Preparing for the last Kiwi adventures

Autumn has come to New Zealand and it's definitely time to start planning my last adventures here before the long haul back to Finland. The last days have been filled with transitional activities; organising the last interviews and meetings for my research, cleaning the house for the landlady so she can show new prospective tenants round, trying to sell the Toyota 'arse rocket' and even posting off a 20 kgs box packed with my camping gear. More boxes will follow as I'm allergic to excess baggage charges and they are really strict here in Wellington, as I've experienced twice already.

Just now everyone in Finland is celebrating Vappu, that May Day eve madness that usually ends up as a hangover on the morning of 1st. Not for me this year! My Vappu was spent in the sauna down at the Urban Retreat in Tory Street and wound up with one bottle of Belgian Kriek Boon cherry beer in front of the TV. The most uneventful Vappu of the last 25 years, that's for sure.

I will be interested to read what Kiwi blogger Matt Kennedy-Good makes of his first Vappu. Matt has been living in Helsinki since late last year and has been posting once a week to the New Zealand Herald's web site. See http://blogs.nzherald.co.nz/blog/kiwi-abroad/ Reading his posts brought back memories of my first years in Finland well over 25 years ago, learning to skate, ski and ice fish amongst other shared experiences. It has to be said that Helsinki and Finland have changed a hell of a lot since, yours truly, a young English photography graduate, arrived on August 31st 1982 with a 10 month State post-grad scholarship at TaiK. Since then...half my life so far.



I've been lucky enough to get a Finnish Arts Council grant to make an exhibition from the photography work I've done here, sometime later in 2009. In fact that's the only additional support I've had because all my applications for research grants connected with my intentions here were unsuccessful. So I've been concentrating on the photography a lot and am happy to notice that me and the camera are now much better companions that when I arrived here in January. There's still a few things I'd like to shoot. Wellington and architecture has been an ongoing topic but I'm really keen to see even a little bit of the South Island's mountains with snow cover.

Next week I will make my final adventure to the South, visiting Dunedin and Christchurch on official research business and then, weather and transportation permitting I'll spend the weekend on the Southern Alps, hopefully around Arthur's Pass or thereabouts. Flights to and from the South proved incredibly cheap with Virgin's Pacific Blue.


Here in Victoria University there is a lot of mid-term activity now and students are handing in course work and its being presented and evaluated on a more or less daily basis throughout the building. It's nice that the course work is always presented publically and I've noticed that staff colleagues and the Dean of School show up to see what's been done. The picture here is of Mikko, our student from Helsinki here on exchange, presenting his interactive 'sound object' project a few days ago to Simon (right) the Dean.