Hi everyone!
I realised that despite the fact that I've been here for almost four months and I came here to study, I haven't been talking about the studying itself very much, and been mostly talking about other things. I have mentioned my classes every now and then, but I thought now would be a good time for a super-cliché "what is it like studying in a foreign country" -exchange-blogpost. It comes to you in four parts.
Part one: The universities.
To my best knowledge there are three public universities in Manaus. There's UEA, Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, aka. the Amazonas state university. It's located closer to the center and the only reason why I've ever been there is because I had molecular biology class in March half of which was taught by a UEA professor at the UEA.
Then there's UFAM, Univerdidade Federal do Amazonas, aka. the federal university of Amazonas. That one's located close to where I live, and while I haven't been there for any classes, I spent a few days there in also March, because I was hanging out there with this research group who study monkeys and sloths, among other things. I may have put up here a picture of one of the sloths. Or maybe not, I don't remember. I've also been there once because there's a two-day market there once a month, so I went to see that the last time they had it.
The palace I'm studying is the third one, INPA, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, aka. the national institute of Amazon research. So I suppose it's not actually a university, but instead a research institute, but they offer master and doctorate programs anyway. It's also close, next to the UFAM campus. Or I guess depends on what you mean by close. From where I live it takes ~40 min on foot (when you're not in a hurry) and 10-45 minutes by bus or car, depending on the weather and the time of the day.
All my courses are from INPA, although I was told when I was picking them that I could have taken some from UFAM too, had I wanted to. At that point I pretty much didn't know anything about anything and decided to stay in-house, to keep things simple. If I was staying another semester, I might look at the courses they offer at UFAM.
Part two: Things that are the same here.
Well. You pick courses, you sign up for courses, you study on courses. Studying itself is pretty much the same. You sit and read. Or write.
There are some mandatory courses (if I was actually studying here), but other than that you get to choose what you want to take.
It's the same people I see on the courses. Not everyone is on all of them, but it's the same faces that come and go in the classes. I've understood they're the group of new master's students who started in the beginning of March.
How much work a certain course requires (in relation to the number of credits) depends on the person teaching it. That's true in Finland, and that's true here. I complained about ridiculously long days back in April, but it turns out at that point I had happened to take courses where the professors required more. The courses I've had since then have had a more relaxed tempo.
The whole being a student thing in general. Students also here don't really have time, or money. They hang out with the people from the classes, and they hold parties when ever there's an excuse.
So I guess the basics of being a student are the parts that are the same.
Part three: Things that are different.
The registration for the courses had to be done on paper. Well, I didn't actually have to have it on paper paper, but I had to fill a form that was sent to the secretary, who then makes lists of the people signed up for each course. I think our system is easier for everyone.
As I've already said, there's only one course at a time. They go on for a week or two (mostly two), full-day, every day. (Well, unless we get off an hour earlier than the schedule says. Has happened more than once.)
There's a really long break for lunch. This is also something I already mentioned, but it still annoys me. It's a two to two and a half -hour break in the middle of my most efficient working hours with which I can't do anything. I could do some studying, but without a laptop (which I don't carry with me so it won't get stolen), there's not much I can do. I think in Finland, when there there happens to be classes of only one course all day, the break for lunch is about an hour. Because an hour is enough.
There's more field work. Right now I'm in my first course that includes no field work (well, the molecular biology had lab-work, and not field work, but still), and this is my fifth course. After this one I still have two, one of which is a field course.
The lectures are more interactive than in Finland. By which I mean that the people here ask a lot more questions during the lectures. In Finland people mostly listen, and don't have anything to ask. (Well, except when you happen to be in the same course with one of those people who keep asking something every ten minutes and it's really annoying.) So the professor and the students actually talk during the class.
The references are better here, and the reading for the courses is scientific articles. For most of the courses in Finland, if you want something extra to read, it's usually a book. Here the professors dump a hundred articles in dropbox (which is used here for sharing documents) and gives a list of which articles are related to which lesson. So if you want to know more or check something (or like me, have the same thing explained to me in English), you take the stack of articles and start reading. And I do realise reading scientific papers is kind of important if you're going to be a researcher, but it's so hard and takes forever. Even when they're in English. And I don't even know if I'm going to be a researcher. Though I guess the people who study in a research institute are planning on becoming researchers.
The master's program has a lot less classes and a lot more master's project than in Finland. While our project is supposed to be about a third of all the work put into the master's studies, here it's three quarters or something. And yes, their program is two years too, like in Finland. So their project is a lot more extensive. I think I like our way better. I'm not saying that learning to do research while doing research isn't valuable, but I feel like I want to have more general background knowledge, because that is after all what new research should be built on, and the courses are the place to get that. But maybe this is one of those things that since this is a research institute, the students are taught to do research above all else.
It seems to me that the students and the professors know each other better here. Maybe it's the research-institute thing again, but already the master's students seem to be integrated into the research groups, and they know their supervisors and the other professors, and people keep talking about "her students". In Finland there's just students, they're no one's in particular. Or maybe I don't notice this kind of thing in Finland, because I haven't yet started my own master's project. But even the master's students here have their own (well, shared) offices, and that's a thing I don't see happening in Finland, because we wouldn't have the space for everyone to have an office. But I guess this is partly because a significant majority of all the work the master's students do here is on the project, and they need to have someplace to work.
I'd like to say there are less exams than in Finland, since this is only the second course I have with an exam in the end, but based on half a year as a master's student in the Finnish program, I think there are less exams in those courses than there were in the bachelor's courses, so maybe that wouldn't be true.
Apparently there is no deadline for the professors to inform us about our grades for a course. I still haven't heard anything about the course that I had in March. Also, no one's told me what happens if I don't for some reason pass a course on the first try. Not that I'm worried that will happen. I'm not expecting good grades, simply because of the language, but I am expecting to pass all the courses I've had so far.
So in summary: less book learning, more interactive and practical learning. Which sounds great, but honestly, I'm the kind of person who likes book learning.
Part four: A couple of things I've learned.
Because I just want to share some of the things I've learned in the classes, because I thought they were interesting.
There is a baobab in Namibia with a diameter of ~10 meters. I honestly don't even remember what this had to do with anything, but I just thought it was a super-interesting fact. It's in my notes right after "yes, the trees in the tropics also do have annual rings". That one's interesting too, actually. So apparently people (including me, but also scientists) used to think that the trees in the tropics wouldn't have the annual rings like in temperate areas. That's because the rings in the trees in say Finland is caused by the differences in the growth rates during the year, because weirdly enough trees don't grow very much when it's -15 degrees outside, and then grow a lot during the warm period. But the thing is, it's always warm in the tropics, so that would mean that the trees grow at the same rate the whole year round, and don't have the rings, right? Wrong. Turns out the differences in rainfall and river water levels (vary so much during the year) are enough to make trees grow a lot during some times of the year and very little during others. So yeah, they have rings too.
The Amazon river is responsible for 18% of the water that flows from rivers into oceans worldwide. 18%. Of the oceans' water. Well, not quite, because some of the water gets into the oceans directly through rain, but still. That is a lot of water. About 200 000 cubic meters per second on average, in case you want to know how much is a lot. That's unsurprisingly more than any other river in the world.
The majority of Brazil's electricity is hydroelectric. Which makes sense, at a first glance, since they have a lot of river here. But no. Hydroelectric power is based on the potential energy of water coming down a hill, and the Brazilian Amazon has no hills. (Ok, it has any hills.) Manaus is at an elevation less than 100 meters above sea level, despite being over 1000 km from the ocean. So not much elevation difference there. Sure, the Amazon and a lot of the tributaries start somewhere in the Andie's, and they might actually have a hill there.
