There’s far too much to say about everything right now, but after an inspiring Futuresonic conference in Manchester I followed a hunch and visited a fellow conference attendee in Sheffield. We don’t know what it is yet, but there’s something good going on.

Rather than regret not doing anything and returning to Australia in the next month or so, I’m going to take the safer risk and stay in Sheffield for a while to actually get to know this young man. So, the hunt is on for a job, a flat, some dirt to garden in and new experiences.

More to come…

The last two months have been strange. Good though.

I arrived back in Finland one year to the day after leaving. And my plan at that point was to stay here for a month or so, to make some side trips to visit friends living elsewhere in Europe and then to go home. I had sworn to myself that I would not want to stay away from Adelaide for any longer than 3 months - to do so would be in contradiction to what I stand for. I had plans you see, plans to save my hometown single handedly and to make it an exciting and dynamic city that draws young people from the world around. I had to go back home and do that.

I still do have those plans, but somehow they’ve become terribly confused in the last few months. Friendships that I’d begun when I was first in Helsinki became even more strengthened. There were offers from my old boss to work at a new club he was going to open - only a week later I became adamant that I’d never work in a loud bar again. At the same time Toph (who I worked with at Ratbag) had moved to Helsinki too - I had yet another friend to hang out with in this town. Then, I started to think - if I don’t want to work in a nightclub, but still want to stay in Europe for the summer - what could I do instead?

I also made other new friends and went to Pixelache Festival which ultimately deserves an entire (very belated) entry of its own as it sent me on a 10 day bender on the internets as I read and linked and thought [almost] far too much.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with information about art, technology, collaboration, sustainable travel, ubiquitous computing and subcultures. I was reminded that my loves of gardening, urban design theory, architecture, craft, literature and culture actually can be combined with my technical background. Even though traditional games programming hadn’t been the ideal career for me, that didn’t mean that being a geek was a bad thing that needed to be completely written out of my life. Most importantly, I began to realise that there could actually be work that I would love to do if I combined my technical background with urban design. Most importantly this work could tie into the slowly gestating radelai.de concept: how can cities and towns best use communication technologies (web, mobiles, social networks) to become more vibrant and sustainable communities?

This of course is great. After a couple of years in the professional wilderness I have a path to follow. But after a bit of research into Urban Design degrees back in Adelaide I found out that I can’t actually start studying Masters until the beginning of 2009. Which has left me with 9 months to kill.

So I’ve been thinking once more about working somewhere in Europe for that time. It would give me a chance to live overseas again, I would be earning money - and there is so much more work related to my long term path in Europe. But I have two major problems: I left my house in the care of a housesitter with NOTHING packed up AND all the jobs that I’m seriously considering would be permanent positions. And before any of you suggest that I take up a job “permanently” and then quit 9 months later… Well, I’m pretty terrible at lying (even by omission) and that course of action would not really be in my best interests.

But then again, to not take the opportunities for doing this kind of work would also not be in my best interests - particularly when I could learn so much at any of the companies that I’ve been looking at. Would working towards this goal be better than formal study?

Ultimately I need to go back to Australia to organise my “stuff”, but after that, I’m not really sure what could happen.

I really am trying to summarise far too much in too few words - when ideally I should have been blogging about this all along, though my Twitter and Facebook updates have been fairly confusing reading for a lot of my friends!

Anyway, what I started out to say was that decisions about “home” and life are difficult, and even when you think you have plans, a path and a place to stay - your situations can change drastically.

Today, I went with Toph to the airport, just two months after he arrived in Helsinki to start a new stage of his career. A week ago, he found out that his mum was sick and understandably he chose to go back home to Australia for at least the next two months. I truly hope that everything goes well for Toph’s family, and I really am going to miss hanging out with him here in my other home, Helsinki.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed this mental phenomena or if it even has a name, but hopefully I’ll describe it in a way that makes sense.

You might regularly pass along a street and so the facades of buildings become familiar. Then for some reason, an appointment, the purchase of a specific item, you enter one of the buildings and it is no longer a facade facing a street, but a real(ised), three-dimensional space filled with people, objects and stories. From that point on, whenever you pass along that street, you can comprehend the form of the building, and as such it becomes far easier to imagine what might be happening inside. The physical world is still the same size, but somehow the representation of its space in your head and imagination has become larger.

This is not to say that you can’t imagine what is behind a facade without walking through it, but imagining becomes far easier once you have a collection of the real in your mind to draw from.

I feel that it’s the same with people. Names and faces are facades, but until we interact with another person’s mental and emotional space, it is much harder to imagine what that person’s life is like. Of course, once you begin to know a person, it is like rooms in their self open up in your mind. As with physical spaces, the more human spaces you know, makes it easier to imagine what an unknown person is experiencing and feeling.

Almost two years ago I ended up living in Finland. An imagined land of snow and Moomintrolls was now a three-dimensional space of parks and lakes and islands and streets, cafes, kitchens and living rooms, workspaces and tram-tracks. The abstracted population of “Suomi” became a community of real people, people with stories and feelings and goals and failures. They were mothers, fathers, coworkers, customers, bank-tellers, friends and strangers I smiled at on endless summer days as we drank cider in parks.

About a year later, back in Australia, the news of a school shooting in Jokela, a few hours north of Helsinki, really shook me. This was a violent act taking place in a culture that I had come to know, even though I hadn’t visited the town. I could imagine the faces of the students, what clothes they wore and food they ate, how they spoke and interacted with their families. My exposure to people and places meant that the Jokela violence affected me far more intensely than similar incidents in the United States, a country I have never visited.

