/travel/finland/Nine Months of Loose Ends, and Midnight Sun
Tonight was my last night in Oulu. It's nearly 6am, and I'm still up, taking care of various things. Nine months lets you build up a lot of loose ends.
Tomorrow I'm leaving with Peter, a German who drove here. He's taking me into Sweden, where I'll start my bike trip. He had some people over, so I went to have something of a goodbye party. At 12:11, there was that characteristics sound when everybody knows that something interesting is going on, but nobody knows what. Eventually I clued in -- the window by the kitchen was casting shadows. The sun was still up. Oulu's been cloudy lately, so this was the first time I'd seen the Midnight Sun.
My work has wrapped up, but unfortunately my project hasn't. I hope it goes well after I leave.
Today (well, yesterday) I shipped one of my suitcases home, and then I'll send the other one home in a few hours. It's costing more than I expected, somewhere around 160EUR = 250CAD. Ouch.
From here, I'm going cycling. I'll start in Sweden, meet up with Steve in Copenhagen, and then we make our way to Paris. I'm still not sure who I'm visiting along the way, but I've made a couple of connections.
The whole departure from Oulu has been very subdued. Most of the people I was closest with are long gone. The last couple weeks have been spent focused on wrapping things up, particularly at work. "With not a bang, but a whisper," or something like that.
Times like these always give me a sense of sadness; it's hard for me to see the details of the good things in my future, and it's easy for me to see all the things I didn't do while I was here. The consequences of my course failure were very unfortunate, and meant that I didn't get as much out of my time in Europe as I might have. I'm sure I'll find upsides later on, but for now it seems like a pretty big consequence. Could have been worse, though.
I'm looking forward to get back to Canada. I'm not overly eager to leave, but I'm ready to leave. Everything seems to be in a fairly good balance, under the circumstances. I've had my time here, learned, grew, met more people from more cultures than I ever have, and on many occasions thoroughly enjoyed myself in ways or situations that I wouldn't in Canada, where I can be more picky about things.
So, that's where I'm at. Moving on. I'll try to post things as I cycle, but I make no guarantees. Of course, they won't be in the /travel/finland category, but the /travel/cycling category.
I've also been very bad with emailing lately. I'm sorry about that, but it had to take a backburner while I tried to get my project done. I look forward very much to seeing all the people that I haven't seen in a long time, and hope my lack of emails and phonecalls hasn't pissed anyone off too much. :-)
And so ends the last (?) entry from Finland.
