With Rage I Shall Burst

”With rage I shall burst”, sings a young man – a rising opera star – with dramatic devotion. I can’t help wondering whether he, too, has just moved countries, and now his devices won’t hook into the wall.

Behind the singer there’s an enormous window, birch trees and a kayak gliding silently across the bay. It’s late May and we are in Helsinki. Things are starting up. We feel hopeful and new. It’s a chance for reinvention and first encounters. All this light, our endlessly stretching days!

Hungry Cats

This move came up quite quickly. But we jumped at it like hungry street cats onto a fishing boat. Helsinki! Finland! Nightless nights! Carelian pie! Digitalised services!

I left my car in Cyprus, packed my kids and cats. Left hubs in charge of the rest. Shed my face mask and started buying garb for my post-pandemic size. It’s time to really, finally crawl out of my cave and meet some people! To travel to Estonia, go to live performances, picnics and gatherings. With Excitement I Shall Burst now to greet officials, consuls, guides, artesans, MP’s and school parents. All kinds of quickly changing circumstances, and other opportunities to appear foolish and commit epic social gaffes.

Farewell Card

On my dresser I still have a card from a small farewell lunch in Nicosia. I don’t really read it because I know what it says, but I want it to sit there. Because some days really, really don’t go as hoped or planned.

Some days we are back to invisible ghosts no-one knows, nor cares to. Some days we visit the school and see a young kid sitting alone at a large table, and the kid is ours.

Some days I need a reminder that we are not strangers everywhere. That first encounters led to second and fifteenth encounters, and things will turn out well for every member of this frigging traveling circus. Even the cat who won’t come from under the bed. She will be fine. Everyone will be okay, of course.

We are just a work in progress!

Drunken Weekday Song

“What was the song about the wine drinking on Sundays?” I ask the opera singer after his encore.

“It sounded very intense, but then everybody sort of laughed at the end.”

“Ah! That was about what he does on every day of the week”, the singer explains.

“A bit of a drunken song”, the pianist chips in.

“Oh, it sounded very intense”, I ponder. “But it was basically a drunkard’s weekdays song?”

“Yes!”

Moral Choices

How does everyday diplomacy happen in a continent torn up by murderous appetites?

“Please stay a while after the performance”, pleads our hostess tonight of the small crowd. “Let’s keep talking. I feel it’s so, so important.”

We stay. Behind large, locked gates, others hide.

26.5.2022 0

The New Normal: Day

10.00 Laptop most definitely will not switch on.

Contemplate the situation. Seems I kind of have a day off. Also seems I have no computer.

Feel sad.

Why is life with technology such an uphill battle?

10.01-12.00 Non-photogenic activities. (So I here’s my favourite plant Rosalie instead.) Feel obliged to unpack the joyous remains of a fun weekend by the sea. Not fun. Kind of gross. As is the laundry. As is blog writing in ugly housewear (way too hot to write elegantly dressed – otherwise obviously would).

12.00 Toddle off to the bakery to buy some good veggie protein with a village salad. Get told off for taking a pic of the bread shelf. Feel stupid.

Feel stupid taking a photo of my lunch, take one anyway. And post it here. There it is.

13.30 Watch Sister Wives.

Don’t feel stupid. Haven’t got a computer and the seaside weekend was a bit consuming actually. And Mariah has recently come out as gay to her five fundamentalist Mormon parents. Five! Fundamentalist! Gay! Mormon!

15.00 Reunited with my tanned rascals on the school yard.

Gather all our courage and ask one boy’s mum if he could join us for pizza on Friday. He can! Oh their joyous little faces!

Oh the dawn of a friendship.

Oh my poor old heart.

19.9.2018 0

Cardboard City Prayers

Friday

The movers brought in 250 boxes and left. What a shock! Whose is all this stuff? We want to return it! But the truck has already rumbled off. Panic is rising.

Apparently, we’ve been in this exact situation no less than six times in the last 16 years. I can’t remember much about the previous times though. Maybe moving is like childbirth? You forget what it’s like because if you did remember, no-one would do it. And then there would definitely be no diplomats. Nor their spouses. And the latter would surely be very bad.

Saturday & Sunday

Sorting my books by colour.

(Yes, that is indeed Gone With the Wind. I heard it’s coming back to fashion this autumn. In the hipster circles of Berlin everybody is ordering crinolines.)

