Trains And Summer Rains

Drawing in the rain on the train. (It was raining outside when I sketched this.)

Greetings from the train! I'm now on my way to Tampere where I'll have my last entrance exams on Finnish and English philology this week. The English exam will be tomorrow and the Finnish exam the day after. I'll be back home on Friday night. Apart from being busy with work, studying and the endless amount of procrastination I always spend my time with, my life has been very basic normal every day. I graduated from upper secondary school last Saturday and am no longer a student. Doesn't feel special as I've got to apply other schools anyway. My number one option is, of course, University of the Arts in London. I just sent my documents to the translator and they'll be back shortly. I have my IELTS exams carried out, me and my former art teacher shall take care of the references next week and I only need to finish a couple of works for my portfolio. And of course I have to write my study proposal but that's not a problem, I have outlined it months ago.

Anyways, I got over 1000€ as a present last weekend (collectively: most of the people who attended my party gave me 50 or 20 €) and it means that whether I get in the university in London, I'm traveling there this autumn nevertheless. We just discussed about it at the party with the people we were there during my last visit; they wanted to go back soon too (well, of course they did). I don't know if I'll be traveling alone or with some sort of company, both options are fine as I'm quite used to adventuring around by myself too and it'd be only intriguing to go there by myself. I've got to wait until The Games are over, though, I don't want to go there when the city's full of people because of them. Of course the city is full of people anyway, being a lovely lively place as it is, but everything has its limit, especially my tolerance of crowds.

Anyhow, I just realised that I haven't made my London post yet. We didn't really do anything special while we were there, just spent a fuck load of money and walked a shit ton of miles. I bought my graduation dress and shoes from there. Mum went to the tube for the very first time, couldn't use it and the nice lad there told us to keep an eye on her. We promised to do so. We took a lot of photos and because I really hate editing, you won't see them anytime soon but I promise I'll upload some of them some time. We hung around the city and bought clothes and things we couldn't find (or that would be a lot more expensive) in Finland. Next time I'll have to go to Camden Town as I hadn't time for that last month. Everything went well if we close our eyes from the things that happened in the hotel; it was one of the dozens of hotels in Pimlico, those white ones that stand one next to another and look exactly the same. When we got there, we found out that our room was technically in the basement. It didn't really bother us and if we would've been smokers, we'd been in heaven; we kind of had a backyard. (No, not really, it was a dark and dirty alley behind the hotel but we had a door that could be opened there and it would've been a perfect place to go smoking if only we would've done so.) That wasn't all.

After the first night, we had some food in the room, thinking that we'd save time if we ate there and then went out to the city. I was casually eating my blueberry muffin with some age old breakfast tea when mum took a closer look at her lemon one: it had been bitten. That's when we noticed that we probably had an unwanted visitor in our room and when I was about to wash my teeth, I saw the worm-like tail swish behind the toilet seat. Mum hates rats and I don't think hotel rooms should have rats that act like they pay for it or something either, so mum insisted that we should tell the staff and change the room. So we did. It was tedious and involved a lot of talking with the annoying guy who worked at the reception. I managed to get us another room.

Everything didn't go smoothly with that one either, as when we were waiting for Kaisa and Vuokko to pay us a visit, we left our key outside the door. Someone stole it and we had to pay for it. It was even more annoying to do. Mum was quite sure the person who took they key was actually working at the hotel but I don't know, could've been anyone. It just was the done thing there, some people left their keys outside their doors and I don't know whether theirs were taken as well or not. Anyhow, apart from the hotel fuckery, all went quite well.

I really can't wait going back. My current location bores me so much! It's good that I have work, it keeps me busy. The quality of my procrastination online has also become a lot better: I got a new laptop. It's a MacBook Pro which I named Irene. (Why yes, I do name my electronics: my iPhone is called Mirana and the desktop's name's Asta.) My old laptop was such a pain in the arse to use; the graphic card was broken so the display fucked up all the colours. It was also slow and it didn't run Photoshop anymore.

Hmm. Now I should probably start writing my Camp NaNoWriMo novel Molly's House I've been geeking about for everyone who knows me in real life for a couple of weeks now. I'm behind schedule but it's okay, I really don't have time to do it yet I try my best to do it anyway. Writing is always good and it's a really fun and different story to write. It's way more serious than Utopia but it's more personal than there's nothing in the woods.

That, or I could draw. Too many things to do, so little time, even though trains are really good timesavers when you have tasks like this to be accomplished.