Jane in Finland: Friday October 29 - A taste of culture [ Art and wine]

I hope that one day my typical Friday could always consist of frequenting a few art museums, dinner at a restaurant and a wine tasting in the evening.

Sadly, this is not the life of a student so this Friday was a treat.

My Finiteness of Finnish Art ( a mouthful to say I know) started today which went really well. I learned the basics of Finnish art and Finnish artists. Turns out that the typical artist lives alone in a forest and drinks himself to death. Lovely isn't it?

After our two hour introductory lecture to Finnish art, we set off on a two hour excursion to Galleria Becker and Galleria Harmonia. Both had interesting exhibitions. Galleria Becker had an oil painting exhibition called Landscape: Far away and close up. The painter wanted to put the viewer in the same spot as she was when she painted the pieces and convey the same feelings she was feeling and to do this she chose to put a square in the foreground of some of her paintings. For me, that square did not place me at the scene of her painting but on the contrary, pushed me farther away from feeling as if I am standing in front of that lake or whatever else was trying to be portrayed. Perhaps her method worked on someone else.

The second exhibition we saw was called (M)animalism at Galleria Harmonia. The photographer tried to capture how humans would behave in the bodies of animals or if animals were put into the authority that human beings had. There were some very clear photographs that conveyed this role reversal. Sadly i did not get a picture (as there was no picture taking allowed) of one that stuck in my memory for quite some time. It was a photo of a human arm covered in tattoos and a boa constrictor with the same colored scales roughly as the tattoos alongside the arm. It was an image that made me stop and think abut how similar humans and animals are in some ways. Also how humans act so much more savage than animals in some situations ... Hmm

All of the walking from gallery to gallery made me hungry and so our dinner at Sohwi's was quite welcome. The portion size was too small in my opinion and i had 1.5 portions! (Annelies couldn't finish hers) In portion size sense, Maria's is definitely better and cheaper too.

Yet at the wine tasting, it was not about quantity. It wasn't about quality either really as I thought the wine wasn't superbly fantastic. It was quite good for a homemade one but I still prefer my 2010 or 2009 Chardonnay from France.

A met a wonderful person today - her name is Sari Kaehne and she is Paivi's twin sister who came to visit from Hamburg. She will be one of my tour guides when I go to Hamburg and we clicked right away. The only downside to her visit is that it is much too short; she was scheduled to leave Monday morning. I was so honored when Paivi and Sari adopted me as their TRIPLET :D