(Okay, they’re not! But it’s yellow, okay? That’s a very rare colour actually in the grown-up books section! So it’s staying!)

Monday

My husband is back at work at the ministry. I’m opening boxes and guffawing tearfully at what we brought. It’s great. I recommend it. Summer in Cardboard City!

My child is hooked onto his gaming system. He is very happy. The other one has been abolished to the mountains. (Not my himself. The grandparents were with him last time we checked in with him.) He’s happy too.

My husband isn’t very happy. He has called upon the Holy Mother of Christ so many times I’m becoming socially very anxious. What if she gets tired of it, appears right here among our boxes and says ‘What is it my children, I heard your cries’, or something kind like that.

Then what? We ask her if she could please flatten some empty boxes? Take them to the garage? Men just don’t think things through sometimes!

Tuesday

But there is progress!

The first night I went to bed with an enormous yellow vacuum cleaner staring at me right next to my bed. I couldn’t unplug the beast from the wall for love nor money. So I rolled around fretting ‘What does it want? What does it want?” until finally hubs showed up.

I was all damsel in distress. He was all valiant, vacuum cleaner taming youth (cough) whom I would now self-evidently marry if I hadn’t already. Romance in Cardboard City! Can’t beat it!

But I was writing about progress – we just found power socket adaptors! They were in nr. 130, Cardboard Row. Now I can plug in and out anything I want. Although then, the microwave won’t switch on. I love how all countries have their own plug and socket shapes. So exciting to discover! (Cries)

Wednesday

Today is a national holiday for the Holy Virgin. (She’s very popular in Cyprus.) So we had our first lunch guests over. Nothing fancy, just takeaway and bakery sweets for some close family members. During lunch, both kids had a fit of some kind. My food got very cold. All in all, it was an excellent idea. Excellent! I should have ideas more often. (Not! Must stop this instant.)

Thursday

The kids are to start school in less than two weeks. Problem is, they don’t actually, officially have a school to start at. Optimistic, I ordered supplies anyway according to the school’s list. 100 items. That took hours. Meanwhile, hubby was slaving away behind the window, on the balcony. It’s very hot out there in the afternoon. I hope the boys will be really excited and grateful for their school supplies. They were really hard to order.

Friday

After the Holy Virgin Day lunch disaster, I took a break from the home-making for a couple of days. Just felt like I needed to. (Procrastinating, you could say. Pre-emptive mental health care, I’d say!) Despite of that (surely not because of that?!) it’s starting to look nice here and there.

After dark the kids and I climbed the stairs to the roof terrace. There was a night breeze and a wonderful view of city lights and the starry sky. To top it all off, they spotted a shooting star. Underneath, aquarium was no more. Neither was Cardboard City. Just a valiant and exhausted man saying Holy Mother of Christ it’s Friday, how will we ever make it through the weekend?

But at least he was saying it in something slowly starting to resemble our home again!

31.8.2018 0

What Else Is There?

Ohh.

Everyone’s out.

The sun shines in through the blinds. I am so sleep deprived but so relieved too.

On the screen, two boys in uniforms pose in front of the school’s lemon trees.

A little ray of raw happiness seeps in with the sunshine.

They seem to be okay.

Now, what else is there I wonder?

31.8.2018 0

I Love the Food!

Hi, I am an introvert.

I don’t think out loud. (Except here!)

DSCN4910 — At a Finnish family party, in the garden of a hundred-year-old fishing lodge

If you want to know how I am and I don’t know because I’m in the middle of something, like a move, I might tell you that. Or I might freeze, or I might wonder if you would perhaps like a very light and cheerful answer – and I can give that a little go.

‘How do you feel about moving to Cyprus?’ everyone kindly enquires and I am grateful.

But I don’t know.

How could I when I don’t know what life there will be like this time? So many things I look forward to yet others are still so vague it’s hard to picture our everyday lives just yet.

So it’s a fun raffle of ‘Great!’ and ‘I don’t know?’ and ‘It’s really hot there’, as answers to the question. They are all true, of course!

As is ‘I love the food.’

Because I really, really do love everything to do with Cyprus cuisine. Perhaps I should refrain from overthinking for once in my life, just announce ‘I love the food!!!’ and get on with my social life?

