civilisation

in october 2000, siggimus travelled to helsinki, fresh from a delightful hospital stay & with a neck brace in his bag. went to helsinki to rendez-vous with jonkurteiz & jodaz, who were there on a café norden conference

of course getting to meet minna (the human one, i.e.) was kinda the main incentive 🙂

an extremely finnish looking girl minna knew lent her an apartment. it was extremely small, but with a high ceiling, and a second ‘floor’ serving as a bedroom. siggimus remembers lying in bed, drinking in everything on tv, as he didn’t have a tv at that time back in riga. two things stand out

news footage from palestine, where a teenage palestinian was shot by israeli soldiers. it was the reemergence of the ‘troubles’ after a well timed stunt by some guy, who later, surprisingly enough became pm of israel. the thing about the footage was that it was old news & had been on the news everywhere for a week or two. siggimus had read a lot about it on the web, seen pics in the papers, read long pieces on the impact it had on the world, but always had to imagine it. strange, to finally see it

on mtv scandinavia siggimus remembers a wet man walking on a bleak beach in the rain, singing a beautiful song siggimus had never heard before (about the most alternative they allowed on the radio in latvia was madonna) & after seeing it a few times, it quite grew on siggimus

when the conference was over, siggimus went straight back to riga (if you can call something that takes 18 hours & involves a bus, a ferry, another bus, a trolleybus & the stupidest elevator in creation straight), straddled with a 25 kg ‘bag of essentials’ he had asked jonkurteiz & jodaz to bring, but turned out not to contain anything siggimus ever used. jonkurteiz & jodaz generously took it upon themselves to bring bjúgu sausages, green ora peas, some malt & a bit of appelsín lemonade which made a whopper of a meal when siggimus finally got through making some uppstúfur sauce without botching it & some delicious harðfiskur that caused great joy on the second floor of paddy whelan’s when siggimus gave it to maiks kungs on his birthday

*sigh

this walk down memory lane sponsored by yellow