chooce from. My Friday consisted of a local wine tavern in Simmering with tradiotional "Austrian" live music, salsa club in the downtown and finally into side of Saturday morning flux club with indie rock night next to the danube canal. On Saturday after recovering for most of the day, I started in a "beach" bar by the Danube canal and stopped completely exhausted in Arena closeby Gasometer after 5 hours of fervent Drum & Base rhythms. Optionally, I could have gone to the Nuke festival in St Pölten which is some kilometers off from Vienna to listen Chemical Brothers and Lennie Kravitz. However, on Friday I was still not quite sure how my bruised toes are able to cope and I did not bother to persuade people to leave the city. Today I learned that I was not the only one of the YSSPrs to enjoy the ear shattering (I had the plugs and still my ears were ringing) beats on Saturday, but we had failed to coincidentally spot each other between the 3 different dance floors and few bars and food stalls.

What is difficult, though, is the adjusting of the daily (or should I write nightly) rhythm between work and clubbing. On Friday, people started to flow into the club only after 24, which is the time when I close my eyes during the week. Fortunately on Sunday I did not sleep to long and somehow managed to go to bed at 10.30 and drag myself out of there today at 7.10.

Bad Samaritan

It is nice to have good lectures from time to time and contrast to many interesting seminars here at IIASA, the one we had today was also entertaining. If you happen to see book called Bad Samaritan The Myth of Free Trade and Secret History of Capitalism I would recommend borrowing, buying, or if you are from a poor country pirat copying the book. The book is nicely titled and will surely attract plenty of conspiracy theorists, although the author Ha Joon Chang, refuses to take the arguement quite that far. Instead, it is nicely shown that at certain extensive periods, most of the "developed" nations have sheltered their industries from free trade and more often than not this had led to economic prosperity.

After such topics going back to my own work with crop categories, soil classes and field slopes is so boring...

Hochschwab in Styria

Another awesome hiking trip for the weekend. We took a train to Bruck an der Mur and a bus from there to Seeweisen where we started the hike from. Only four minutes between the bus and the train left me without food supplies and little water, so the advise for future hikers would be to take care of the supplies in advance (instead of say playing poker the previous night). Well fortunately my buddies Stef and Julia had food and we got water few hours later from a mountain spring. Also close to the top there is a restaurant and few more when you get closer down to the valley. The first hours went by without seeing people, but instead we met a mountain goat who took the incidence quite calmly. Should have guessed that they are used to people who started to trickle from the opposite direction when we had reached the top of the range. The weather forecast for the weekend was gloom and few times we were close to getting wet, but then the sky cleared again thanks to the heavy wind and we got even some sun shine. We reached the "hut" near Hochschwab top almost in time after about 5-6 hours of walking. The hut turned out to be a cross between restaurant and a hoster with modern interior design and prices which were as close to the sky as the restaurant. While having the coffee, we contemplated the chance that we would encounter Saskia who had taken a later train and as we declared that it would be unlikely to see her during the trip (without mobile network coverage), she walks in :)

Well we made it to the windy top an hour later and from there walked for 3-4 hours more for our potentially fully booked hut. We found it before dark, discovered that we would have beds and I had some very good dearstew, local snapsch and bier. Next morning (after night of listening to snoring) the weather was foggy and we took our time with the breakfast. We decided not to go for any more mountain tops, walked back towards civilisation, had a swim in the green lake and were utterly drenched by the thunderstorm just few minutes before reaching the restaurant close to the buss station. Thanks to Stef for arranging the hike!

ktm strada 3000

new nice fast and shiny