News flash

Howdy partners!
Again it´s been a little while since something happened here on the blog so it is high time to break both the silence and the news:

First of all, I received my invitation to the new language course already last Thursday. It starts on the 14 of February, so exactly one month after my Finnish test in January. This one is gonna put the dot on the i of "intensive" cause it´s five days a week and at least six hours per day.
This means war, mate! Well, bring it on, the odds are that I will either speak Finnish fluently after some weeks or turn into a vegetable, I will have to find out the hard way.

Then we had my girlfirend´s cousin visiting us for the weekend which was lots of fun. Hanging out, eating out, rocking out was our agenda. After a nice dinner on Friday in a Mexican restaurant we went to Juttutupa on Saturday to see rock ´n´ roll veterans Whistle Bait. It was our first visit to this venue which is actually a restaurant / bar that looks like a real castle. The cool thing is that they have bands play there at weekends and the entrance is free!

The place was pretty packed and we had to cue for a little while but it was worth the wait. Whistle Bait did mostly covers but with a very positive vibe and without the incredibly generic and boring exercised moves that you usually see in most R ´n´ R performances. They didn´t need that anyway, the music was good enough. Definetely more Sixties than Fifties they came across like a Wanderers soundtrack and I mean that in the most positive way. Spiced up with piano (well, the dreadful keyboard) and saxophone they were the full package. Especially their saxophone player was cool. He played great and even looked as if he would have just come from a movie set.

Whistle Bait just celebrated their 25 anniversary!

Mr. Cool at work

After the show we stayed for a couple of drinks and then went to one of the smallest bars I know in Kallio. It´s on kolmas linja and the damn name escapes me each and everytime I´ve been there. How come, I wonder? Well, it´s really funny over there cause they have an old juke box. Although there´s an out-of-order sign it can still be used, so for a couple of bucks you can listen to Finnish Iskelmä, German Schlager, 50ties R´n´R, the Beatles...it´s like made for me!

Ra, Ra, Rasputin, lover of the Russian Finnish Queen

As you can see in the picture above, shaving hasn´t been an issue for me lately. I promised myself that I will grow my beard until I have a new guitar. And what can I say? Der Bart ist ab! Last Sunday my razor machine had some work to do cause I got lucky! After a long search I found my desired guitar on German Ebay. For the ones who didn´t know, there is NO Ebay in Finland. We have an equivalent here called Huuto but it can´t really compete. It´s quite hard to find anything there I´m interested in, e.g. vinyl records. Muusikoiden.net is the place to search everything music related, be it musicians (that´s what I´m currently doing), gigs or instruments. That page is a very useful tool, needless to say that I searched it daily for that particular guitar but it never popped up. Now, since I bought it finally in Germany, I still gotta wait some time until I finally have the axe in my hands. When the moment comes I´ll let you know, but älä nuolaise ennen kuin tipahtaa!

Make sure to check out:

Whistle Bait
Juttutupa