15.03.2015

At work things are pretty much still the same. There isn't that much work, but there isn't really much that anyone can do about it. I've mentioned it to Almond and they can't move me anywhere since they have other students that need places to work too. But it's fine. The people at Recycling Plymouth are nice and I can just chat with them to pass time. There is this guy named Martin who has worked with computers for a couple decades now and he's always explaining new things to me. Besides there is only a couple weeks left, I think I can manage here.
So you would think that I have plenty of freetime to do other things, which I actually do have but I have to admit that I haven't really done much with my freetime here. I think it's because I don't know anyone here, I'm not as drawn to do things alone. On that note, people have been really surprised when I tell them that I travelled here all by myself.

My attempt to liven up the blog with a picture.

I've walked around the city just looking at sights like the Smeaton's Tower and the beautiful view that comes with it (in the picture).
I went to the cinema and at first it was a bit weird to watch a movie without subtitles, even though I could understand everything they were saying it did need a bit of getting used to to not look at the bottom of the screen all the time.
The language hasn't really been a problem anywhere else either. Except on the first day of work when I was told that work starts at half nine. My Finnish brain automatically thought it would be 8:30 since he didn't say half PAST nine. Well, turned out he did mean 9:30 so I was there an hour early.
I don't feel that my English has improved by that much. It was pretty good to begin with and even though my pronunciation of things might not be the greatest, people can still understand me and I think that's the ultimate goal of a language. To understand each other.

02.03.2015

I was told it would rain everyday here, but that really hasn’t been the case. Yes, it rains more than it would in Finland but still most days are sunny and up to 10 degrees Celsius. Which is great since I have to walk to work and back every day. Also the rain often happens at night so I have only once had to walk to work in the rain. Lucky me I guess.

Kind of related to the weather, or at least to the temperature. The water boiler broke down at the house I’m staying. This means that there will be no heating or hot water for couple of days while it gets fixed. I was kindly offered to move to another host family because of this, but I declined the offer since it doesn’t really affect me. I didn’t even use the radiator in my room because it’s already warm enough without the heating and they have an electric shower that heats its own water so I can still take warm showers using that. Petra told me that she will remember me as the one who didn’t need any heating. Not sure if that is the greatest thing to be remembered by, but I guess that’s just me being Finnish and used to a cold climate.

The problem with work right now is that there isn’t enough of it. I’m fairly certain I’m the first person to ever complain about the lack of work, but that really is the case. On an average day I might get a computer or two to install and prepare for sale and then do some little things on the side like taking apart few TVs or moving stuff around the “office”. But those things can’t really fill a full day’s work. Even though my days aren’t that long (from 9:30 to around 15:00), there is still quite a bit of just sitting around and waiting for something to happen or waiting for a computer to install updates. And there isn’t really much else for me to do, because I can’t really fix computers or TVs. I can assemble a computer, but that’s pretty much it since I’m more of a software type. And they don’t have the resources to try and walk me through the process of firstly identifying the problem with the machine and then trying to fix it (it’s different on every machine). There are two guys working with me there. Darren fixes the computers and Jason fixes TVs and vacuum cleaners, and they have barely enough work for themselves with those things. This means that the Recycling Plymouth is slowly dying. :(  I of course hope that it will never happen, but they do have other competitors and I don't know how many people are interested in used goods nowadays.