amsterdam

My mother took a picture of me talking about the architecture, hence the Silly Hands of Enthusiasm.

Example of aforementioned architecture.

Me trying on the most beautiful shoes in the existence of time. (Far, far, far too expensive. Unfortunately.) 

Amsterdam was everything I'd dreamt of and more. My first day was spent in consistent awe. (I've seen beautiful cities before, but this? I was not prepared to lose my heart so fast and so permanently.) My mother and I kept stopping every few metres to sigh at the beauty of everything. Winding our way through narrow streets, incredible winds and the incessant tolling of church bells, dodging the most reckless cyclists I've ever seen. It was, in short, spectacular.

(Now it's all school and studying again, long days spent girding my loins for revision. It was the best thing possible to get away from it all for a few days, to visit Van Gogh and Anne Frank and then return feeling a bit more like a person than before.)

(My mother took all the pictures, I was too lazy to bring along a camera. 

So thank her, that is if you indeed wish to thank anyone, for the visual evidence.)

amsterdam

Tomorrow my darling mother and I head off to Amsterdam.

(Things I'm most looking forward to: seeing all that Van Gogh up close and authentic, ambling about the streets and enviously looking at all the houseboats, visiting the Anne Frank House, stuffing my face with food every chance I get and maybe doing some shopping too.)

Oh, Amsterdam. Don't you just love the way the name rolls off your tongue?

never hurry, never worry

There's a hiccup in my swagger and worries in my way, although this Christmas has been simply divine.

I've been eating a truly indecent amount and reading almost constantly. (Books, after all, are the very best of presents. I was lucky enough to receive a glorious take on Austen by P.D. James, some Stephen Fry, some highly praised new Finnish novels and almost a thousand pages of brand spanking new Murakami. Oh yes.)

And maybe the most surprising and welcome present of all was a short trip to Amsterdam next week. (Thanks, Mum.) Van Gogh, Anne Frank, here I come.


(Also, if anyone feels like squeeing over the Christmas special of Downton Abbey with me, feel free to do so in the comments. My feelings over Matthew and Mary are full of flailing and smishing and clutching at my heart. Mary Crawley is my favourite character ever in the history of all things and Michelle Dockery is just stunning. Oh show, how I adore you.) 

Picture by the ever-delightful Nan Lawson. 

a bit of wanderlust

Oh if only all commercials were romantic, wanderlust-inducing short films.

move

One of the most stunningly beautiful videos I have ever seen. (And oh, the things I'd give to go travelling right now.)

notes from an island

So there was the sea and the smooth cliffs pouring into it.

There were sunsets to warm the bone to its marrow. (Sunsets I mostly spent on the phone, because sometimes you need more than beautiful views, you need tangibility.)

There were small cold waves to dive into and lots of books to read. (I mostly read Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's been years since I've last read it cover to cover and it's very different from what I remembered. And I might have outgrown Fitzgerald, oddly enough. He's too melancholy for my state of mind.)

There was a lot of thinking and even more writing. Pages upon pages. Most of it utter nonsense but sometimes there's no need to judge. Not right now.

There was a huge bed to lie back on and listen to my breathing during the nights when sleep didn't come. A small lamp to light up the walls made of wood and outside the steady sighs of the sea.

arriving

I'm home, finally. (Yes, finally. I was supposed to be gone for ten days but it became almost two weeks. These things happen on tall ships: they needed crew and I needed to keep on sailing.)

And now I'm sat in this empty house, tired and a bit sad and ultimately thankful to have experienced all this. Life throws us in such strange directions and sometimes following the wind is the only thing to do.

The places I've been and the things I've done during the past two weeks seem oddly detached from the rest of my life. And that is exactly what I love about sailing, this chance to leave everything regular behind. I live and breathe the ship and sea. I get to forget myself, completely and without a doubt. Sailing tall ships is one of the most beautiful things in my life and I need it desperately. It is an act of forgetting.

(Also: countless bruises, new scars, wonky tanlines on my forearms from all those rolled-up sleeves, tar and sweat and mud on every piece of clothing. Chipped nails and callused palms and I love it all.)

how i want to live

A country house in Italy. With stray cats and big windows with shutters and balconies and tiled floors.

(Oh, I've never told you about all those trips to Italy as a little girl. Especially Venice, far too many times. I don't think I'll ever be able to shake off the gold dust.)

Today I'm selling my ukulele in order to buy a new and better one. Last night was a whirl of dreams in which I pressed the familiar (cheap, always out-of-tune) strings and I woke up at four in the morning only to give my trusty old uke one last play, then collapsed back into bed and slept without dreaming. Sentimentality, the things it makes me do.

away

This week I'm staying with my father's family.

