Lovely Finland!

How is it possible for a person to be so tired?! Yesterday I slept practically the whole day! Ok, during the actual night, I slept only something like 6 hours because there was a party here in the residence and therefor there was a lot of noice. Then I woke up at 9 in the morning, ate breakfast and... felt so sleepy that I decided to take a little nap there around 11. But the nap wasn't actually so small after all, because I woke up again at 15.30... And was like SHIT! The whole day is gone! And I was sure I wouldn't be able to sleep at all the next night, but amazingly enough, I had no problem at all falling asleep in the evening :)

Mmm... I really love sleeping :P

But a few words about the party... I had actually already decided not to go there because I still felt very sick and tired that day, but when the clock was getting close to 10 in the evening, I decided it wouldn't be any harm if I'd just check it out for a little while. But on the way downstairs I met my neighbour and she said there wasn't so many people there yet so in stead she invited me to her room and we sat there for an hour, drinking orange-juice and talked about France and our countries. She's from Algeria and speak really good french. And fast. So actually it was mainly she who spoke, I just nodded my head :D

Finally down at the party I talked with a lot of different people and was actually in the end very glad that I went there, even though I stayed only for one and a half hours (and oh yeah, all the alcohol was by the way finished already at midnight... and THAT would never happen on a party in Finland!). I met one form the Dominican Republic, two from Syria, one from Holland, some Germans and of course some French too. And it was really interesting to learn about all the different countries and especially hearing what those people knew about Finland! I was actually surprised that even the guy from the Dominican Republic knew exactly where Finland is located! Some of them knew what our capital is called, but even those who didn't remember it directly, recognized the name when I said it. Some also knew that Finland is usually listed very high on the list of welfare countries. But the thing Finland is obviously most famous for is our nature and our climate. People asked me about the nature, what it is like, if it's beautiful and if there's really as many forests as they had heard. They knew Finland is a large country and thought it was a bit funny that the most of the people still live in the south, near Helsinki. Then I also had to answer a lot of questions about the winter and the sun and the kaamos and all. They just didn't understand how people in Finland survive during the winter when it's so dark and cold. And how we are able to sleep during the astonishing summer when the sun is up so many hours. You should have seen the face of one of the Syrian guys when I told him that if you wear a scarf over your mouth when it's cold outside, it actually turns white! And that was right after he told me he usually doesn't go swimming in the sea before the water is close to 30° warm! :D

The funny thing is that one of the Germans I met, actually knew some swedish! He had been traveling around in Sweden after he finished school (and therefor he was also the first person I've met who knew Finland doens't actually belong to the scandinavian countries) and now he had started studying some swedish. But he refused to try to speak swedish with me :)

One hard thing about the party was that the girl from Holland and the guy from Germany didn't in fact speak any french because they were just visiting Paris and had come to the party with some friends from here. So I ended up switching from french to english and back to french all the time, and in the end I didn't know what language I actually spoke! :D I kept using french words even though I tried to speak english... Very annoying. It was like that too when I a few days ago wanted to explain a really complicated thing to Liss and decided to do that in english in stead of french. But it actually took several minutes for my brain to understand that I had changed the language.

But all this talk about Finland during the party made me think about home again. I later also ended up looking at a lot of old photos here on my computer and right now it feels like I begin to have had enough of France and french culture. Finland is so wonderfully...normal and understandable! :D We talked about this with Liss yesterday (it was raining outside and we were both a bit sick so I went to her place to watch the movie Chocolat while drinking loads of hot chcolate and eating chocolate of two different flavours... goody good!) and we've both understood that if nothing else, this exchange has at least thaught us to appreciate our home countries much, much more! Before we came, it was like "I want to go abroad! This country is boring! I want to see something else, someting exciting and different" but now, after two months here it's like "I wanna go home! Everything's so weird and annoying overe here! Why doens't anything work as it should? Why are everone so strange?" :D

...only 2,5 more months till I'll be back in lovely Finland again ;)

...although I have to admit that I aboslutely do not envy your "spring" this year ;P France actually do have some good sides too ;)