In a week, I will be leaving for Korea and Japan.

I have been so yearning to go back. 

I know that I am going to have a wonderful time there. 

Last time when I went to Tokyo, I was by myself. I just wanted to go there after the funeral. Walked around the city for 12 hours aimlessly each day. No strong desire to see anything special. Just whatever showed up, I was glad to see. The familiar images of the places gave me a certain comfort. I am not a carefully-planning-the-trip-type of person.

I only remembered the billboards on the streets. And Japanese men dressing up so monotonously. 

At the Shinagawa Station, where there are Sony, Canon, Mitsubishi offices, 18 out of 20 men were wearing black suits. Looked very unified, but scarily boring and pitiful. 

Sadly this Icelandic volcanic eruption affecting the air traffic in Europe hindered some leaders of the world to attend the funeral of Kaczynski in Krakow, Poland. Luckily my luggage which I ordered from Mandarina Duck, Italy had left Europe before the volcano erupted. My mum won't yell at me for not bringing it to Korea.

I was reading about University of Michigan and Michigan State University on Korean Wikipedia website. There is a longer entry for Michigan State University in Korean, I could only assume that there are more Korean students at the Michigan State University. I got a letter from University of Michigan last week. A good one. Let's see how I'd manage to commute to Ann Arbor.

The news of Polish president Lech Kaczynski's plane crash in Russia was quite mind-boggling after waking up from the wild-night of partying on a lazy Saturday morning. For some reason, I imagined the moment of plane crashing onto the ground.

This Korean cartoon called With the Gods deals with some traditional Korean views on death and afterlife. Today's episode was about a dead soldier, whom wants to avenge his superior who murdered him in the army, explaining how he was killed. When he was shot by his fellow by an accident, his superior decided to cover up the accident while believing he was already dead. When the unconscious soldier was awoken up, his superior simply buried him alive. Sadly, this kind of accidents are likely to happen in the Korean army. And of course I could not help imagining the fictional character's dying moment. People think about deaths all the time, innit?

Valtteri Filppula got a penalty today at the end of the game. I am sure he was not happy to be in the penalty box, but all I could think of was me being a penalty box. 

 

I practised how to say "Minä rakastan sinua" the other day. Rolling 'r' sound in Finnish seems easier than pronouncing German 'r' sound. 

 

I've been lacking a great deal of sleep since this 2010 Winter semester has started according to my Twitter enties. I only slept for 5 hours past 2 days. And I've been on the bloody internet when I could have gone to bed already. So I can't blame it on anybody or anything, but myself.

The Hesse post below made me think that my English has become Germanised or somewhat like Swedish. I quite fancied the fact that you could change the words-order depending on which fact you want to emphasise in Swedish when I started learning the language about 11 or 12 years ago. That really does not work in the Korean language well. 

Well, time for bed now. 

Enjoy the Spring, and don't kill yourselves. According to Emile Durkheim in his book Suicide, "suicide reaches its maximum during the fine season, when nature is most smiling and the temperature mildest."  

Finally I have a role model now, Hermann Hesse that is. Not that I want to write some of the greatest novels ever (which would be quite nice, actually, but I am a horrible storyteller as you can see here), they're the facts that he tried to commit suicide and ended up not dying. And went on with his brilliant life. Maybe one day, I would write a novel called A Journey to the West, rather Scandinavia.

I had a great time at the Joe Louis arena today. 3 pints of beer contributed a bit, I suppose.

I wish I were a penalty box when Filppula gets a penalty, so he could be inside of me.

 

I am actually smiling here, which I rarely do when photographed. I guess Mr. Fulppula makes me smile all the time. :)