But there's more. The hydroelectric dams are not great. Not only do they permanently flood the area right above the dam, which destroys the ecosystem there and releases so, so much CO2 and methane as all that now-drowned biomass breaks down, the dams also even out the natural water level variation downstream from them. And since this area has been adapting to the seasonal floods and droughts for a few million years now, the floods and droughts suddenly disappearing is very bad for everything, because a lot of creatures count on that flood to come every year. And the less intense floods would make agriculture in the flooding areas easier, which would mean turning what's now very biologically productive flooding forests (that would no longer flood) into farmland. So maybe no more dams in the Amazon? Except there are, according to some article I read during the weekend, plans to build almost 300 new hydroelectric dams in the Amazon basin. And someone once (so many times) called hydroelectric power clean and environmental-friendly.
So I have a better idea: how about cover all the surface that is currently useless, like all the roofs of buildings, with solar panels, and see how that increases the energy production. Because in the cities there is a lot of area that could be covered in solar panels. And here at the equator it would actually make some sense (unlike in Finland, where the energy is needed when the sun isn't shining), since even though the sun is covered in clouds a lot of time, it is also not covered in clouds a lot of the time, and even when it is there's probably enough light coming through to get something out of the panels. And also because sun shines year round about twelve hours a day, and the electricity would only have to be stored so it can be used the same day once the sun sets. I feel like I might be getting off topic, but seriously, there is so much heat and light here, turning some of it into electricity would be great.
I think that's all I wanted to tell you this week. I think.
Ok.
~matu
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Friday, May 25, 2018
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
The flood and things that lived
Last weekend I had a plan to go to Anavilhanas national park, which is some way up Rio Negro from Manaus. In the park there is the second largest river archipelago in the world. However, during the week I got a huge inspiration to do some world and character building for the thing I'm writing, and since those come way, way too rarely, I decided to make this one count and stayed at home and basically spent five days in Wikipedia reading through articles about extinct life forms. (If you just want to read about cool animals instead of the flood at my house, you can skip the part with the pictures.)
And I don't regret it. Not only because I got many, many hours of research done, but also because at about half past three on Saturday afternoon my ceiling started dripping water again.
You may remember the dripping ceiling from about a month ago, if you bothered reading the post about my terrible week. I don't blame you if you didn't, it was essentially just me complaining about everything.
Anyway, on Thursday one of my roommates noticed also the garage ceiling (which is right next to my room) was dripping, so on Friday morning a plumber came over and fixed that. About an hour after he left, my ceiling started dripping again. I have no idea what he did up there, but yeah, my ceiling was dripping, and I was annoyed. So we called the plumber back and he fixed what ever was making the ceiling leak.
His fix worked for a little over a day. And that's why I'm happy I
was home on Saturday afternoon when the ceiling started to leak again. I
was sitting in my hammock, when the dripping started. I groaned to
myself, because this was seriously getting old. So I got the mattress
and the hammock out of the way, and put a plate under the leak. In about
half a minute I realised that would not be enough, and went out to get
the biggest kettle we have, which is only a few liters, but bigger than
the plate. In another few minutes I realised the kettle would not be
enough, because the dripping had turned to something closer to a shower.
So Iran around the house, trying to find someone who knows how to cut
the water off, and I am so happy I wasn't alone at home. I moved the
mattress and all my electronics out of the room, tried to empty the
kettle fast enough that my room wouldn't completely overflow, put our
big trashcan under the second practically-shower leak in the hallway
that had appeared there, and started scooping the water off the floor. (You can't actually see the amount of water on the floor here very well, but I can tell you my floor is not actually shiny enough to reflect things.)
And
there was a lot of water. This was not a small leak. Me and one of my
housemates spent an hour moving the water out of my room and the hall
and pushing it outside using one (well, two) of those things you use in
showers and swimming halls and what ever to guide the water into the
right place on the floor so it's drained. At the end of the hour, the
floor in the hallway was not exactly dry, but dry enough to dry quickly
on its own. My ceiling was still dripping (despite the fact that the
water had been turned off an hour earlier), but the floor was dry enough
there too that I decided that there wasn't more I could do before the
dripping stopped. So I went out to get some ice cream, because ice cream
makes everything better.
And I found avocado ice cream! I'd heard that avocado ice cream is a thing here more than two months ago, but I hadn't seen it until now, despite the fact that I'd been looking for it. It didn't really taste like avocado, though, if you ask me. It just tasted sweet.
Apparently avocado is eaten here as a sweet thing, not as a salty-food-thing like we're used to. Although to be fair, the avocados they get here are different to those we get in Finland. The avocados here are big and smooth, and sweeter than the avocados we're used to in Finland. They also get those normal avocados here, but they're apparently imported and expensive. Then again, since they're imported and expensive in Finland too, I wouldn't so much say that they're expensive, just that the local avocados are very cheap.
Anyway, when I got back home the ceiling was still dripping, though now only dripping, so I scooped some more water off the floor and got to doing some other things. The dripping finally stopped around seven, three hours after the water had been turned off.
So that was great. I'm just happy we live in a house without doorsteps and where you can just sweep the water directly out the door. It would have been way, way worse if I was living in an apartment, or a place with doorsteps. Oh, and the fact that our floors are ceramic tile instead of wood or something is also good. It can take the flood.
Ok, enough about the flood.
Before the house started flooding, I wanted to tell you about some of the highlights of my research into the past lifeforms. I suppose you might be wondering why I'm researching those for a story. Shortly explained the story is located on a tidally locked planet, which means I basically have to invent the kind of life they have there, and ancient, now-extinct animals are a great source of ideas for creatures that are very different from the current ones. I also want to do the life there well, because my main character is a monk of the god of terrestrial life, which means he's really familiar with the plants and animals there, which means I need to be too.
Anyway. Here are some of the most interesting things I've found so far during my hours on Wikipedia.
Chalicotheres (46.2-0.78 Mya = million years ago) were a relative of horses. That's not so weird, it turns out there are a lot of things that are relatives of horses. What is weird, is that despite only eating leaves, they (well one lineage of them) had claws, which they used to pull the tree branches down to better reach the higher leaves. And, to avoid breaking those claws when walking, they evolved to walk on their knuckles. Like gorillas. What. Actually, I already knew about them before hand, because the youtube channel Eons did a video about them a few weeks back. You should watch it.
Also related to horses (probably a direct ancestor, if i'm not mistaken) were these animals called Mesohippus (30-40 Mya), which I guess basically means half-horse. Either way, they were still using more than one toe for walking, though most of the effort was on one. (Horses only walk on one toe, in case someone reading this didn't know. That's why it seems it doesn't have toes.) Anyway, Mesohuppus were only ~60 cm tall.
Mesonychia (66-33 Mya) was a group of ungulates (which include everything from pigs to hippos to deers to, yes, horses) that were carnivorous and apparently resembled wolves somewhat, except that they had hooves on all their four toes. Yes, a wolf-like thing with four hooves on each foot. (For reference, horses have one hoof per foot, and pigs and cows have two.)
Kopidodon (~56 Mya) was basically like a squirrel, except it wasn't a rodent, had huge canine teeth and was over a meter long.
Silvacola (~50 Mya) was a 5-6 cm long hedgehog. That's a tiny hedgehog.
