I'm so happy! My Finnish: An Essential Grammar arrived the other day - I would have posted sooner, but Matt was staying at mine meaning I couldn't post. Anyway, what a godsend. Last week, when I ordered it off Amazon, was when I decided to step up my Finnish, and I couldn't do that without a grammar. What a fantastic book. Beautiful to look at and read. I think I would marry this book if it was legal. One problem I have though, is living in the UK. Bookshops here seem to only cater for the popular languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish, which means it is very difficult to find anything on Finnish (or Hungarian or Turkish for that matter). Sooo! Now I have a Finnish course and reference grammar - I need a dictionary. It would be absolutely impossible to find a Finnish dictionary in shops (with the exception of travellers ones which are of no use to me) and the only dictionaries I can find on Amazon have really bad reviews and/or are dead expensive. Whiiiich leads me onto my next point...

Helsinki! I made the decision the other day that I will go during the summer (probably August). I have to go. I might ask my Grandad if he will take me for my birthday, haha. I lie awake at night and hear her calling me: "Tom... Tom... Lähtisitkö kanssani ulos tänä iltana?". Sigh. It would cost me maybe about £150 to go for two nights, including accomodation. Even if Matt or anyone else don't want to come with me - I am going. There's so much yet to see, and I'm gonna make sure Helsinki is one of the first to be crossed off my list, meaning that I have more opportunities to go back to Finland and see places like Rovaniemi and Lapland. It makes me laugh though, because my Finnish book says "The Finns are excellent dictionary makers, so if you ever go to Helsinki you are in luck". Can you see where I'm going with this? :-)

Anyway, closer to home, my house for the next academic year! It's all sorted on paper, the room in the house is mine. There have been no financial interactions between me and the landlord (which is one of the girls mothers), but the room is mine. Remember how my flatmate decided he didnt want to live with me? Well I'll tell you the whole story. Basically, after Christmas, we decided that we definately definately wanted to live together, and rather than just talking about it, like we had been before Christmas, we were going to take positive steps to finding somewhere. We also got the interest of our Turkish friend Özge, who wanted to live with us. We found the most amazing three bedroomed flat, but Özge needed to back out, so James and I had to aswell. This seemed to deterr James, who didn't look for anywhere else. I would say to him "If you don't want to look for places to live, let me!" to which he would reply: "No no no! I'll do it!". But I had a look on the sly anyway, and found a few places. But then he turns around one day and told me that our friendship had run it's course, we needed to make new friends, that things had become really stale and perfunctory between me him and Nikki, and that it was time to move on. I wouldn't have minded if he told me this sooner, as I could tell that he had been waiting ages to tell me, and also because it would have meant I had a better choice of places to live. But no. He tells me in April. At least I have somewhere to live now, which is more than him. He said two of his coursemates had a place to live, but thats fallen through and as such they have nowhere. I'll be going into a new 5bed house, all girls, but three are moving out. Left, will be an Italian girl whose mother is the landlord, and her BFF Rozzy. They seem to be inseparable. I'll have a large room and a bay window :-) In the future, you will be hearing much about this house, and the people in it.

I've noticed my posts are always really long - does this bother people? I'll try and cut-down, but I just feel like theres no where else I can ramble on about such things, 'cos my mates said it was boring if I tell them I want to go places and do things. But I think my friends are bland and Anglo-Centric. The Bastards. 

 

By the way Finns, what the fuck is with the Partitive (Partitiivi) Case? It's currently making me want to put bamboo under my fingernails :-)