Jane in Finland: Thursday September 9

I'm beginning to remember my friend Judy Chan more and more. It seems like 12 pm is the earliest I can meet anyone because I seem to be enjoying sleeping a little too much. perhaps my body is just making up for all the sleep I lost during the summer months. Luckily, our lunch date with the girls was at 12.30 so I easily made it. I was not impressed with the student restaurant that we went to today because the meatballs I had were much too salty and had a strange texture. Oh well. Somedays you win, some days you lose. After lunch, Noora, Lucy and I went to a second hand shop where I found some very useful kitchenware. Now I have not one, but TWO forks! I also found some Russian books by Pushkin and Tolstoy in the free bin so now I have enough reading material to last me all four months :) We biked past a viking restaurant that looked very interesting but by the time we got to the main post office where I will at one point be purchasing stamps, my bag felt heavy with the dishes and books and I decided to go home to east and rest before the karaoke party that me and Kerstin were going to go to.
For me, rest meant finishing the laundry that I failed to properly launder last night. All my tasks were successfully finished by the time I was to pick Kerstin up and we headed to Juulia's flat. It was very convenient for us to go there since Juulia also lives in our neighborhood of Kuokkala.
After some adventures of Kerstin's chain coming off (like I warned her it would!!) and not being able to find the house right away because Kerstin left the exact address at home, we found it. Inside, there were already lots of Finnish ethnology students. Kerstin is the only international student in the department of ethnology and I was her guest. We played a name game to start off the evening and proceeded to eat and sing. I picked Celine Dion's "My heart will go on" as my debut and one of the guys battled me. He was a typical heavy metal lover so it was funny to see him pelt out flowery notes. Later on in the evening, him and I sang ALL of the Avril Lavigne songs that Juulia's machine had. What a gong show.
The Finnish students were really nice and everything was great but me and Kerstin were exhausted by 12 pm. This was partially due to the scorching heat inside. The windows couldn't be opened because Juulia's two cats would escape. It felt nice to go outside and breath some fresh air.