Surely this wasn’t a just way for me to react? What makes the lives of people we can’t easily imagine less valuable than those who are already “real” in our minds? Sometimes, imagining and remembering places and people I know, feels far more authentic than the empathy I can muster together for people I am _just_ imagining. Then I have to remind myself that I’m not alone in the continual practice of combining memory, place, people and imagining to understand more about the world.

As far as I can tell, this practice of imagination and empathy for people takes me one step closer to becoming compassionate in the true sense. In isolation from people, compassion is possible, but difficult. However, once you know how some individuals feel, it is far easier to feel empathy and thereby be moved to compassion towards a greater number of people.

To me, that is why travel is so important in making a person grow towards a better state of being. Countries which may have just been marketing images in a magazine now become real, living spaces full of life and smells and sound. When traveling, one is not just confronted by new spaces, they’re also meeting new people and learning their experiences and stories.

Exposed to new people and places your heart begins to stretch so it can accommodate and acknowledge these amazing new experiences and memories. Of course, once it becomes easier for your heart and mind to feel and empathise, it also becomes far easier to miss and long for the places and people you are no longer near. Despite the longing and missing, you know that you can always experience just one more place and make connections with a few more people, safe in the knowledge that your heart will stretch that little bit more.

On the windowsill of my room in Merihaka I have a temporary garden of lettuce, parsley and thyme in jars, mugs and reused plastic containers struggling to survive out of their traditional hydroponic environments.

At times I miss Adelaide horribly. I miss the way the park by my bus stop smells on a warm evening and the sounds the rainbow lorikeets make. I miss the Farmers and Central markets and the fact that I don’t need to buy airfreighted fruit and overpackaged food from a chain store. I miss my friends, Queen St and my old job, my bike and Womadelaide. I miss it but it all feels a bit unreal. I miss my garden and my ridiculously large house which is both a blessing and a burden.

But I’m back in Helsinki and that means that I’m surrounded by a tremendous amount of good stuff. I’m love that Ninnu and Sid are an hour away and that I have friends in Helsinki too. I love that there is snow even though it’s the warmest winter in a century. I love the drying cupboards in the kitchens and fact I can shower as long as I like and not have to carry the used water on to the garden. I love the smell a wood-fired sauna makes and that I don’t need to talk or think when the löyly hits my skin and my head. I love the amazing design surrounding me and the scale and density of the city and the public transport. I love the range of salmiaki in the pick and mix section of the video store and the rye bread. I love that even though I never studied the language I can actually understand some of what I read and hear.

I’m flattered that here I’m greeted like a minor celebrity by some old customers “Hei! You! Australian Girl!” and that my English is international enough to confuse some people into not knowing where I’m from at all.

For all the good stuff here I’m frustrated too. I’m kind of bored because I don’t have a job to fill up some of my days and let me meet new people. I regret not studying Finnish because I understand enough to know that it will be years before I was ever fluent in a language only 6 million people speak. I’m frustrated that I feel heartbound to Adelaide but intrigued by Finland and that so many people are leaving while I’m away (not that my presence would have kept them there).

Every couple of days it seems like I switch moods between “I shall stay here and work at the bar so I can stay for the summer…” to “I need to go home and make radelai.de happen right now!” and then to “Ooooh, maybe I should apply for a Masters program here… It’s free!”. I half make plans for a summer in Europe and for May in Australia.

I am confused by choices and I don’t want to give either one up just yet.

I had a feeling today that it would be snowing in Helsinki, and it turns out my intuition is right!

Hopefully the reflections off the snow help keep my friends happier through the scary dark month of November. And the fact that it’s November already means that in less than 3 months I’ll be getting on a plane to head back over to the other side of the world. I can’t wait to go back to Finland and visit other parts of the world, but at the same time I really don’t want to leave my lovely hometown.

i know. i miss you! by Fighting Tiger.

A few months ago I tried to articulate to a friend who’s spent some time living in Japan the feeling that you get when you’ve really fallen for another culture and group of friends. It’s not that you don’t love your origins anymore, but that your heart just stretches and gets bigger to fit all the new people and experiences in. It is a frustrating experience, because you know that if you spend a significant amount of time in either place you’ll always end up missing what you don’t have.

Lately I’ve been desiring specific experiences that were easily come by in Finland - as I can still talk to my friends and listen to the music, the experiences I was looking for were mainly culinary. Last week I tried to find cheese equivalent to the rather bland Finnish juusto and a rye bread similar to the amazing black bread splits I lived off - but to no avail. I’ve also been regularly stocking up on Dutch salt liquorice in a desperate attempt to capture the ever so slightly different taste of salmiakki. On a trip to Ikea I stocked up on gloggi (mulled wine) mix, lingonberry jam and was over the moon to find a carton of blueberry soup. The lingonberry jam will be dolloped on spinach pancakes (pinaattiohukainen), and breakfasts for the next week will be porridge with cinammon (canelli) and blueberry soup stirred in. Pure comfort food.

Finnish Christmas Food by Fighting Tiger.

As Christmas rushes towards us, I’m planning on making piparkakut (gingerbreads) to eat while sipping on vodka spiked gloggi, and maybe I’ll even attempt to make some of the traditional casseroles. Carrot and rice casseroles will be easy to recreate - but my favourite casserole was made of lantuu (rutabaga or swedes) which is a winter vegetable, so that will have to wait for another time.

Despite the possibility to recreate the culinary experiences of Finland, the consumption will not be entirely satisfactory, as the food may be real, but the experience will be a simulacra of something I remembered. I’ll pick nettles to dry for tea and sit down to my porridge and blueberry soup for breakfast, but I won’t be eating it in the company of Ninnu, Sid and Ronja. In February, when I’m sitting down with the people that I miss in kitchens on the other side of the world, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll pull out my tube of Vegemite and be plotting the creation of pie floaters in an attempt to taste the memories of this side of the world.

pie floater prototype by Fighting Tiger.