I wrote this yesterday and now I'm at a church friend's house so I can post it!
There is simply too much to tell you! I am here in Turku since Friday night, but without internet at home (I’m hoping to post this from work or a friend’s house). Because while I can get a mobile router with super-fast internet service, I have to wait for it to come in the mail (seriously).
1. Mostly I heard Finnish today. Russian was second, and Arabic third. So at least I understood some of what people were saying (hint: not the Finnish. Though I did speak to a woman at IKEA and said “horse” instead of “white,” so there was that. (It’s because I had studied the phrase “white horse,” and then today could not remember which word was white and which part was horse.))
2. I was feeling pretty awesome today, getting myself around the city by bus. Turns out I was S-M-R-T because I took one bus the wrong way, got off and took a bus back, found the right bus, and then missed it. Let’s just say there have been lots of moments like this today. The one consolation is that at least I fit in here. Nobody stares at me because I look like a stupid foreigner. They have to wait until I act like one.
3. I hit a low the first night right after I got here and maybe even cried a little. Foreign countries are hard, and I missed having superstar Jeremy with me. I also missed the chorus of positivity that my children often are in new places – they’re always able to find something to be excited about when all I can see is a completely empty apartment.
4. When you are learning a foreign language, sometimes a word or phrase gets stuck in your head for days at a time. I remember when we moved to Russia, I think “otkuda viy” spent a week running on an endless loop in my mind (it means where are you from?). Today’s word is “tervetuloa.”
5. Oh yeah, so Aeroflot is THE WORST. Jeremy warned me not to fly with them, but we’d done it before when we lived in Russia and the ticket was cheap, so I risked it. NEVER AGAIN. The Dubai-Moscow flight was delayed five hours, ensuring that I would miss my connecting flight, even though I had a four-hour layover. But then! My connecting flight from Moscow-Helsinki was also delayed, by 2.5 hours, so it all worked out. Except for the part where the security checkpoint at Sheremetevo Airport was deserted of all employees, and we passengers were all just milling around in this locked room, and then someone pressed the red emergency button on the wall to see if it would summon an employee, and then the phone rang and nobody else answered it so I did, and the woman said, in Russian, “is everything ok there? Someone pressed the red button,” and I said in Russian “no, it’s not ok, there is nobody working here and all the passengers are just waiting” and she said something else I didn’t understand, and so I said “what?” but I said it the way you would in Arabic, but in Russian, which isn’t correct, so she hung up on me. But then an employee did come, so it all worked out.
6. Yes I have already used the sauna. Not gonna lie, I really wish that space were a bedroom, but I am doing my best to embrace the sauna. On Friday when my university liaison person brought me to the apartment, it was practically the first thing she said: “oh good, there’s a sauna.” Oh good!
All right, enough for now. Sorry I missed Outsourced Friday this week – the other thing that made the Aeroflot debacle even worse was that WiFi at DXB was down. I had been planning to do the post then, and I certainly had time on my hands (like five hours), but without internet I couldn’t. I'll save those links for this Friday.