High Water

After returning from vacation yesterday, I was intending to go to class today, making ½ a week instead of 1/4. But I had not recovered from yesterday's return journey, I guess, because my brain was COMPLETELY incapable of performing math (logic?) this morning. I thought about when I had to leave the house to reach the bus stop by 7:25 for at least 15 minutes without ever figuring it out, and ended up reaching the bus stop at 7:29. The next bus wouldn't have come until 8:45 and I decided I should just go back to bed instead. I then slept until 4 pm, so that was probably necessary.

Yesterday we took a cab to the airport at 4:30 am in London time, and it was somehow a cab that didn't take credit cards, which was a thing that my innocent Finnish wife had previously not suspected the existence of. At Heathrow, we walked through a brief zone of free wifi just large enough for waxjism to learn the Hawks lost and Hossa was injured, at which point the lingering threat of lurgy coalesced into full-blown misery. She spent the rest of the trip in a little huddle, occasionally emitting moans about either a) nausea or b) I JUST HATE THE BRUINS SO MUCH WHYYYYY. Then we had a ~3hr layover in Stockholm and our flight to Helsinki was delayed, so we didn't get out of there until 14.50 local (time since waking: ~10 hours). In Helsinki, during the ½ hour we waited for the bus, it started raining briefly but determinedly - just enough to get us all wet when embarking. I think we got home around 8:30 pm (time since waking: ~14½ hours).

I actually did sleep about 7 hours last night, but it wasn't enough to recover I guess. I can't help feeling that one of the greatest benefits of being rich would be the ability to afford direct Finnair flights from Turku, which would have made the whole transit time like 5 hours, counting the time in a cab between London and Heathrow.

Oh, and Sofi Oksanen was on our flight from Stockholm to Helsinki. In first class, naturally. She's so tiny and hot and her hair is so thoroughly amazing in person. But I can't help wondering whether she is really that dedicated to sparkle motion, or whether her anatomy is sufficiently different from mine that she actually finds fishnets over back-seam stockings under knee-high Dr Martens to be comfortable for riding on airplanes.

Vacation disaster rating: nowhere near as awful as the Vacation from Hell! No flights were interfered with in a significant way, everyone was in the correct countries, no spurious charges of drug use, nobody required to visit the hospital* and no comas fallen into whatsoever.

Biggest mishap: I didn't pack warm clothes or an extra suitcase, and was freezing cold a lot because I didn't realize that "high 19°, low 11°, cloudy/chance of rain" for London was, in terms of coldness, more similar to "Windy, sun never comes out, feels like ~7° in Turku all day and all night" than to the 11-19° week we'd just had here. I should have worn knee-high Dr Martens and my lightweight wool winter coat the day of the wedding.

English houses: Still colder on the inside than Finnish ones, still not properly insulated, but the B&B was cosy and not damp at all, so only the bathroom, which was kept at +10° C and not fitted with an exhaust fan, requiring the window to be opened to out-of-doors after a shower, was actively freezing. The bed was nice. Bexless's house was lovely and no colder than the house of my brother-in-law. I can only assume that all British people would find our flat's ambient non-summer temperatures like a visit to the tropics.

London: A collection of meandering, too-narrow tracks and lanes, each approximately 1-3 blocks in length, intersecting each other in increasingly improbable manner, obviously laid out by malevolent and drunken cowherds. Like Helsinki, but 100x worse. Buildings running the gamut from tiny rowhouses to tiny narrow rowhouses to improbably tall and skinny narrow rowhouses to really large rowhouses to giant buildings that take up the entire block yet are still somewhat like rowhouses because of being built directly into the building next door at every opportunity.

Craziest stop: We had cake with the brides at an adorable cakeshop where the sole toilet dated directly from the Victorian era, and was located in a dilapidated and thoroughly alarming closet. The closet was reached through a little hallway with no other purpose, and the hallway was decorated with a giant poster that said "OUT OF ORDER", so I unwisely assumed it meant that the toilet was out of order and spent like 5 minutes wandering down and up (to an attic full of abandoned industrial kitchens??? With all the doors open. Seriously) in futile search for an alternate toilet.



* When I say nobody had to go to the hospital, I'm not lying; however, Bexless did break her 2nd toe.