Balticum, Baltigo

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We spent the weekend in Riga, Latvia which was a nice break from Finland and I have always been very curious about the Baltic states. The food was good, the Jugendstil buildings both shabby and beautiful and the people enigmatic. It's somewhat sad that cheap air travel and the internet have pushed many destinations around the globe towards a sameness no matter where you decide to go. This isn't to say that you won't find differences, just that they are harder to find and often a culture hangs on through the local traditional foods and the language. I bought a Latvian cookbook and am finding the similarities in the cuisine and slight variations in ingredients to be a strong cultural connection to Finland even if the languages are worlds apart.

Forever the masochist, I started Finnish classes again today. I wanted to take the conversation course but it was filled already so it's back to another semester of "Kysy naapurilta!" It often feels like the circus of the futile, especially when the teacher breezes through some rather broad grammatical concept and then tells the students to do an exercise in the book by the seat of their pants. Minutes tick by as many look around the room to see if they are being slow or if everyone is as confused as they. Maybe I'm getting better at this game as I didn't bother thinking about the tic-tac-toe of forms and endings and just wrote what I thought sounded right and did pretty well. Still, it is at times like these I wonder how I managed to spend so much of my life in a classroom.