The Butt Ugly Weblog

So yeah...

I'm spending the whole week in Redmond, WA, in Microsoft country. Someone in the office asked if I remembered to bring my allergy medicine... Harhar.

To me, one of the biggest differences between the US and Finland is noise. Here, I find it difficult to find quietness: either the radio is blaring, or the traffic is hard - there's always something. I needed to turn down the air conditioning in my hotel room simply because it was too loud for me. Heat is better than noise.

Of course, once you go out of the urban area, it changes. But cities are very grey, very... regular in their randomness, and very noisy. The whole place feels as if it was designed to turn you inward, find a retreat, a place where you can just be with the people with as little contact to the outside world as possible. Or maybe it's vice versa. I don't know.

(Incidentally, I made a new podcast from here. In Finnish, of course.)