lucille tay hui xuan: i’ll come visit you, and cook for you, and clean for you

adele goh ee lee: can you come visit me ? cook for me? clean me?

lucille tay hui xuan: clean you???? Yea, babe, i’ll clean you cleaaaann

adele goh ee lee: thanks. haven’t been able to reach my shoulder blade for 10 years

lucille tay hui xuan: you are so gross i love you 

Joel was right to say that Helsinki is everything that Singapore aspires to be.

The country is renowned to be a functionalist city, possessing a thoroughly efficient transport system (what would i do without the city’s journey planner???), with an incredible productive workforce, and plus, its the world design capital for the year. Also, what really brightens my heart is that the wage differential between manual and technical jobs, and that of white-collar occupations is relatively narrow. Oh and it has such a respectable educational system too, of which kids have little time in school, engage in alot of creative play, plus have little homework. Blessed are the teachers. 

Well i know, its always dangerous to romanticise any exoti- right, i meant to say foreign- country, but it is tempting not to as well. The women are so involved in politics here, making up 40 percent of parliament. And throw in a female president elected for 2 terms (they apparently really like her). Also, the city relies so heavily on trust it seems and most finns are pretty civil- minded. 

But but but, actually, there are no buts. i quite like helsinki. its obvious. 

And almost everything about my time in helsinki has been quite lovely so far. I don’t really fancy the word “sight-seeing” but its how i’ve passed my first week. facebook says it all. hahah. so its been quite a jolly holiday.

but I do think there were some (relatively) difficult moments- i say relatively, because i’ve had way more incomparable trying points in my life before: 

1. My first few cooking experiences were so demoralising. 

i’m not even trying to be humble or modest about this. i literally felt… discouraged. i know it sounds amusing but it wasn’t then. Coming to finland and finding out that the average meal was 9 euros was impossible. So dinners had to be cooked back in my apartment. i decided to play on the safe side the first night and got a ready made pack. i bought chicken tikka masala because i thought “yea, i should really ease my way into finnish food. get something without too much effort”. But no, it was truly the worse dinner in finland. heating the food up without a microwave really wasn’t as easy as i thought it would be. and the frying spatula had specks of burnt char accumulated on it. And the taste- it was so artificial and preserved, i felt nauseas. plus, i kept thinking that the plates, and utensils i was using belonged to the tenant before me. too intimate.

The second time i tried cooking again, rice this time. hahah. (i know i know, i really should leave singapore behind) it failed miserably as well. the rice at the bottom of the pot was so stubborn it got stuck and refused to budge. And it wouldn’t cook properly because the pot had no lit, which meant the rice couldn’t steam like how it does in a rice cooker so i had to scrape off every grain after i was done. 

But things have really picked up, cos since then, i’ve had bah ku teh, decently marinated pork chop and potatoes with shitake mushrooms, basil and pepper, and this amazing tasting spicy chicken drumlets which i roast in my oven for 15 mins or so. 
Also, i found a subway and got sandwiches for 3.70 euros- what a find, realised that school food costs only 2.50, and found some great treasures from the old market hall. 

So yea, food has formed a significant part of my experience here in finland, and interestingly, God has used my cooking experiences to remind me to be so reliant on Him. I’m really praying each time- “dear God, please let it turn out alright. please oh please.” And cos food’s such a great motivation for my existence. right, i meant, necessity, there is a greater impulse toward prayer and just depending on Him in the day to day. Well, before we lapse into a theological error into thinking that charred food means an inadequate God, this whole domestic thing, is really just an opportunity to cultivate an attitude of dependency on God, and a lifestyle of prayer and reliance. And plus, I am convinced that ever since sin entered the world, consumption of quality food also became way more difficult. Either that, or humans became gluttons. 

I think i might find it hard posting in 2 places but for this, i left out all the cheesy sappy i-miss-you bits intended for The Lover.Its saturday, 915pm and since its a 6hr difference from Singapore, its 315am back home. Helsinki is still not home, but i think i might fall in love with it still.

The word Helsinki itself is quite splendid i think. i don’t really know why, but i quite like how it rolls off the tongue. Perhaps its the fact the word ends with the vowel “i”. hahah. i’m only guessing, personal preference. The first day in a foreign city is probably the most significant but I guess for me, things got exciting way back in Singapore as my dad drove The Family to the airport to send me off. Everyone was in a real (angry) fit about how i ought to be getting from the airport in helsinki to my place. It was a pretty sad moment for me actually because it was my last few moments with The Family but we were spending it arguing about travel. It was very heated, very intense. Barbarian Tays (heehee). But i guess what really altered in my heart was when i asked The Lover (we were on the phone) if he could pray for me and he did. And then i did as well, and that entirely soothed the racket, not just in the car, but in my heart. Thank you Lord.

Something else I was grateful for was the friends who showed up to send me off. Send offs can be quite a complicated thing because its really a mix tradition and formality and true affection but regardless, i know i felt such an intense appreciation for those who came that day. And i think it was particularly because it was such an incredible opportunity for us to come together to pray. Being in a circle surrounded by christian brothers and sisters (the great cloud of witnesses) praying was so humbling. It was just so beautiful to be with one another interceding to our Good God about the different ministries in church and the various burdens He has laid upon our hearts. The Christian body is really united in Christ, and though so so fallen, still resembles the image of the (in)visible God. 

The flight was rather traumatic for a couple of reasons, but primarily because i’m really just a coward with too little trust in God. haha. It was so hard to manage my backpack with the camera and laptop, and the worst was really when i had to get it up the overhead compartment on the plane. I looked up to see this miniature sized allocated compartment that could not fit my way oversized backpack; there was such a deep surge of fear in my heart. i don’t know why i always overreact so emotionally to things but it was so high and so far and so small and i just couldn’t do it. So i looked around and decided on the Indian man to ask for help. hahah. yes, i admit, it was a racially calculated choice. i know i know, he’s probably just as finnish as anyone else, but i just thought we might have something in common, being in a plane full of white-skinned people. hahah. so he helped me with it and placed it in someone else’s compartment. And so when the people who actually sat at those seats arrived, i had to apologise and ask if they could place their baggage somewhere else. by then, i was feeling quite nervous and uneasy in general. but when the plane took off and i started looking through and reading the letters that The Family and my friends wrote, i was filled with such gratitude again. i just didn’t expect the amount of effort that they took to write those letters and put together the scrapbook. it nearly made me cry because their love was so generous. 

The moments before landing was particularly special for me and i think i know why. It was the strong sense of God’s presence and the love of His people in the call with The Lover, the prayers at the airport, the letters during the flight. So humbling, so undeserving. Couldn’t ask for more.