Jetlagged

At 16:05 on Sunday, Finnair's flight 880 from Paris touched down in Helsinki-Vantaa airport, and 30 hours after leaving Calle Gonzalo Gallo, I unlocked the door of my humble home here at Calle Vänrikki Stool. It's funny how every home seems to have a distinctive smell when you visit it, but your own home always smells "neutral" until you return to it after being away four weeks. I was surprised at how pleasantly "woody" my apartment smelled when I came in. After a while, I discovered a package of rotting goat's cheese in my kitchen garbage (I knew I had forgotten something) and a distinctly more unpleasant smell penetrated my clogged nostrils and these 35 square metres.



Some people always tell me that returning home is always a bigger cultural shock than travelling to the other side of the world, and I agree. Cultural shocks don't get much bigger than visiting the ever-reliable S-market (called Ass market by some) to find the departments have been shuffled to create a fresher look. Or suddenly realising you're bumping into friends who a while ago were almost 11 000 kilometres away. Or trying to grasp the dreamlike feeling that, 48 hours ago, you were in Quito, the capital of Ecuador and a city Finns never pronounce right (including airport workers, it seems), in the same room with your grandmother, uncle, aunt and cousins all at once!



Jetlag is defined in the OD as "the tired feeling and other physical effects experienced after a long flight, esp when there is a great difference in the local times at which the journey begins and ends". I assume that includes preparing lunch at 23:00. And seven hours of time difference isn't actually that much. I just thought of something - I mean, at the most, if someone travelled almost all around the world at once, he would experience a time difference of 23 hours, wouldn't he? But wait a minute, that's practically one hour if you look at it from the other side. Does that mean only the date changes? I mean, let's assume it actually would be possible to travel, for example, from Helsinki to Stockholm via Japan and the Americas, in less than an hour. Where would that get me? Tomorrow?



I remember being fascinated by this subject ever since I was small. It should be so simple but it can really get you if you start thinking about it too much, like I probably have. Maybe it all started when my teacher in elementary school told us that you could time-travel if you stood at the North Pole (South Pole is just as possible but he probably thought we'll have a bigger chance of reaching the North Pole) and walked around it several times - to the future if you walked counter-clockwise and to the past clockwise. I remember the first thing I thought about then was that there wouldn't be any fun in it, because you wouldn't realise you're in the future if you stood in the middle of nowhere on the North Pole; you'd have to travel to some city to see any change. Isn't time a concept invented by humans? It sure is a funny thing. I mean, who decided that in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a line, cutting through the very tip of Fiji, and that on one side it's Monday and on the other side it's Sunday. You don't believe me? Check your atlas right now! And what if someone lived just where the date line is? Wouldn't that be funny? Let's say you lived on the western side and realise you just missed some once-in-a-lifetime event you absolutely had to see - couldn't you just walk over to the previous day and wait for it to happen again?



I suppose this is dumb, but the line is dumb, too. I mean, it's so unfair! Because of it, New Zealand appears twice on many world maps (on the eastern and western edges), and honestly, look at the line, it's not even straight! Suddenly it veers west to leave the Aleutian Islands back in Sunday and then plunges back east so Russia wouldn't be left out from Monday. And another thing: I get the equator, but I don't get this meridian thing which makes Greenwich so special.



I hope everyone noticed how deftly I brought myself back to the main subject of this entry, which was supposed to be my trip. As a matter of fact, it would be impossible to summarise our four weeks in Ecuador in a blog entry. It'll probably take me ages to tell about the trip here, so let's see if I even start. The chances are not too slim, because I'm going to really try harder now to update D'sH more often. In honour of that, I have freshened this blog's look a little bit, as I hope you realised. Keep posting comments, everyone, (not just Martin, who has performed a bit of magic by getting such a cool URL for his blog, check it out) and thereby encourage me to write more often.