Some pterosaurs (the flying reptiles that were not dinosaurs, 228-66 Mya) had practically fur. Well, it wasn't fur, exactly, because it had developed completely separately from mammalian hair, and has a different kind of structure, which is why it's not called hair, but instead pycnofibers. But it's practically fur.
Also, pterosaurs weren't awkward on ground, but (at least a lot of them) could probably walk or run perfectly well. Some even swam. Also, the biggest pterosaurs were the size of a giraffe. (There's also an Eons video about them. You should watch that too.)
One more pterosaur fact: the few-days-old pterosaurs are called flaplings.
If I understood right, there are three separate lineages of aquatic reptiles that used to live in the world, mosasaurs (101-66 Mya), ichthyosaurs (250-90 Mya) and plesiosaurs (204-66 Mya). They did actually apparently live at the same time for a while there, some 100 million years ago.
Tree ferns are a thing. I actually knew they had been a thing, but then they died and turned into the coal and oil we dig out of the ground today. So yes, I knew there used to be ferns that grew like things that long ago. What I didn't know is that there still are tree ferns around today, some 600-700 species of them. In case you're wandering what they're like, tree ferns are just simply ferns that grow at least a little bit of a trunk, so the leaves are higher from the ground. But yeah, the fact that they still exist came as a complete surprise to me. I think it's cool. I've always liked the idea of fern trees.
Cliona patera is a species of sponge (yes, still is) that grows in a cup-shape, which is why it's often called Neptune's cup. The cup can grow to be 5 meters in diameter. In the 1900's it was thought to be harvested to extinction, but some more were found 2011. Why were they harvested? Well, for example to be babies' bathtubs.
There is blue amber. Yeah, I got a bit sidetracked and ended up reading about fossil resins too, because I figured there might be something interesting there too. And there was. Blue amber. It's only found in the Dominican Republic, because that's where the chemical conditions have happened to be right. the amber looks normal in artificial light, but out in the sunlight it gets a blue hue and it's gorgeous. And expensive, because it's rare and only found in a small area. Though I actually googled it, because I was curious, and it's not as expensive as wikipedia made it sound. Oh, more expensive than regular amber, but I found one online store that sells apparently hand-made silver jewelery with blue amber, and the cost of the rings and necklaces was up from 100 USD.
And I don't regret it. Not only because I got many, many hours of research done, but also because at about half past three on Saturday afternoon my ceiling started dripping water again.
You may remember the dripping ceiling from about a month ago, if you bothered reading the post about my terrible week. I don't blame you if you didn't, it was essentially just me complaining about everything.
Anyway, on Thursday one of my roommates noticed also the garage ceiling (which is right next to my room) was dripping, so on Friday morning a plumber came over and fixed that. About an hour after he left, my ceiling started dripping again. I have no idea what he did up there, but yeah, my ceiling was dripping, and I was annoyed. So we called the plumber back and he fixed what ever was making the ceiling leak.
Apparently avocado is eaten here as a sweet thing, not as a salty-food-thing like we're used to. Although to be fair, the avocados they get here are different to those we get in Finland. The avocados here are big and smooth, and sweeter than the avocados we're used to in Finland. They also get those normal avocados here, but they're apparently imported and expensive. Then again, since they're imported and expensive in Finland too, I wouldn't so much say that they're expensive, just that the local avocados are very cheap.
Anyway, when I got back home the ceiling was still dripping, though now only dripping, so I scooped some more water off the floor and got to doing some other things. The dripping finally stopped around seven, three hours after the water had been turned off.
So that was great. I'm just happy we live in a house without doorsteps and where you can just sweep the water directly out the door. It would have been way, way worse if I was living in an apartment, or a place with doorsteps. Oh, and the fact that our floors are ceramic tile instead of wood or something is also good. It can take the flood.
Ok, enough about the flood.
Before the house started flooding, I wanted to tell you about some of the highlights of my research into the past lifeforms. I suppose you might be wondering why I'm researching those for a story. Shortly explained the story is located on a tidally locked planet, which means I basically have to invent the kind of life they have there, and ancient, now-extinct animals are a great source of ideas for creatures that are very different from the current ones. I also want to do the life there well, because my main character is a monk of the god of terrestrial life, which means he's really familiar with the plants and animals there, which means I need to be too.
Anyway. Here are some of the most interesting things I've found so far during my hours on Wikipedia.
Chalicotheres (46.2-0.78 Mya = million years ago) were a relative of horses. That's not so weird, it turns out there are a lot of things that are relatives of horses. What is weird, is that despite only eating leaves, they (well one lineage of them) had claws, which they used to pull the tree branches down to better reach the higher leaves. And, to avoid breaking those claws when walking, they evolved to walk on their knuckles. Like gorillas. What. Actually, I already knew about them before hand, because the youtube channel Eons did a video about them a few weeks back. You should watch it.
Also related to horses (probably a direct ancestor, if i'm not mistaken) were these animals called Mesohippus (30-40 Mya), which I guess basically means half-horse. Either way, they were still using more than one toe for walking, though most of the effort was on one. (Horses only walk on one toe, in case someone reading this didn't know. That's why it seems it doesn't have toes.) Anyway, Mesohuppus were only ~60 cm tall.
Mesonychia (66-33 Mya) was a group of ungulates (which include everything from pigs to hippos to deers to, yes, horses) that were carnivorous and apparently resembled wolves somewhat, except that they had hooves on all their four toes. Yes, a wolf-like thing with four hooves on each foot. (For reference, horses have one hoof per foot, and pigs and cows have two.)
Kopidodon (~56 Mya) was basically like a squirrel, except it wasn't a rodent, had huge canine teeth and was over a meter long.
Silvacola (~50 Mya) was a 5-6 cm long hedgehog. That's a tiny hedgehog.
Some pterosaurs (the flying reptiles that were not dinosaurs, 228-66 Mya) had practically fur. Well, it wasn't fur, exactly, because it had developed completely separately from mammalian hair, and has a different kind of structure, which is why it's not called hair, but instead pycnofibers. But it's practically fur.
Also, pterosaurs weren't awkward on ground, but (at least a lot of them) could probably walk or run perfectly well. Some even swam. Also, the biggest pterosaurs were the size of a giraffe. (There's also an Eons video about them. You should watch that too.)
One more pterosaur fact: the few-days-old pterosaurs are called flaplings.
If I understood right, there are three separate lineages of aquatic reptiles that used to live in the world, mosasaurs (101-66 Mya), ichthyosaurs (250-90 Mya) and plesiosaurs (204-66 Mya). They did actually apparently live at the same time for a while there, some 100 million years ago.
Tree ferns are a thing. I actually knew they had been a thing, but then they died and turned into the coal and oil we dig out of the ground today. So yes, I knew there used to be ferns that grew like things that long ago. What I didn't know is that there still are tree ferns around today, some 600-700 species of them. In case you're wandering what they're like, tree ferns are just simply ferns that grow at least a little bit of a trunk, so the leaves are higher from the ground. But yeah, the fact that they still exist came as a complete surprise to me. I think it's cool. I've always liked the idea of fern trees.
Cliona patera is a species of sponge (yes, still is) that grows in a cup-shape, which is why it's often called Neptune's cup. The cup can grow to be 5 meters in diameter. In the 1900's it was thought to be harvested to extinction, but some more were found 2011. Why were they harvested? Well, for example to be babies' bathtubs.
