Moving Anxiety

This is the week. This is the week that I move to Helsinki and my summer job starts. So this is the week that summer starts for real.

I’m nervous about moving and I’m nervous about my first day at work. Well, it’s only the second biggest newspaper in Finland. Big deal. Only like 700 000 people will see the outcome if I screw up. No reason to be nervous, right? Anyway, working is what I want to do now. It’s much more fun than studying and you get paid for it! So on the other hand I’m really excited. I just wouldn’t want go through the trouble of having to move AGAIN away for the summer. I hate picking up all my things and stuffing them to bags and boxes (see, I’m avoiding that right now by writing this). The worst part is dragging the bags to the new place. That should be counted as an Olympic-level sports performance.

I’ve just started to feel like home here again. Had the best day yesterday with my girlfriends. And mine and J’s small apartment finally starts to look nice (maybe my eyes just are getting used to all the junk). Feels bad to leave all of that behind for three months. I took pics of my favorite details in our home to relieve leaving and homesickness.

My newest interior design find: wall stickers from Maisons de Monde, Nice.

My flea market finds: pillow with the pink pattern and chair upholstered by my mom. The wall is covered with cards with a few of my favorite phrases.

Yay for jewelry trees. Life would be so hard without them, I would just lost all my earrings on the bottom of drawers etc.

The cutest lamp and wine bottles from Romania. It’s good J is colorblind so he doesn’t care about the colors that prevail in our home. 😉

Dog Fever

I’ve had some severe symptoms of dog fever for months now and visiting Barcelona and France didn’t really help. They have the cutest doggies over there. I want one!

I’m seriously starting to think about getting a dog after the summer… It would be better to take a puppy while I’m still studying so I would have more time to train it. Though, if I  graduated and had a job first, I would for sure have money to get the dog everything it needs. We’ll see. For sure I’ll continue at least dreaming about a puppy of my own. Maybe it’s going to be like the ones I saw on the journey…?

The one that eats tapas and the one to crash your picnic.

The one that likes birds.

The one that makes sure the beaches of French Riviera stay clean.

The one to understand if you had a rough day…

And the ones that know; it’s always better together. 🙂

Photo Collage

This gallery contains 23 photos.

Here’s my travel album of the latest trip, compressed to… well to quite a few photos considering the selection I had to begin with. I’m pretty sure everyone has seen a picture of the Sagrada Familia (a famous church in … Continue reading →

Back with a Big Bill

After a night of traveling I’m back to Finland safe and sound but officially broke. I somehow lived in this ever continuing Asia-dream before the trip and I convinced myself that traveling is always almost as cheap as in Asia. Well, Barcelona and the French Riviera pulled me back to reality quite quickly with their almost Finland-high prices. But the trip was worth of every spent penny. Even I’ve now crossed my lowest personal poverty line in my adulthood, we had so much fun! (Or I had, not sure K agrees with me that being stuck with me and my stories for 10 days is fun. ;))

Anyway we ended up staying in Barcelona for a couple of days and we could have stayed longer, but didn’t want to stay in the same crappy hostel kept by kind-of-cranky old lady who refused to speak anything else than Spanish and tried to overcharge us. Lucky for us, K has taken some Spanish classes… Thinking changing the hostel causes trouble anyway, after three nights we took a bus to laid-back Montpellier, hanged around there for two nights and then took the train to Nice (unfortunately there wasn’t a bus connection, ’cause trains are expensive…). From Nice we explored Monaco, small town Villefranche and the filmfestival-fever in Cannes. The busses are slow and crowded but it’s possible to get all the way from Nice to Cannes or to Monaco only with one euro! And the scenery at the Mediterranean sea is pretty incredible.

The weather was comfortably warm and sunny almost all the time so mine and K’s white Finnish skin got a nice light tan easily (read: burned. We had the British Glamour magazine as our traveling companion and we should have really revised the tanning tips… For some reason I was only interested in the tip: eat pizza, because tomato somehow helps you not to burn your skin so easily. So I just went to do as told. Mmmm…. Pizza). 😛

This was my second visit to France (first was the Paris-trip last fall) and I’m falling in love with French (and Southern European) food more and more every second I spend in that country. Now I sort of came obsessed with goat cheese, because it was just around every corner. I must have eaten chevré in every form possible; pizzas, wraps, paninis…. You name it, I most definitely ate it. 😀 Well, at least I have something to think back now that I’m doomed to eat only oat meal for a month with my current bank account balance.

I’ll post some pictures about everything in few days, as soon as I get my photos and brains sorted out of this travel fatigue!

Ready to Roll

Yay, just finished my last exam of this academic year (hmm, more like semester for me though, ‘coz I skipped fall for Asia…) and it feels great. Summer is just around the corner. Or actually my summer holiday starts right now because in June I already start working in Helsinki. What is even better, me and my friend K are leaving for Barcelona tomorrow!!!

So our original master plan was to rent a car and drive through the Cote d’Azur (Or how do the French spell it?) and after 10 days fly back from Nice. But as always things don’t turn out quite the way they were planned and we found out that to return a rental car into a different city and country would have cost us 500-1000 euros of extra. Therefore our plan at the moment is to continue by train or bus from Barcelona to Montpellier and further to Nice, maybe stop by in Monaco or some other cities near Nice to see more of the French Riviera… I guess we’ll know after 11 days what happened. 😉

I’m quite excited about the trip too just to escape the pollen in here! Or I don’t know what this is what I’ve got, since I haven’t had pollen allergy before, but now my throat has been itchy and nose running for over a week. Of course I’ve done the ultimate mistake and Googled the symptoms (I don’t have fever or anything so I’ve still trusted my own treatments rather than gone to the doctor…) and of all the options Google offers, I like to calm myself down with the pollen allergy one. Yep, I’m usually always suffering more of Google-caused hypochondria than of real sickness.

Well, it’s probably nothing a good trip couldn’t heal. And of course since it’s officially now my summer holiday Southern Europe is the place to be because of the weather. It should be around 20-22 celsius degrees down in Barcelona, when it’s only like around 10 here in Finland.  I’ve got my camera ready, clothes almost packed and passport secured in my bag… Here we come!

Yay also for the possibility of taking colorful summer rags and bikinis into use again! And of course yay for all the new clothes I’ll hopefully find in Barcelona and Nice. 😀