Helsinki, proper stay this time.

From a Helsinki bed...

Oh HOW we slept last night, solid and silent and long.. all we managed after arriving in our room was to admire the features (standard modern hotel room, but the bed is in one piece, there is a big shelf in the bathroom, and I have the window side), unpack completely (and gee, what piles of stuff come out of those little hard-working suitcases), stagger out to eat, stagger back, and fall over.

M woke me just now with real coffee, yes we have a kettle, it’s amazing what a difference it makes to food if you have even the tiniest fridge, and a kettle.. and I am lying on the bed, looking (from the 7th floor) over the Helsinki Town Square rooftops, towards the cathedral. On a building nearby is the time and temperature, a breezy 19 degrees today. I see the locals are wearing jeans and long-sleeved jackets, so it can’t be so warm yet.

I woke dreaming of my brother, and a Chinese princess, and strangeness and distance and the madness of elite protocols in dynasties... what? Like, the princess needed a nom-de-plume, so all over the kingdom a list was made of all existing names, so she could be given a unique one.. I seem to have the Chinese on my mind. Which reminds me, I missed the diving in the Olympics again. I miss it every time. Dang. I like watching diving.

Anyway, we are slowly pulling ourselves together (with the help of the coffee and Rachmaninov’s 3rd piano concerto on the iPod) in time to meet M’s Finnish linguistic professor for lunch. I don’t much feel like going out, but I think we are free afterwards for more collapsing as needed.

Haven’t cracked the hotel’s “free” interwebs yet. I tried last night, by pressing buttons on the remote to make clever things happen on the tv, but I couldn’t then get the little laptop to run off the connection I think we’ve paid for.. oh well. Research later today should clear that up. The set-up in the room is that you tell the telly that you want interwebs, then use the keyboard on the desk with the telly as the screen. INteresting.

Seeya later..

I wish I could stay in bed....