There is blue amber. Yeah, I got a bit sidetracked and ended up reading about fossil resins too, because I figured there might be something interesting there too. And there was. Blue amber. It's only found in the Dominican Republic, because that's where the chemical conditions have happened to be right. the amber looks normal in artificial light, but out in the sunlight it gets a blue hue and it's gorgeous. And expensive, because it's rare and only found in a small area. Though I actually googled it, because I was curious, and it's not as expensive as wikipedia made it sound. Oh, more expensive than regular amber, but I found one online store that sells apparently hand-made silver jewelery with blue amber, and the cost of the rings and necklaces was up from 100 USD.
Also, there was (is? I only read about the fossils) magnetic bacteria. Wikipedia says it better than I could: "Within the magnetotactic bacteria, magnetite and greigite crystals are biosynthesized within organelles called magnetosomes. These magnetosomes form chains within the bacterial cell and in doing so, provide the organism with a permanent magnetic dipole. The organism uses it for geomagnetic navigation, to align itself with the Earth's geomagnecit field and to reach the optimal position along vertical chemical gradients."
Oookay. I think that's probably enough for this week again.
There are so many cool things in the world.
~matu
Saturday, May 19, 2018
Next week will be better, I promise
I realize I didn't write a post yesterday and I apologize for that. I've had a pretty shitty few days.
I got the fucking stomach flu from somewhere. Or a food poisoning, I don't know. I woke up Thursday morning and was like "hmm this feeling isn't very nice" and then rushed to the bathroom before I threw up in the bed. Then later that day I checked and apparently I had a fever (38.8°C!!), so that sucked too. I felt better yesterday, but I was still feeling a bit weak and queasy, so I didn't really do much. But yeah, wasn't really in the right mind yesterday to write a post.
I'm all better now though, and I'd write a proper one now, but we're going to Turku for a friend's home warming party thing so I don't really have time. Plus I don't really have anything planned out so... sorry. I'll come up with something extra special for next week to make up for it!
Pie out.
I got the fucking stomach flu from somewhere. Or a food poisoning, I don't know. I woke up Thursday morning and was like "hmm this feeling isn't very nice" and then rushed to the bathroom before I threw up in the bed. Then later that day I checked and apparently I had a fever (38.8°C!!), so that sucked too. I felt better yesterday, but I was still feeling a bit weak and queasy, so I didn't really do much. But yeah, wasn't really in the right mind yesterday to write a post.
I'm all better now though, and I'd write a proper one now, but we're going to Turku for a friend's home warming party thing so I don't really have time. Plus I don't really have anything planned out so... sorry. I'll come up with something extra special for next week to make up for it!
Pie out.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
At the fair
I've been told my posts are too long. So today I'm doing a short one. You're welcome.
Like I've already mentioned in some post I think, there is a fair (or market?) at the city center every Sunday. I googled it on Saturday, because I wanted to know if it's only there for a morning, or also some time into the afternoon (it's there for the morning), and found out that it's officially an artisan or handcrafts fair, which I had not known.
Anyway, I went to the fair again on Sunday, mostly to get some fruits I can't seem to find anywhere else. And because I realised that despite having been to the fair twice by now, I don't think I have any general pictures from it. Only of my food.
And since I went there, I had some breakfast there, just to get some variety. And because it's not that expensive to eat breakfast there. Well, depends on what you eat. I actually had some bread this time instead of a tapioca. My bread had fried banana in it, with tucumã. I thought that was an interesting combination. And some cupuaçu juice.
(So now I have more pictures of my food at the fair...)
But while food is a relevant part of markets, so are the other stalls. It was hard to take pictures of things in shade on a sunny day line Sunday was, but I tried.
This is the kind of stuff you can find at a lot of the stalls there. So it's mostly souvenir-kind of things. Small wooden statues and key rings and... I'm not even sure what these things are at the front here. A lot of the statues and key rings are made of not only wood, but can have the base made of tucumã seeds or something like that. There are a lot of those. They are the really tiny ones, though, like the ones right behind what ever the things in the front of the picture are.
And then there are completely different kind of things. Like this guy selling live fish for aquariums. Which, um... sure. Ok. Not a thing I could see happening in Finland. So this surprised me.
And of course there's the fruit vendors. They're why I went there in the first place. I couldn't actually find the fruits I was looking for, but I found some other fruits that I've been trying to find for a while but don't seem to be able to, so I had started to give up on them. So that was nice.
And people selling plants, because why not. I really want to buy a plant every time I see one of these, but then I tell myself to stop being an idiot, because I'm only here for a month and a half more, and it's not like I could take any of the plants with me when I leave. So no buying plants.
This picture is a great example of what happens when you try to take a picture of something partly in shadow and partly in the sun. It's not actually dark in the shadow. It's just ridiculously bright in the sun. But I thought I'd put this one up here anyway, because I wanted to show you the parrot-probably-wall-cloth-things. There are some of those too, with different designs, also other things than birds.
Jewelery is also really typical at the stalls, not only key rings and statues. A lot of the jewelery here is made of some wood and/or seeds of different things. Açaí seeds are really common in these. It's a palm, and the seeds are round, ~0.5 cm in diameter. So excellent size for making bracelets and necklaces. There are some of those in the lighter-colored necklaces farther back at the picture (the colorful beads), I'm not sure what the ones in the front are made of, since the beads in them are smaller and flat. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were some kind of seeds too.
I also ended up buying a few pão de queijos, too, because they're good, and because they're Brazilian, and because they only cost 50 (real) cents apiece. There were people who baked them there, at the market. Well, they had clearly made them ready before hand, and then just had an oven there to bake the ready-made balls. They were apparently pretty popular, too, because when I was buying them they had run out, so I had to wait for the next batch. And I wasn't the only one, they had more than half a dozen people there, waiting to get some. But it was worth it, because I wasn't in a hurry, and I got some fresh from the oven.
I also bought myself a mug. Because you have to have mugs from the places you go. Or maybe that's just me. Despite the fact that my mug-shelf at home is already almost overflowing. Either way, I hadn't so far found a good mug, but now I did. It doesn't really look like me overly much, but I like it in general.
The mugs are actually a good example why I found it a little weird that this is a handcrafts fair, because while there are a lot of people selling what are probably actually handcrafts, there are also a lot of stalls with essentially the same products. Those are the ones with the most souvenir-like things, the mugs and key rings and statues. But the fact that there are a dozen stalls with the exactly same stuff makes me doubt they're made by hand. Or at least that the people who are selling them definitely didn't make them themselves, because the guy in the next stall is selling identical stuff. But I don't know.
Oh, and apparently I didn't take a picture of all the stalls selling clothes. They are definitely not handmade. Basically you can find all kinds of clothes for sale there, starting from underwear and swimsuits. Which takes my mind at least to the question of who buys bras from a street vendor. There's (I assume, I haven't asked them) no way to try them on there in the middle of the street.
Anyway, as a person who hates shopping for clothes I mostly just ignore the clothes stalls. Which is probably why I don't have a picture of them.
Anyway, I hope this was short enough for you. (Well, it looks quite long, but it has a lot of really big pictures, so there is only little text.)
~matu
PS. I don't mean to rub in in your faces, by I am so happy I'm missing out on the pollen season this year, sounds like it's a really bad one.
Like I've already mentioned in some post I think, there is a fair (or market?) at the city center every Sunday. I googled it on Saturday, because I wanted to know if it's only there for a morning, or also some time into the afternoon (it's there for the morning), and found out that it's officially an artisan or handcrafts fair, which I had not known.
Anyway, I went to the fair again on Sunday, mostly to get some fruits I can't seem to find anywhere else. And because I realised that despite having been to the fair twice by now, I don't think I have any general pictures from it. Only of my food.
