July 29, 2007

cheery day.

last night we had a small grill party, 7 of us altogether. F and Avner and a friend of theirs called E.L., and a couple people from work. it was a good gettogether, i think everyone enjoyed themselves. discussions of the winter war and people we know. turned out E.L. knew our co-worker through some of their mutual friends. and someones girlfriend's sister was flatmates with someones...whatever... such a small land everyone is connected somehow. F's older brother is married to someone from Heinola, and she'd asked F if i am related to a girl named Anna who shares the same surname. F didnt know but she is second cousin of mine.

anyway this is Avner working with the grill. E.L. brought us these great fuckin steaks (tenderloin i think) from a specialty store (Roslund in Kauppahalli). its amazing but even i thought 'goddamn' after the first bite, my sense of taste is so bad but i could tell this was amazingly good. its all we talked about the whole night and even today. id say something like that is a fuckin boring topic, but i was there to experience it myself and didnt feel the applauds were overrated. probably the best steak ive ever had in my life.



















well, this is people eating i assume. the steak!!














after dinner we moved ourselves inside and continued with ice cream dessert. note: both real strawberries and strawberry cider in the photo.














the week was very busy and i didnt get to spend much time alone but i have to admit i had mostly good time. Avner was suberb, happy i met him. Helsinki is like a pitstop, he is on his way to London (from Israel), hes moving there with his wife and starting a new life. they have a condo rented but no jobs, nothing, they're just going there to see what they can make of it. and neither has ever been to London before :) exciting when people do that.

last night, i remember hearing people discuss the price of cucumber. i think they said dutch or spanish cucumbers were 80cents cheaper than domestic atm. but earlier in the summer the price difference was not that great, thats was apparently the high season for finnish cucumber. conversations like that are so foreign to me. i am pretty sure ive never in my life checked what cucumbers cost. even today as i bought one. i'm guessing it costs something between 80cents to 2 euros. but i have no clue and i dont think its necessary to find out. the same goes for most food things... if you're not totally fuckin broke and you want cucumber (or milk or whatever), then what does it matter? surely, if you compare prices between foreign and domestic vegetables and the price difference will affect your decision... but how much of a price difference matters? how much are you willing to pay for a cucumber? geez. quite obviously foreign is always cheaper. and for the record, i buy whichever i guess but if i notice 2 options ill take domestic. because again, if that 30cents or whatever the difference may be, isnt going to financially ruin me, why would i need to know or care? domestic is the recommended choice for obvious reasons. so my point is, if you need to be cost-conscious and you want cucumber, youll just get the foreign one and thats it. and if you dont need to savour every penny, just get the domestic one. it could be, that once a year, the finnish cucumber is only a few cents more expensive than its spanish counterpart, and even on a budget youre then able to support the domestic economy. if that does make you happy, that your sharp eyes find you a compromise that fits both your moral obligations and economy, then so be it. but all those hours you spend in your life comparing prices by the vegetable, bread and whatnot-shelves... im surprised people dont have other things to think about. of course, if that is the tactic, then you save time and effort by only comparing cucumber prices in june or whenever finnish cucumber is "known" to grow well and should be cheap. and for tomatoes, you keep an eye on the price around june to august (im making this up), which is when...yea exactly. this requires prior knowledge of when each vegetable and fruit is growing in finland, whens the season. you mightve learned this in school or maybe just by comparing the prices all these years! christ im getting more and more concerned the more ithink of this. its crazy. seriously, like i understand if you dont have money, or very little of it, that you need to be careful and choosy. but for most people this really is NOT the case. and these are the people who keep comparing potato prices every time they buy food! of course, if you always get the cheapest, at the end of the year youve saved yourself like 6 euros and 76 fuckin cents. you could get a beer with that! okay maybe 2 beers, or even 3. i dont care, look at the fuckin time and effort you spent saving those cents. if you wants 3 extra beers per year it'd be easier done if you worked 2 hours extra. 2 hours that year. fuck, even if it was like 10 beers. come on. i see things are connected here though, people also do quality control, hmm, the spanish cucumber is still almost raw, the finnish one...better...the price difference is... yes, the formula gets more complicated as more factors are added. and i admit my lack of capability here... i dont know shit about food stuff, freshness and how things should be cooked and all that, and as said earlier my sense of taste is very poor. so comparison at this level, or to add it to the i'm-choosing-the-right-cucumber-here process, doesnt work for me. so maybe i dont understand the other half of the process because im unable to understand the other? whatever, people, its senseless. just get the cucumber so you can go on with the really important stuff!

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