hiidenkonttibeta

No updates for a long while.. ごめん. The city has looked utterly boring and gray lately, so no photos. And I’ve been playing busy updating my homepage (soon about half done – but this includes scanning of photos, there’s still one category to do…) and trying to catch up in Japanese. We’ll have our last normal Japanese lesson next week, and then there’s some discussion sessions in smaller groups. “Tell about yourself” and other fascinating subjects. Eep..!

Here’s a list of kanji we’re supposed to learn this Spring from the Japanese course materials (not including those already among the ~50 I listed before):

joki, kukka, oppiminen, mennä sisään, (oppilas), katsoa, aikainen/nopea, koulu, punainen, aiempi, taivas, henki, sade
pohjoinen, etelä, maa, samanlainen, lumi, itä, taivas, länsi, pääkaupunki, korkea, kaupunki, lause, isä

kieli, ystävä, tekninen, paikka, metsä, ulkopuoli, meri, tapaaminen, lähettää, syödä, käsi, yritys
sähkö, keskustelu, lähellä, auto, suunta, sininen/vihreä, pysähtyä, koira, merkki, äiti, leikata, lanka

Note that the Finnish “translation” is far from exact, it’s only giving a hint of the meaning in some cases..

Wet, heavy snow has been falling in Post-It sized flakes this week.

dirtyice biketracks whiteyards snowyparks

Another packet from Hong Kong.. I’ve got packets from two completely different senders, and both use the same green paper as a wrapping for the package. Is this some kind of official paper for postal packets in HK? But what do we have here..? (If there’s something wrong with packet in the first photo, that’s because I censored it a little..)

Japanese special edition of PlayStation 2 game サクラ大戦 – complete with an extra DVD, a photo frame of the cast, and a “made in China” pocket watch?! Woohoo! Last year I figured out that since playing adventure games & RPG’s greatly improved my English skills as a kid, I should try the same trick with Japanese. But it’s quite hard to obtain Japanese versions of PS2 games – Japan’s Amazon (and other companies I’ve checked) are not willing to send them abroad. This one I found in shrink-wrapped condition from ebay. Now I only need to get a modchip installed in my PS2 to be able to play this (and to find out what kind of game it is, actually..)

The last photo shows a nice car trap.. The snow is wet, if it gets cold at night it will turn to concrete-class ice..

During the night the fog seems to freeze into trees, resulting in totally white trees which seemed to have grown a snowy fur:

I also walked around the nearest park photographing trees with a real camera.

Lots of fog in Oulu this week.

木曜日に I tried doing some more serious photographing with a real camera, but in Pikisaari there was too much fog and too few lights, and in Ainolanpuisto and city center there was too little fog :-/

Villatulkku on lentokyvytön mukalintu. Joku pisteli valomiekkoja pyörien renkaisiin? CCD näkee tähtiä, ja hiihto ei näköjään ole enää muodissa.