(So now I have more pictures of my food at the fair...)
But while food is a relevant part of markets, so are the other stalls. It was hard to take pictures of things in shade on a sunny day line Sunday was, but I tried.
The mugs are actually a good example why I found it a little weird that this is a handcrafts fair, because while there are a lot of people selling what are probably actually handcrafts, there are also a lot of stalls with essentially the same products. Those are the ones with the most souvenir-like things, the mugs and key rings and statues. But the fact that there are a dozen stalls with the exactly same stuff makes me doubt they're made by hand. Or at least that the people who are selling them definitely didn't make them themselves, because the guy in the next stall is selling identical stuff. But I don't know.
Oh, and apparently I didn't take a picture of all the stalls selling clothes. They are definitely not handmade. Basically you can find all kinds of clothes for sale there, starting from underwear and swimsuits. Which takes my mind at least to the question of who buys bras from a street vendor. There's (I assume, I haven't asked them) no way to try them on there in the middle of the street.
Anyway, as a person who hates shopping for clothes I mostly just ignore the clothes stalls. Which is probably why I don't have a picture of them.
Anyway, I hope this was short enough for you. (Well, it looks quite long, but it has a lot of really big pictures, so there is only little text.)
~matu
PS. I don't mean to rub in in your faces, by I am so happy I'm missing out on the pollen season this year, sounds like it's a really bad one.
Friday, May 11, 2018
Death comes from above, in a cloud of pollen
The pollen season is here and I'm dying. It's horrible I tell you, it didn't use to be this bad back home. I don't know if it's because I'm much more south now, but I am constantly sneezing and I'm so stuffed up I can't even sleep properly. I spent at least a good hour laying in bed last night trying to even breathe properly. All the snoring didn't help me fall asleep any better either...
Had to go to a physician because of my allergies, even. She told me it's birch (which I knew already) and alder. That one came as a bit of a surprise. She gave me a prescription and now I have to take medicine twice a day. I'm still super stuffy though, which sucks.
Oh gods, my everything is aching today. Even my head, I don't know if it's because of the stiff neck or the constant sniffling, but I think I'm going to leave this here for now. I wanted to tell you about the ball, but I guess that'll have to wait until the next one. I need to go to bed now.
Until next week, bye~
Had to go to a physician because of my allergies, even. She told me it's birch (which I knew already) and alder. That one came as a bit of a surprise. She gave me a prescription and now I have to take medicine twice a day. I'm still super stuffy though, which sucks.
Oh gods, my everything is aching today. Even my head, I don't know if it's because of the stiff neck or the constant sniffling, but I think I'm going to leave this here for now. I wanted to tell you about the ball, but I guess that'll have to wait until the next one. I need to go to bed now.
Until next week, bye~
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Thoughts from half-way through
The total time I will be spending in South America is about a half a year. This you all probably know. What you probably don't know, because you probably haven't done that math, and most of you don't even know when I left and when I'm returning to Finland, but the exact time of my travel is actually 27 weeks and one day, from when I left my parents place in February to when I land back in Finland in August. This week is week 14. Which means I am (almost, still a couple of days off) half-way through my time here.
I think often people would start with "I can't believe half of my time here has already gone!" But not me. Because I can't quite believe I still have half of my time left. It feels like I've been here a really long time. Some of that is probably due to the fact that I left my own home already in December, and then spent a month and a half at my parents' place doing pretty much nothing. And then after I got here, I spent another month and a half here doing pretty much nothing. A bit of being a tourist. A bit of getting used to being here.
And because it feels like I've been here a long time, I feel like I'd be ready to get back to my real life. Because being here apparently doesn't count as real life. And there are a lot of things I miss about Finland.
I miss being able to understand what people are saying. All of it, not just the main points.
I miss only having mosquitoes for a few months a year.
I miss not being sweaty. Actually, I miss this surprisingly little. I'm a person who doesn't sweat very much (and not because I'm always cold), and as such when I do sweat it's really uncomfortable. But I just noticed the other week that while just walking to a lecture gets we as sweaty as capoeira training does in Finland, I don't pay much attention to it anymore. It's just the normal state of being while walking (because it's not hot enough to be sweaty all the time. As long as you're just sitting in shade, the temperature is actually really comfortable and no sweat). But yeah, apparently I've gotten used to being a little sweaty, which is probably good, because it would be really terrible here if I was as uncomfortable sweaty as I'm used to being. (What I am not used to, however, is the muscle cramps that come from sweating out all the things that stop them from happening, instead of keeping them in the body where they'd actually be needed.)
I miss drinkable water coming out the tab.
I miss having a bike, although I wouldn't want to move around by bike here. So I miss being in a city where you can comfortably move around by bike. I don't actually like cycling all that much, it's just super-practical.
I miss being able to carry my computer and camera around without being scared. I miss being able to walk around when it's dark outside.
I miss my plants. Those of you who have been to my place know I have a lot of those. I keep wondering if and how much my mango sapling has grown.
I miss being able to tell what time of the year it is. Because I am used to being able to do that. It looks completely different in Finland now than it did when I left in February, because that was in the dead of winter, and now it's almost summer. Here, every time I want to know what time of the year it is, I actually have to think for a moment about what month it is, because it looks the same outside now than it did when I got here. People keep telling me the raining will get less and the weather warmer, but I haven't noticed any change. It might be that the weather is different now, but the seasonal change from "28 degrees and probably raining at some point during the day" to "30 degrees and possibly raining at some point during the day" is just not the same as the change from "-15 degrees, snowing, and dark for most of the day" to "20 degrees, some clouds, and never dark". I think this might actually be one of the reasons why it feels like I've been here so long: because for me it's been a very warm July for three months, and July isn't supposed to last for three months.
I miss (literally) some of the food. I couldn't quite believe it when I realised it's the first of may (which I somehow didn't see coming, because that's supposed to be in the spring, not in the middle of summer) and I will miss out on the sima and doughnuts. And the strawberries. Oh, the strawberries. I'm coming back in mid-August, which means there maybe are still some strawberries around, but the best season will be past. Way past, if it's a warm summer. But as you may have deduced from the post I made about the food, I love the food here, so it's hard to feel too bad about missing the Finnish highlights of the year.
(Speaking of food, I recently found out that there are also sweet banana chips, coated with sugar instead of salt. They're the brown ones in the picture. Why are they brown and the salty ones yellow? I don't know. Maybe they're made of differently ripe bananas or something. Either way, I like the salty ones better. Although that can be simply that the salt sticks to the chips better than the sugar, and they're better when there's something on them instead of tasting only like banana.)
Weirdly, a thing I don't miss is living alone. I mean, I kinda do, but not once have I thought here "I wish I was living alone". Because I wouldn't want to live alone here. I would want to live without pets, though. Because the entire time here I've lived in houses with at least two animals, and I could really do without them. And once I get back to Finland, well, there I wouldn't want to live in a house with five other people, because it is really annoying that two days after I scrub the stove it's covered in grease again because other people are using it too. But still, I like living with people here. Because I know it's only temporary.
And, I was reminded (by a friend on Facebook complaining about it the other day) that you're currently going through all the birch pollen, and man, do I not miss that. So I really do not mind missing one pollen season. Then again, I keep living with people with cats here, and I'm also allergic to them. Then again again, I'm not getting any allergic reaction from those cats. Or the dogs I've been living with. Or the peanuts I've gotten a mild reaction from before. So I don't know what's up with my allergies and this country. But I'm still happy I'm not there for the birch pollen season. Especially if it's bad this year. Is it bad this year?
