August 26, 2004
It has been a week...
...since we started looking for an apartment. I don't know if our standards and requirements are too high, maybe we're not so much aware about the realities here in Leijonakaupunki, but... we can't find anything yet. Some nice places that we've seen are over our budget... You should see me when I'm chatting with agents, by now I'm on quite equal terms with them. I'm very converse about different locations and benefits of living here and there, I'm also really getting the grip of the Singlish: "washing machine? Can. Tomorrow second viewing? Can or not? Can can. ok-lah" Forget the nice sentence structures you learned at school, say the essentials and don't forget the "lah", which I'm still not quite sure what it means (Kaitsu says it is confirming the statement). Singlish is still understandable (when they try speak clear to you), but some claim that it is a separate language (from English). I've read in the paper about a survey that most young Leijonakaupunkilaiset consider Singlish to be one of the core things sustaining their national identity. I've read about Singlish before coming here, but never realized it is so different from English.
We gave already one "letter of intent" (that we want to rent an apartment) for a charming young Indian family, but I'm not quite sure that we'll get the place or even that it is a good deal for us (once again over our budget). Still few more places to see tonight. (Kaitsu has been working like crazy this week, I think he came home around 2am yesterday night and there's some complicated job in the evening shift coming today too...) ..."they never promised us a rose garden..."
Otherwise there's interesting discussions going on in the local media. Just now Leijonakaupunki got a new prime minister who gave his 3.15h long (!!!) speech last Sunday. We came across it on TV and were horrified to see that there was the same guy maybe on 15 channels (for 3.15h !), for me it felt just like in the "good old" soviet times.. Later during the week there wes extensive analysis in the papers of things told by him. Some points show that he's a really clever guy, a lot of attention was given for education and aparently he said: "we should teach our children less so that they could learn more". Great statement, in case of Leijonakaupunki it means that they will cut sylabus by 30% and focus on interdisciplinary projects. I think they are still very much into rote learning here. They will also hire 3000 new teachers by the year 2100 and practice more teaching in pairs. Nice changes! Oh yeah, there's also some kind of division between "normal" and "express" study streams here in school. "Normal" suposedly are underachievers... And they still practice caning (spanking)...
The prime minister also promised to improve some freedom of speech matters here. I'm not quite sure about current regulations, but I think for speaking publicly people need to get a licence or some kind of permission.. So there will be one arena where people can speak without licence, I guess that mostly concerns activists, worker unions and all kinds of leftist organizations. Interesting.
Otherwise it seems (reading/watching media) that Leijonakaupunki is in very similar situation as Finland - small nation desperately seeking new ways to be competitive, they're smart, they plan to invest into education and creativeness...
Posted by gkligyte at August 26, 2004 11:03 AM