Theory of Relativity

When I lived in Bandung, due to the traffic jam and the fact that a kind of public transit (that I used frequently 'coz I can't drive a car nor motorcycle and it's not safe to ride a bike in the streets) called "angkot" could stop anywhere for a long period of time whenever the driver wanted to get more passengers, it usually took a long time to get from one place to another, even though Bandung is far smaller than Jakarta. Especially over the past few years ever since they built a highway from Jakarta to Bandung, many people who work and live in Jakarta come to Bandung to relax during the weekend - thus causing more traffic problem.

So, when I still lived in Bandung, it was pretty normal to travel by "angkot" for 30-60 minutes just to reach one destination (even if this travel time should be only half or one third or one fourth of the actual travel time were the roads clear of traffic and if the "angkot" didn't stop too often along the way).

Now that I've lived in Sodankylä for a little over 3 years and we have always lived near downtown changes everything. Now a 30-60 minute ride by car seems like such a hassle, 'coz over here there's no traffic at all and I'm used to getting to a place in a short amount of time.

So when we went to Crete, we were in a very lazy mode. We could have visited many more places by bus, but we just didn't feel like "wasting" so much time on a bus. And I've just realized one more phenomenon...in Crete there are so many mountains all around the place, whereas Sodankylä is far more flatter. Yesterday when we drove back home from my in-laws' place, I felt something that I felt when I first moved here: the VAST stretch of the sky (esp. when we passed by two HUGE fields on both sides of the road) - it almost feels like a blanket surrounds us. Funny how our perspective changes once we've been to different places.

Anyway, to cap this post, let me show you how much snow there's still left around my in-laws' place.




The ground in some parts are still SO wet:


Just posing he he he...the temp. was around 6-10'C yesterday and the sun was shining, but it was SO windy and the wind was cold.