Worth ruminating for hours about, definitely!

28.7.2018 0

Farewell

This is my farewell. Brought to you from my sweaty bed where I’m trying to shake off a little fever, so I could go see some motorised dinosaurs on my last day in Geneva. Fingers crossed!

On a more romantic note, I remember our first evening in Geneva like a lovely, fragrant painting. A peaceful family painting that I was in myself!

(It could be of course, that the reality was more like Tom & Jerry’s craziest than a Monet painting. After all, my kids were there! But this is my memory and I’d like to keep it please – thank you!)

From our hotel we crossed the street into the park, with the little one in his stroller. I still remember the ghostly shape of the Jet d’Eau fountain towering on Lake Geneva. (It just doesn’t show in the darn pictures. So maybe it wasn’t there that night. But I reserve the right to my memory!)

We were four years fresher than today.

The city was an exciting stranger. Someone to be curious about. To get to know slowly.

That night we didn’t know a soul but each other.

Then one by one, day by day, month by month, people showed up.

And this post is about them. People from volunteer meetings, schools, stables, playgrounds and from right here in our own neighbourhood. Everywhere where we felt like outsiders to begin with.

Until someone reached out a hand and a couple of kind words.

For those words, for those people, I will always remain grateful.

For what is life if it isn’t shared?

As expats, we live removed from our home tribes and our home territories and our collective memories. At worst, it can be such a lonely experience.

So to recognise a thought in someone else’s words, and to receive a little smile as recognition of ours, there’s no gift like it!

I think it’s human nature needing to share.

Parenting kids whose childhoods are so different from ours.

Struggling to learn something difficult. Like living in a foreign environment.

Things that we feel, love, fear or can’t get enough of – most of these fill with meaning when shared.

Views, country roads, hot summers, little boats on the waves of the lake – and you. All the former strangers I was happy to call friends.

My favourite memories! (Maybe to be joined by some robot dinosaurs this Sunday?)

Thank you.

6.7.2018 0

Trying to See It

Woke up too early to a thought: Maybe this is the day!

It wasn’t.

Brushed and combed, the kids met year leaders and did their very best. We await. Bite our nails and wait.

Carefully hopeful, D and I met estate agents and looked around people’s homes trying to see it, see us, see something.

Of course we couldn’t.

But late in the evening, we slipped out the door once more. A little freedom, a little meze! Music, sweet hookah steam and a tiny ridiculous caraffe of white and suddenly, everything of course, will turn out fine. Just fine!

We are back in Cyprus and everything will soon again flow.

12.5.2018 0

The Roundabout of No

Woke up to a sublime, fragrant morning and ran out of bed to do stuff.

Back and forth in the morning rush hour, I am being reintroduced to the exciting, unwritten geography of the Cyprus capital.

You see, life in Nicosia is kind of a big hide and seek where the locals live somewhere and the foreigners can’t find the way there until the party is finished and all the wine is gone.

It’s played so that instead of a street address, the participants are given a list of landmarks – both existing and long gone – that all the good Cypriot folk know and no silly old xeni like moi will ever learn. But my good man is trying to share his wisdom, bless! He has such faith in my capacity!

I promise I will give the unofficial geography a shot.

But Kalispera traffic lights? That means good evening, for heaven’s sake!

The roundabout of ‘no’?

11.5.2018 0

My Pineapple House

To counterbalance the rather shocking effect of a serious Sponge Bob Square Pants overdose, I went to a tulip festival. It was prettier. So much more elegant than Bob universe. Nice in other ways, too!

I went there with a friend.

This friend I didn’t know existed four years ago (she did).

Now I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to do without her.

She is packing for the north and I for the south.

I want to go into my pineapple house under the waves and never talk to anyone again!

Like a furiously mute Sponge Bob.

28.4.2018 0

11 Sundays

Last Sunday I went for a long walk with one of my boys. Winter had changed to summer overnight and we weren’t really dressed for the weather. He was on his scooter. I was trying to keep up.

This Sunday was laundry day. There are now summer clothes drying everywhere. The kids went out with a friend from next door.

I sat at the window, listening to them and editing photos on my laptop.
Eleven more Sundays. Eleven more Sundays like this until the big storm hits and lifts us in the air!

22.4.2018 0

Tag: expat life