Although honestly, I think if I was leaving now and heading back home, I would feel like the time hasn't been enough. I've just gotten used to the rhythm of studying here (and I still have half of my courses coming up!). I've just gotten to know some the people studying in the ecology program a little, which is how much I usually get to know people in general, because I have absolutely no idea how to go from "I now this person's name" to "I know this person". I've just gotten my Portuguese skills to a level where I feel like I can say I speak some Portuguese instead of a little Portuguese. Enough Portuguese that I'm not super-nervous about going out knowing I will have to talk to people a little.
And thinking of this I once again realised that I still have half my time left. Which means I still have the time to maybe get to know the people a bit more than a little, I still have time to learn the language. I won't be great at Portuguese once I leave, but considering how much more confident I feel about my language skills now than I did when I got here, I will be able to speak enough to say I speak Portuguese, unlike most of the languages I've studied in my life. (I started to read The Name of the Wind in Portuguese a couple of days back, and while it's a lot slower than reading in English or Finnish, and I definitely don't understand all the words, I understand enough to read it!) And knowing I still have all that time for that makes me feel good.
(I have no idea how I'm going to keep up those Portuguese skills once I get back home, though.)
I think probably another reason why it feels like the half of the time I have left is a long time is because (and a lot of you already know this) for the last month, I'm going to Peru, to travel, and then to participate in the Interamerican Scout Moot in Cusco, which yes, to those of you who don't know scouts very well (or at all) is a scout camp, but the participants are 18-25-year-olds, instead of the kids, and I am really, really excited about it. Both the camp and the traveling in Peru. (Just last week we got to know the international 10-person teams we'll be doing everything with at the camp, and there is so much Spanish happening in my Whatsapp now, because my team has me, two Brazilians, and the rest are from Spanish-speaking countries. I guess I fill the spot of the non-Latin-American, so they didn't put anyone from US or Canada in my team. But it's very exciting.) And of course time goes slow when there's something in the future you're eagerly waiting for. But I think the second half of my time here will go a lot faster. I mean, all I have left is a few courses, and then I'm off to Peru, where I have a few days here and there, and then there's the camp, and then I'm already returning to Finland. Three months from now I will probably be wondering where the last three months disappeared.
So yeah. That is my thoughts at this point in time. I can't believe I'm only half way through, and I'd want it to be July already (because that's when I'm leaving for Peru), but at the same time I'm happy I still have all that time to do things I haven't had time to do yet. And keep eating the amazing food.
~matu
PS. I saw a huge lizard on my way home the other day and by huge I mean easily over half a meter with the tail, it was turquoise with some black stripes. I wanted to put a picture of it up here, because it was really cool, and it was just sitting there on the other side of a fence, so I was literally a meter away from it, but my phone battery had died about a half an hour earlier, so no pictures of huge lizards for you.
I think often people would start with "I can't believe half of my time here has already gone!" But not me. Because I can't quite believe I still have half of my time left. It feels like I've been here a really long time. Some of that is probably due to the fact that I left my own home already in December, and then spent a month and a half at my parents' place doing pretty much nothing. And then after I got here, I spent another month and a half here doing pretty much nothing. A bit of being a tourist. A bit of getting used to being here.
And because it feels like I've been here a long time, I feel like I'd be ready to get back to my real life. Because being here apparently doesn't count as real life. And there are a lot of things I miss about Finland.
I miss being able to understand what people are saying. All of it, not just the main points.
I miss only having mosquitoes for a few months a year.
I miss not being sweaty. Actually, I miss this surprisingly little. I'm a person who doesn't sweat very much (and not because I'm always cold), and as such when I do sweat it's really uncomfortable. But I just noticed the other week that while just walking to a lecture gets we as sweaty as capoeira training does in Finland, I don't pay much attention to it anymore. It's just the normal state of being while walking (because it's not hot enough to be sweaty all the time. As long as you're just sitting in shade, the temperature is actually really comfortable and no sweat). But yeah, apparently I've gotten used to being a little sweaty, which is probably good, because it would be really terrible here if I was as uncomfortable sweaty as I'm used to being. (What I am not used to, however, is the muscle cramps that come from sweating out all the things that stop them from happening, instead of keeping them in the body where they'd actually be needed.)
I miss drinkable water coming out the tab.
I miss having a bike, although I wouldn't want to move around by bike here. So I miss being in a city where you can comfortably move around by bike. I don't actually like cycling all that much, it's just super-practical.
I miss being able to carry my computer and camera around without being scared. I miss being able to walk around when it's dark outside.
I miss my plants. Those of you who have been to my place know I have a lot of those. I keep wondering if and how much my mango sapling has grown.
I miss being able to tell what time of the year it is. Because I am used to being able to do that. It looks completely different in Finland now than it did when I left in February, because that was in the dead of winter, and now it's almost summer. Here, every time I want to know what time of the year it is, I actually have to think for a moment about what month it is, because it looks the same outside now than it did when I got here. People keep telling me the raining will get less and the weather warmer, but I haven't noticed any change. It might be that the weather is different now, but the seasonal change from "28 degrees and probably raining at some point during the day" to "30 degrees and possibly raining at some point during the day" is just not the same as the change from "-15 degrees, snowing, and dark for most of the day" to "20 degrees, some clouds, and never dark". I think this might actually be one of the reasons why it feels like I've been here so long: because for me it's been a very warm July for three months, and July isn't supposed to last for three months.
I miss (literally) some of the food. I couldn't quite believe it when I realised it's the first of may (which I somehow didn't see coming, because that's supposed to be in the spring, not in the middle of summer) and I will miss out on the sima and doughnuts. And the strawberries. Oh, the strawberries. I'm coming back in mid-August, which means there maybe are still some strawberries around, but the best season will be past. Way past, if it's a warm summer. But as you may have deduced from the post I made about the food, I love the food here, so it's hard to feel too bad about missing the Finnish highlights of the year.
Weirdly, a thing I don't miss is living alone. I mean, I kinda do, but not once have I thought here "I wish I was living alone". Because I wouldn't want to live alone here. I would want to live without pets, though. Because the entire time here I've lived in houses with at least two animals, and I could really do without them. And once I get back to Finland, well, there I wouldn't want to live in a house with five other people, because it is really annoying that two days after I scrub the stove it's covered in grease again because other people are using it too. But still, I like living with people here. Because I know it's only temporary.
And, I was reminded (by a friend on Facebook complaining about it the other day) that you're currently going through all the birch pollen, and man, do I not miss that. So I really do not mind missing one pollen season. Then again, I keep living with people with cats here, and I'm also allergic to them. Then again again, I'm not getting any allergic reaction from those cats. Or the dogs I've been living with. Or the peanuts I've gotten a mild reaction from before. So I don't know what's up with my allergies and this country. But I'm still happy I'm not there for the birch pollen season. Especially if it's bad this year. Is it bad this year?
Although honestly, I think if I was leaving now and heading back home, I would feel like the time hasn't been enough. I've just gotten used to the rhythm of studying here (and I still have half of my courses coming up!). I've just gotten to know some the people studying in the ecology program a little, which is how much I usually get to know people in general, because I have absolutely no idea how to go from "I now this person's name" to "I know this person". I've just gotten my Portuguese skills to a level where I feel like I can say I speak some Portuguese instead of a little Portuguese. Enough Portuguese that I'm not super-nervous about going out knowing I will have to talk to people a little.
