Spring nostalgia

Considering how much I miss certain places, moments or feelings, you could think I'm talking about Paris in the 60s, having drinks with Jane Birkin and discovering free love. This is not the case, it's just that in the spring time an indiscernible feeling of nostalgia emerges. I miss.

For some reason, I've been missing Boston especially lot lately: reading the Sunday New York Times in my favourite coffee shop with a wholewheat cranberry pecan scone. I don't fully understand why I miss the place, but I guess it has something to do with freedom and the endless number of opportunities that I seemed to have ahead of me at that moment. It's funny how in only two years time, I feel like I have limited my options quite drastically already - or other people have done it for me.

Last week I was in Brussels. I have a love-hate relationship with that city. The arrival is always chaotic and comes with a bitter smell of pee in the metro and train stations. In the centre, I look around and see poverty, homeless people, drug addicts and it feels like somebody could hurt me at any moment. I look down and stop smiling. It's a developing country next to the EU district and my 4-star hotel, maybe that is why the surroundings catch my attention so strongly. But there is something unidentifiably attracting in this city that I've also been missing in Helsinki.

It's not (only) the tasty beers or cute guys in Belga, the bar - together with Campari oranges - that I first discovered and fell in love with in the summer 2003. Those days the bar was full of guys wearing Lacoste T-shirts, then the ultimate brand for hip university students. However, it wasn't the Lacoste T-shirts that I had been missing (you hardly see them any more) but the possibility of meeting strangers and doing things ex tempore.

People in Brussels (just like the PhD researchers in Florence) are temporary residents, coming and going, interested in meeting new people and extending their social networks throughout the city or Europe. In Helsinki, people have the same friends they had in kindergarden, or at least for the last 5 to 10 years. The groups are tight, but it also means that it can be hard to dive in if you're a newcomer. One thing in Helsinki that has surprised me maybe the most is that groups don't mix: you seldom bring a new friend along for a dinner with other friends. Dinners and meetings need to be planned weeks ahead and few acts or invitations are improvised; it makes life a little less exciting.

In Brussels I met with a devoted Finnish scout and we went to a vernissage to which he happened to have an invitation. After a few glasses of champagne and discussions on contemporary art, I had agreed upon going to Burundi to represent the Finnish scouts in an African jamboree.

I miss it already.