Going through the motions

Hello blog, and sorry I have been ignoring you for the past three weeks!

As to be expected, my life in the town of Wise has by now attained some regularity. I have gotten to the rhythm of college studying, which for me means a lot of staying up late and reading or writing the designated assignments. The difficulties I have had with keeping up with the coursework are due to the fact that the courses are neither as interesting nor challenging as back in Finland (with the exception of music classes). However, I have got a lot of interesting new friends while here and feel more at home than I did initially when I came here. It is to be noted though that I have not at any point thought of going back to Finland and abandoning my studies here. I am attributing my lack of a culture shock experience to the "Southern" hospitality (although most of the people I know in the college seem to come from Northern Virginia or somewhere else entirely) and the fact that I've had no trouble with the language since I came here. I can sincerely say that at the moment I do not miss home.

On the weekend we had an international party at a professor's house and that proved out to be a great success. About 25 people attended the party, which consisted of a walk around the town of Bigstone Gap, a dinner with (tasty!) foods from all around the world and finally some games. I had a ton of fun conversing with people from different backgrounds and hosting some of the Finnish games I knew. I also managed to horrify the people present with a sloppy rendition of Kansas's "Dust in the wind".

One aspect of this blog which I seem to have so far ignored is attending to my list of items, which surprisingly enough has not grown substantially since I entered the US. You can find my initial posessions in an earlier post. In this post I intend to add the items I've bought while here, not counting items borrowed or school books, which will eventually be put to circulation to others students.

50. Kyocera cell phone
51. LG cell phone
52. T-shirt
53. T-shirt
54. Pants
55. Folder for Cultural Anthropology
56. Notebook for music classes
57. Notebook for Jane Austen's World
58. Notebook for The Immigrant in American History
59. New alarm clock
60. Breedlove Passport D200 steel string guitar, picks, case
61. Beatles songbook
62. Jethro Tull songbook
63. Towel
64. Kettle

Some of you maybe wondering why I have three cell phones at the moment. The reason is that my Finnish phone does not work here and the Kyocera phone I bought from New York has no service up here in the mountains so I had to buy yet another one from Wal-Mart. Another thing is that I got rid of my 4cl bottle of Koskenkorva Salmiakki but I can assure you that it was all for the sake of science! ;)

For me at least there is a certain romance in the idea of having so little stuff that at any time I could stuff them to a backpack and leave, possibly never to return. Some items I brought with me from Finland I haven't even had any use for so far, which means that I could make do with still a lesser number of items.