Disappearances

I think that I have finally unravelled the mystery of my disappearing food.

The portions in restaurants here are so large that I usually eat only half of my lunch and take the leftovers to the math departement fridge. Sometimes I eat them the next day for lunch, and sometimes I take them home. Usually I save two half luches for weekend, though, since that way I don't ever need to cook anything. But often on Fridays I don't go straight home from the department and since I don't want to carry my lunches around the town, I leave them in the fridge. Then on Saturday I get hungry and walk to the department to pick up my weekend food only to find it disappeared. This has now occurred three times.

I don't think anybody is being mean. I think somebody is in fact being nice and cleaning the fridge always on Friday evenings or on Saturday mornings, and the lesson of the story is to take your food home on Fridays.

So today I had to pick up take out food from Raja Rani's, since when I walked back home our favourite grocery store the White Market had already closed. And I felt really American walking home carrying my mug of mango lassi in my hand. Not that mango lassi is American, but the take out mugs.

But walking to the department wasn't really a total waste of time since I saw this in front of the math departement. Imagine the University of Helsinki having its own cranes...























The real reason for not minding the walk today was, however, the fact that the spring finally arrived today. I imagine that on the Finnish scale it had actually already come some time ago, but today I felt happy and laughing just because of the sun and all the people on the streets and the fact that I had to open my coat.

As much as I like snow, it doesn't really fit here. Everything melts away right away. And I really would prefer to hear the snow crunching under my shoes and not the salt that they seed all around.

The salt makes the snow especially miserable when there is a lot of it. It will melt from the bottom and everything will be wet dirty slush. And all the store owners and janitors hurry to place a “Caution! The floor might be wet” stand just inside every door to make coming in and going out more difficult.

The only fun snow here are the occasional snowfalls that come with such strong wind that you see the snow flying horisontally along the streets. But they always only last for a short while. And the snow always melts away.