I think the winter has arrived. It snowed last week!
View from our home street!
I am quite amused by the fact that we had our first snow before my family in Finland did! It's all gone now but the winter atmosphere is still here. I've been burning so many candles (that my girlfriend is worried that soon I will have no money left)! But I feel that the candles are making me feel less stressed out about this whole Christmas thing. Especially Christmas shopping, because surely I can just give candles to everyone. Candles are lovely.
A little Laura-elf hiding behind the tree.
We also erected our Christmas tree! It's new, cute and we bought it at 2am in our local supermarket. It's plastic and lacks that sensational pine tree scent, but I've solved the problem by buying pine tree scented candles. It's like having a real tree.
And since, I've now told you about the snow we had, it's a good time to tell you that Katja from Little Snow-blog gave me 11 questions challenge. I've done this challenge once before and told 11 facts about me, and answered Jonna's questions in this post, but now I'm going to answer Katja's 11 questions.
Remember when I mentioned that I would get new glasses? Well I did!
Also notice my funny socks that I got from my
ex-flatmate, Louise, as a birthday present!
What do you think of them? I quite like them, but my girlfriend thought at first that they are too hipster. They are big, but I've secretly always wanted big glasses, and since they are in fashion now, this seemed like too good and opportunity not to get them. I can also see a bit more comfortably with these than the old ones, although these felt heavy at first.
This week I also joined a new society! It's called Nippon Connections, and they are the university's society for people who are interested in Japanese culture and language. They had a film night on Friday, and I went along. We watched two Japanese films. The first one was an old Japanese film called Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa.
I don't know if it's because it was Japanese, or because it was released in 1950 or because it felt like a play - but it was a very weird film. It's refreshing to see something different though! After Rashomon, we watched an anime called Kiki's Delivery Service - 魔女の宅急便。
きき！
It was a great film! I mean, it was probably aimed for kids... But kids' films are happy, and I like happy films! There was a 13-year old witch, Kiki, who leaves home in order to become a successful village witch somewhere. Except Kiki has always dreamed of moving to a big city. So she takes her cat Jiji, and her mum's old broomstick and flies away to start a new life. And when she finds a perfect city, she's determined in settling in and starting her own business. I wish I had seen it earlier! I think it may have become my new favourite kids' film*.
In other Japanese study news, according to my phone and it's useful hiragana trainer app, I now master 97% of hiragana. And the morning after the day I congratulated myself for that, I turned on my computer and there was a little surprise for me. Erm, I wasn't really sure if I was ready for this.
My laptop screen.
For some reason my laptop was in Japanese. Presumably, some sort of error happened when the Japanese keyboard was installed for my computer. I had wanted to be able to write hiragana with my laptop, but my Japanese definitely is not good enough yet to have my whole computer in Japanese.
But fortunately, you can google anything these days. It is very useful in this sort of situation to be able to just ask google to translate things like "shut down". Being able to do that definitely made a traumatic experience like this more comfortable.
Thank you, Google Translate for helping me shut down my computer.
So yeah, my language learning is going well. I also received my Japanese Textbooks today! I now have a Basic Japanese Kanji book and Japanese for College Students. I hope these will be useful books when I try to learn vocabulary and grammar. My girlfriend is clearly threatened by my enthusiasm to language learning and signed up for a Mandarin Chinese language course at uni. Soon we can have competitions which one can read more kanjis. Doesn't that sound like a fun freetime activity?
Kone Helsinki: U05 and
Natural Collection: Crystal Clear.
Another thing I've been practising recently is something I've always found very difficult: varnishing my nails. My nails are short, but I think they look a lot more cheerful when they are painted a bright colour. I used to like coloured nails in secondary school, but I was really bad at it even then. There was always colour on my fingers as well, and the surface of the varnish was never smooth. But I bought these cheap nail varnishes so that I could practise. And I think I am getting a hang of it. Instead of one thick layer, I've been painting 3 thin coats and letting all of them dry before adding the next one. And because the pink nail varnish has some glitter in it, I've finished my nails with a layer of clear varnish on top of it to get a smooth surface, and also to make the varnish last longer. Ha, I have learned something new!
* I definitely think that the films I refer to as "kids' film" are suitable for adults too. I'm an adult and I enjoy watching them too! But because I have other favourite films from other genres, I wanted to specify that this is my favourite without an age limit.