And thinking of this I once again realised that I still have half my time left. Which means I still have the time to maybe get to know the people a bit more than a little, I still have time to learn the language. I won't be great at Portuguese once I leave, but considering how much more confident I feel about my language skills now than I did when I got here, I will be able to speak enough to say I speak Portuguese, unlike most of the languages I've studied in my life. (I started to read The Name of the Wind in Portuguese a couple of days back, and while it's a lot slower than reading in English or Finnish, and I definitely don't understand all the words, I understand enough to read it!) And knowing I still have all that time for that makes me feel good.
(I have no idea how I'm going to keep up those Portuguese skills once I get back home, though.)
I think probably another reason why it feels like the half of the time I have left is a long time is because (and a lot of you already know this) for the last month, I'm going to Peru, to travel, and then to participate in the Interamerican Scout Moot in Cusco, which yes, to those of you who don't know scouts very well (or at all) is a scout camp, but the participants are 18-25-year-olds, instead of the kids, and I am really, really excited about it. Both the camp and the traveling in Peru. (Just last week we got to know the international 10-person teams we'll be doing everything with at the camp, and there is so much Spanish happening in my Whatsapp now, because my team has me, two Brazilians, and the rest are from Spanish-speaking countries. I guess I fill the spot of the non-Latin-American, so they didn't put anyone from US or Canada in my team. But it's very exciting.) And of course time goes slow when there's something in the future you're eagerly waiting for. But I think the second half of my time here will go a lot faster. I mean, all I have left is a few courses, and then I'm off to Peru, where I have a few days here and there, and then there's the camp, and then I'm already returning to Finland. Three months from now I will probably be wondering where the last three months disappeared.
So yeah. That is my thoughts at this point in time. I can't believe I'm only half way through, and I'd want it to be July already (because that's when I'm leaving for Peru), but at the same time I'm happy I still have all that time to do things I haven't had time to do yet. And keep eating the amazing food.
~matu
PS. I saw a huge lizard on my way home the other day and by huge I mean easily over half a meter with the tail, it was turquoise with some black stripes. I wanted to put a picture of it up here, because it was really cool, and it was just sitting there on the other side of a fence, so I was literally a meter away from it, but my phone battery had died about a half an hour earlier, so no pictures of huge lizards for you.
Friday, May 4, 2018
Mistakes have been made
Hello. It pains me to inform you that I have sprained my ankle.
Get it? It "pains me"?? Because my ankle hurts so much???
Puns aside, my ankle doesn't actually hurt that much anymore, it's been a few days by now. I'm honestly surprised that I didn't fuck myself up earlier, really, but I do like to think that I'm pretty attentive of my surroundings. Not this time apparently. Wanna know how it happened?
I tripped on some stairs.
Like seriously, of all the things, it's some stairs that get me, how lame is that! (get it, lame? bc I can't walk properly? I'm hilarious, I know) I mean like, I've stumbled in stairs before, obviously, who hasn't? You know that feeling when you think there's one more step but then there's not and your foot just keeps going and you're suddenly convinced that you're falling into the deepest pit of the underworld or whatever? Like, that's happened to me sooo many times, that's fine. You haven't really fucked up that bad if that happens. But this time I was going down the stairs, and there was a little platform in the middle, as there sometimes is (now that I think about it, why is that a thing? it just is), and I thought it was three steps wide but it wasn't, it was two and so I stepped into air. And then I went stumbling down. And I was falling face first, too, not on my butt like sometimes happens when you step a bit too far on the step and your foot slips off, no, I was all topsy turvy for a sec there.
I was holding onto the railing so I didn't really stumble down that much, but I did fuck up my right ankle. And now I'm basically confined to my bed. Which might sound great, but I'd much rather be studying with everyone else! I guess I've been catching up on lot of sleep, which is nice. I hadn't even realized that I was getting a bit sleep deprived until I didn't have to wake up with everyone else and could stay in bed. Ended up getting like two more hours of sleep yesterday morning!
I suppose, now that I've realized this, I might try to go to bed a bit earlier. I just have so much stuff I want to do in the evenings!
Well, anyway. I... was going somewhere with this, I think? Can't remember anymore. In any case, that's the udate on my life this week. Hopefully I won't have to just lay in bed for much longer anymore.
Although... it's a real comfy bed.
Until next week, bye~
Get it? It "pains me"?? Because my ankle hurts so much???
Puns aside, my ankle doesn't actually hurt that much anymore, it's been a few days by now. I'm honestly surprised that I didn't fuck myself up earlier, really, but I do like to think that I'm pretty attentive of my surroundings. Not this time apparently. Wanna know how it happened?
I tripped on some stairs.
Like seriously, of all the things, it's some stairs that get me, how lame is that! (get it, lame? bc I can't walk properly? I'm hilarious, I know) I mean like, I've stumbled in stairs before, obviously, who hasn't? You know that feeling when you think there's one more step but then there's not and your foot just keeps going and you're suddenly convinced that you're falling into the deepest pit of the underworld or whatever? Like, that's happened to me sooo many times, that's fine. You haven't really fucked up that bad if that happens. But this time I was going down the stairs, and there was a little platform in the middle, as there sometimes is (now that I think about it, why is that a thing? it just is), and I thought it was three steps wide but it wasn't, it was two and so I stepped into air. And then I went stumbling down. And I was falling face first, too, not on my butt like sometimes happens when you step a bit too far on the step and your foot slips off, no, I was all topsy turvy for a sec there.
I was holding onto the railing so I didn't really stumble down that much, but I did fuck up my right ankle. And now I'm basically confined to my bed. Which might sound great, but I'd much rather be studying with everyone else! I guess I've been catching up on lot of sleep, which is nice. I hadn't even realized that I was getting a bit sleep deprived until I didn't have to wake up with everyone else and could stay in bed. Ended up getting like two more hours of sleep yesterday morning!
I suppose, now that I've realized this, I might try to go to bed a bit earlier. I just have so much stuff I want to do in the evenings!
Well, anyway. I... was going somewhere with this, I think? Can't remember anymore. In any case, that's the udate on my life this week. Hopefully I won't have to just lay in bed for much longer anymore.
Although... it's a real comfy bed.
Until next week, bye~
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
Thoughts on fantasy books
There's not much happening here right now. Last week and this week I've had a course on terrestrial ecosystems in the Amazon. It's mostly about trees. As if there's nothing else in an ecosystem.
But since there's not much happening, I decided to talk about a bit about something completely different today.
I want to talk to you about fantasy books. More specifically I want to talk to you about people dying in fantasy books. Cheery topic, huh?
So some time last fall I started to think about the books I had read recently, and it seemed many of them were about some thieving crews going around killing people (not really, also a lot of other things happened in them, but there were thieving crews and they did kill a bunch of people). This was a coincidence, of course. I simply happened to read two series back to back with thief crews in them.
But it got me thinking. I tried to think of a single fantasy book or book series where 1. no one who has a name dies, and 2. none of the main crew kill anyone.
I couldn't think of single one. We went through a list of best fantasy novels or something with my (other) little sister some time in January, trying to find a book or series where no one dies, and couldn't find one. We didn't know all of them, but between the two of us, we had read a significant majority of them.
The Kingkiller Chronicles (is my favorite fantasy series of all time) practically starts with everyone dying. Also, it's called the Kingkiller Chronicles. A king will be killed, even if we don't yet know who that king is or how he's killed. (If I could get the third book I'd want nothing more in life.)