Walking along the river bank all the way to the castle near the sea, dancing around the kitchen while cooking, running around this vast green garden with my siblings, reading reading reading on the grass beneath the apple tree.

Watching a bulb of tea drenched in steaming water open up into an artificial flower, seeing the skin between my fingers grow paler in comparison with my steadily darkening tan.

This is everything I've been needing, that longed-for perspective. Watching my life from a distance, a physical distance. Home is but a place on a map.

Yesterday I took the bus into town by myself. I know few people in this city and so I could walk around without having to watch out for familiar faces. I ate at a restaurant by myself, reading Ondaatje, then sat on the river bank for an hour or so as the sun made its slow descent. It's been a long time since I've last been this peaceful.

I return home tomorrow and I'm hoping to bring some of this with me, some quiet and calm. Because there are things to be done and no matter how easy, there are only so many times I can think I can't do this before I begin to believe it.

this is an introductory post

I was waiting for my crêpes in Paris and my face was doing something weird.

I've been putting off writing an introductory post for weeks. It's high time I grabbed myself by the neck, as we say here in Finland, and churned it out.

Hello. My name is Iida (pronounced ee-duh), I am eighteen years of age and I live just outside Helsinki. I'm Finnish but I was born in England, and I'm bilingual. I attend a high school focused on the arts.

I write, I read, I take photographs, I sail (tall ships, not yachts). I listen to quite a lot of music, jazz and 60's pop and this thing called indie. Pretty much anything with a bit of banjo and whispery vocals.

I am scared shitless by most things in life. I'm a perfectionist to the most ridiculous degree. I'm also inherently lazy and prone to procrastinate.

I'm chronically awkward and ridiculously self-indulgent. It's my second nature to keep a running record of my thoughts and feelings. Like most of us who write, I feel a desperate need to catalogue and define my existence, to pin down my life for fear of forgetting.

My mother wanted to photograph me in front of La Fontaine Médicis and my face resorted to weirdness again.

I've been seeing my therapist for about a year. I've been having a hard time coping with my (truly terribly low) self-esteem, my perfectionism, my difficulties in social situations, my self-harm. It's nothing you haven't heard of before but I have the misfortune of having to live through it. The good thing is that these days I find it much easier to be hopeful about my future

(And the most important thing about me, the reason I write this blog, what it all boils down to: I'm learning to be honest.)

home again

Paris was everything Paris should rightfully be, and maybe more. It was waking up to see the Panthéon through the window of the hotel room, it was croissants for breakfast. It was forcing myself to speak my fragmented, accented French. 

It was glasses of Champagne in corner street cafés and cigarettes smoked outside galleries. It was thé au menthe and crêpes with chocolate. It was room after cavernous room of pastels by Degas at the Musée d'Orsay. It was my repeated wanderings amid the bookshelves of Shakespeare & Company, all the talks I had with the Tumbleweeds.

Paris was several rolls of film (yet to be developed). It was tiny shops in Le Marais and on Rue Mouffetard. It was Sacré-Coeur in the horizon and the view from the Tour d'Eiffel by night. It was hours upon hours of walking. It was those incredible, ubiquitous, unmistakably Parisian rooftops.

I adored Paris, more than I would have thought. But it's nice to be home again, ensconed in familiarity, is it not?

Basin and Shells by Christine Lafuente

à paris

I'll be back in a few days' time, finally as an eighteen-year-old. And speaking French like a native, naturellement! Bisous.

dreams and dancing

Dreams are the oddest things, and in my dreams lately I've been climbing the rigging and then letting go and not falling at all but sommersaulting through the ropes and against the sails and almost flying.

Yesterday we danced and danced the entire day (a traditional ball held annually for second-years) and everyone was beautiful but none more so than my friends. After that we went gallivanting over icy seas and dancing some more (not so traditional at this point though) and I had to run to catch the train home at the darkest hour, between morning and night. And today I woke up to the pale cold sunlight with a raspy voice and hair like a lion's mane.

And tomorrow I leave for Paris. We're living exciting times, aren't we?

galleries

I've been taken to art galleries and museums ever since I was a little girl. There are several museums I associate with certain feelings, certain artists, certain phases of my life. The Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, the Museum of Natural History in London, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

A lot can be said about the pretentiousness and/or stuffiness of museums, but for me the quiet cavernous rooms will always be sacred not because of their potential artyness, but because they make me think.