COLLECTIVE EMAILS (8/2006)

(Subject: Last message from Berlin)


So then I came back from the States and moved house. Strictly speaking, I didn't move, I was first homeless like a stray dog and slightly desperate, as the home searching proved to be somehow much more difficult than in the autumn. Then I moved into an ex-lawyers' office flat with three brisk German guys who had rented the flat and were now turning it into a livable space (the best they could, hmm) and two other girlies that the guys had found, in addition to me, to make up for the fact that two new home didn't quite look like a home. Balance, I mean. The flat is huge, with an unbelievable living room - unbelievable especially because nobody uses it, it's a vast empty space which was simply too big to make cosy - and I got the most expensive room which I didn't want. I can't complain, though; it's the biggest and definitely the most beautiful room as well with grand windows and a nice balcony.

On the third day we received an unexpected visitor. A man who had heard the loud music we had been playing came up, thinking that it was live. Bri opened the door and invited the man in, and they started talking about music and discovered that they both played the fiddle. Only at this point did Bri start thinking that the man looked slightly familiar. A few minutes later they both came in my room, and Bri introduced me nonchalantly to the stranger: Meet Andres, the fiddler from the Transsylvanians. And indeed it was him: the main figure from my favourite Berlin band which I had been to see only a couple of days earlier. It was hard to believe that I had just happened to move next door from him. He was extremely nice and we exchanged numbers, but I haven't dared to disturb him since, as the summer must be their main touring time...

And before that, well, there was the trip to the US, but there's no point in talking about it now, it's so far away. Everything's far away now. The winter term lasted forever, and I don't remember much of it. The summer term never really even started, and now it's almost finished. I don't understand where the time disappeared. I'm leaving in a month's time, and even though I don't want to think that way, in my mind I have already left. As if I knew when I was going to die. I don't really have anything to look forward to in Finland, except maybe the communal flat we are going to start with Marjut in Turku. Still I'm not really sad about moving to Finland. I'm only sad that now, now that I know myself here, I am forced to leave. Just when I have found everything. Now I could start my life in Berlin.

And before all of that was the hitch-hiking trip to France and Spain that I did to meet some friends I was missing. There would be a lot to tell about that too, like about the mad extremely illegal hippie festival in the middle of the mountains somewhere south of Granada where it rained so heavily for the whole weekend that all the tents and cars were buried in water and they had to get a tow-truck to pull some of them out of the mud, and where me and Marjut tried to look for Indians; or about my nerve-racking trip from Granada to catch my plane in Madrid, when I first missed my bus because the Internet timetable had been out of date, then found out that the next bus was in three and the train in five hours, then resorted to hitching, as there was no other way of travelling the 450 kilometres in time... I did make it in the end two minutes before the check-in closed, but that was only after various rides, horrible traffic jams, innumerable repetitions of the carefully learned phrase in Spanish, and a gay couple who first absolutely had to stop to eat for 45 minutes, but who then ended up taking me all the way to the airport.

Dear friends, I wrote this ages ago and never sent it. Now it's the beginning of August, and I'm getting ready to leave Berlin tomorrow. We're hitching with Boyf down to Hungary to the wonderful festival of Sziget, and I can't wait, even though the truth to be told, I'm pretty numb and tired after just preparing moving out, planning the near future and writing an essay for the last two weeks. These things can really eat all your energy... I never imagined, despite my previous experiences, that it would require so much time and effort to get everything sorted out in order to move out of a country and in another one. I'll be in Finland at the end of August. At the moment, I don't what to think about it. Berlin is beautiful. I hope to bring as much of it with me as possible.