Harry Potter. A lot of people die. Harry doesn't actually kill many of them, though. Just Quirrell. When he was 11. And that's... fine? I'll get back to that point in a moment. And I guess he destroys some horcruxes, though I'm not sure if that counts as killing, exactly.
The Song of Ice and Fire. I'm not even gonna go there.
The Lord of the Rings. Gimli and Legolas are competing on who kills more. Granted, it's orcs, but they are clearly sentient beings. And even if you don't count that, there are the pirates who attack in the third book. Also Boromir.
The Lightbringer series. There's a war. People die.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne. One of the main crew is literally a priestess of the god of death.
The Gentleman Bastards. Those deaths were just unfair.
The Stormlight Archive, the series I'm reading right now. In the society it's centered around the men go out seeking the thrill of battle you get when you get to slaughter as many of the enemy as possible.
Narnia. This is a kids book series. I watched Prince Kaspian (yes, the movie) last night, and it tells about a war.
The only one I was able to come up with that's relatively clean of death (that we're sure of) is Avatar the Last Airbender. Yeah, it's not a book, but same genre. And in even that there's a war, and I'm sure some of the people the main crew fights end up dead. Although I'm not sure about that, since in the end Aang struggles with the idea of having to kill the fire lord, so maybe they don't actually get anyone killed before that? But either way, there are a lot of people we know who have died in the war before the events of the series. And there is a war, so I'm quite sure people do die, even if the viewer is never told about those people.
So I ended up pretty baffled by this. Is it really that there simply aren't any (good) fantasy out there in which no one dies. I mean, how hard can it be to write a good book where no one dies. It's present in everything, starting from kids books.
No, wait, wait. The Neverending Story. Does someone die in that? I'm not sure anymore. I used to love that book when I was a kid. Is it possible this is the one book where no one dies? Does someone remember?
Either way. I would like to think that it's possible to write good fantasy where no one dies. I hope it is. Because this amount of killing in books is a little disturbing. And it's so normal that people don't even pay attention to it. I didn't, and I've been reading fantasy for... almost twenty years? I got the first Harry Potter when I was seven or eight, at least since then. And I never thought about it until now. That can't be right.
And what I think makes it somewhat worse is that the characters in the books seem to be pretty much unaffected by all that killing. They take an emotional hit only when someone they personally know dies. The only series I can think of off the top of my head where people get messed up about all the death (as a person should) is The Hunger Games. And that's not really even fantasy. But I think Katniss has one of the sanest reactions to the death happening around her in the literature I've listed here.
Oh, oh, and The Kingkiller Chronicles. Some of the characters. Not all of them. I love the Adem. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to go find a copy of The Name of the Wind and read it right now. It's just 800 pages. The Wise Man's Fear is 1300 or something. But go. Now.)
But mostly people react to death like "people died, but the bad guy had been defeated, let's have a party!" And this including the children's books, like Narnia and Harry Potter. Seriously, Harry kills someone when he's 11, and people simply take him to the hospital wing to get rid of the scrapes he got. Because it's all well and good.
What. Seriously.
So yeah. I don't know what's up with all of this. I don't have an answer. It's just something I noticed, and something that makes me little uncomfortable.
I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.
And if someone knows a good fantasy book or series where no one dies... please let me know. I'd love to read it.
~matu
But since there's not much happening, I decided to talk about a bit about something completely different today.
I want to talk to you about fantasy books. More specifically I want to talk to you about people dying in fantasy books. Cheery topic, huh?
So some time last fall I started to think about the books I had read recently, and it seemed many of them were about some thieving crews going around killing people (not really, also a lot of other things happened in them, but there were thieving crews and they did kill a bunch of people). This was a coincidence, of course. I simply happened to read two series back to back with thief crews in them.
But it got me thinking. I tried to think of a single fantasy book or book series where 1. no one who has a name dies, and 2. none of the main crew kill anyone.
I couldn't think of single one. We went through a list of best fantasy novels or something with my (other) little sister some time in January, trying to find a book or series where no one dies, and couldn't find one. We didn't know all of them, but between the two of us, we had read a significant majority of them.
The Kingkiller Chronicles (is my favorite fantasy series of all time) practically starts with everyone dying. Also, it's called the Kingkiller Chronicles. A king will be killed, even if we don't yet know who that king is or how he's killed. (If I could get the third book I'd want nothing more in life.)
Harry Potter. A lot of people die. Harry doesn't actually kill many of them, though. Just Quirrell. When he was 11. And that's... fine? I'll get back to that point in a moment. And I guess he destroys some horcruxes, though I'm not sure if that counts as killing, exactly.
The Song of Ice and Fire. I'm not even gonna go there.
The Lord of the Rings. Gimli and Legolas are competing on who kills more. Granted, it's orcs, but they are clearly sentient beings. And even if you don't count that, there are the pirates who attack in the third book. Also Boromir.
The Lightbringer series. There's a war. People die.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne. One of the main crew is literally a priestess of the god of death.
The Gentleman Bastards. Those deaths were just unfair.
The Stormlight Archive, the series I'm reading right now. In the society it's centered around the men go out seeking the thrill of battle you get when you get to slaughter as many of the enemy as possible.
Narnia. This is a kids book series. I watched Prince Kaspian (yes, the movie) last night, and it tells about a war.
The only one I was able to come up with that's relatively clean of death (that we're sure of) is Avatar the Last Airbender. Yeah, it's not a book, but same genre. And in even that there's a war, and I'm sure some of the people the main crew fights end up dead. Although I'm not sure about that, since in the end Aang struggles with the idea of having to kill the fire lord, so maybe they don't actually get anyone killed before that? But either way, there are a lot of people we know who have died in the war before the events of the series. And there is a war, so I'm quite sure people do die, even if the viewer is never told about those people.
So I ended up pretty baffled by this. Is it really that there simply aren't any (good) fantasy out there in which no one dies. I mean, how hard can it be to write a good book where no one dies. It's present in everything, starting from kids books.
No, wait, wait. The Neverending Story. Does someone die in that? I'm not sure anymore. I used to love that book when I was a kid. Is it possible this is the one book where no one dies? Does someone remember?
Either way. I would like to think that it's possible to write good fantasy where no one dies. I hope it is. Because this amount of killing in books is a little disturbing. And it's so normal that people don't even pay attention to it. I didn't, and I've been reading fantasy for... almost twenty years? I got the first Harry Potter when I was seven or eight, at least since then. And I never thought about it until now. That can't be right.
And what I think makes it somewhat worse is that the characters in the books seem to be pretty much unaffected by all that killing. They take an emotional hit only when someone they personally know dies. The only series I can think of off the top of my head where people get messed up about all the death (as a person should) is The Hunger Games. And that's not really even fantasy. But I think Katniss has one of the sanest reactions to the death happening around her in the literature I've listed here.
Oh, oh, and The Kingkiller Chronicles. Some of the characters. Not all of them. I love the Adem. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to go find a copy of The Name of the Wind and read it right now. It's just 800 pages. The Wise Man's Fear is 1300 or something. But go. Now.)
But mostly people react to death like "people died, but the bad guy had been defeated, let's have a party!" And this including the children's books, like Narnia and Harry Potter. Seriously, Harry kills someone when he's 11, and people simply take him to the hospital wing to get rid of the scrapes he got. Because it's all well and good.
What. Seriously.
So yeah. I don't know what's up with all of this. I don't have an answer. It's just something I noticed, and something that makes me little uncomfortable.
I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.
And if someone knows a good fantasy book or series where no one dies... please let me know. I'd love to read it.
~matu
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)