Trop d´amour

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...when I took a bus in the morning to Helsinki and went to Sibelius Academy to listen to the young contestants of the 10th International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition.

Beautiful music, Paganini´s and Bach´s solos for violin, some of the players were only 14-15 years old, but played as good as the ones over twenty. But this is only the first round, the finals are sometime next week.

After lunch I visited an art gallery, Galleria Duetto, where there is an exhibition of Kuutti Lavonen.

He makes mostly all kinds of graphics,and I have not been interested in this art form before, but his works have changed everything. I reserved 3 of his works, even one big serigrafia, which is named "Trop d´amour". I believe that after 50 years Kuutti will be as famous an artist as Helene Schjerfbeck, who was one of the most famous Finnish artists of last century!

In the evening I had more music. I went to Järvenpää, a small town some 30 kms north of Helsinki, to see a kind of musical about tango. Two Finnish popular music singers, Anneli Sari and Amadeus Lundberg sang Argentine tangos accompanied by bandoneon, guitar, piano, violin and bass viol, and a dance group danced tango Argentine style on the stage at the same time.

America revisited

I returned home yesterday from a nostalgia trip to New York. I travelled there together with my old friend Alan, who has been living before in the west, in Washington, Oregon and in the Canadian British Columbia.

We both had been in NYC last time for about 10 years ago. The Big Apple had not changed very much. We walked along the Broadway, 5th Avenue and the streets of Upper Westside watching people and breathing City air.

We visited a private club, NYAC, New York Athletic Club. We could do that because Alan was a member of a sister club, Washington AC.

We stayed quite near the Lincoln Center, and we thought about going to see Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart´s "Cosi fan tutte", but we were too tired that evening.

Also Time Warner Center was just around the corner from our hotel. The photo on this page is taken from the second floor balcony of that building, and you can see the Columbus Circle and a corner of the Central Park in the picture.

A grey day, not a ray of the sun today!

Almost all the snow have now melted away. I left my car last night in front of my house and in the morning the windscreen and other windows were all white frosted in ice. But by midday they were almost clear again, though it is only +4 degrees centigrade now.

Watched an old, 2001 made, travel story about California, where Justine Shapiro visited among other places the yearly Gilroy Garlic Festival. Got so excited about it that I decided to travel there next year and visit the 33. Festival, which is held this year July 29, 30 & 31.

The homepage of the festival is: www.gilroygarlicfestival.com

And the life goes on...

I bought about 35 years ago in NYC a record of Giannis Kalatzis and one of the melodies was called "Ke i zoi sinehizete", which means "And the life goes on".

I have today just that feeling, my last writings on this site are almost a month ago. The life just goes on. I don´t even remember anymore what I was doing after October 15! But if I look at my notebook, I remember that there was the Helsinki Book Fair at the end of October and it lasted for four days, and I was there every day. Then, November 3, I flew to Canary Islands together with about 150 other dance freaks, and we had the 7th Baile Retro Dance Course there!

We had pasodoble, rumba, salsa, cha-cha and other Latin American dances every day. First the teachers showed us how to dance in the lessons before and after noon, and then in the evening we had free practise in the Casbah Square with music.

I came back home last night.

And today I attended a lunch for Finnair retirees in Helsinki, and one of Finnair managers, Mr. Turtiainen, told us that last year, first time in the history, the sales of Finnair tickets in Japan was bigger than the sales in Finland!

And Finnair is now the third biggest carrier between Asia and Europe, after Lufthansa and Air France/KLM!

So, we can say that, like Nokia, also Finnair is now an international company, and "connecting people"!