T-time extension

What happens when you have t-time with philosophy students who knows more about the world than you imagine you will ever know? What happens if these particular persons also happen to be one of those people you find easy to communicate with? What more happens if one of them, like you, have an aesthetic obsession?

T-time extension is one of those things I most adore and will most miss of my time in Helsinki. An array of topics displayed across the table for you to dandy your hands in. Dip a few of these topics in coffee or green tea milked and you'll have a heaven of an afternoon, something like ecstasy. Raging through beauty, language, emotion, history, culture, words, music and everything else that might come through your mind, the 2 hour t-time felt like one long extension of brain-exercise (in the relaxing way) where you consume the informations the more intelligent provides and experiment with your own ideas and questions.

The best part of any t-time extension, is the actual extension. At t-times people normally put on a certain type of guard. Usually because your focus is on the topic at hand, or probably because you have more time to observe other's reactions (since you are facing each other). The extension after the sitting hours, those few minutes when you walk out of the locations, when you finally feel relaxed and without fear of the eye contacts, that's when the really interesting conversations normally strike! When people finally run out of supposively interesting / exciting stories to make their friends laugh, that's when they can come up with the most genuine things about themselves. At least that's normally the case with me. After t-times, that's when I get really intimate, for the few minutes after, I am relaxed enough to just be me (aka none of the excited, crazy laughing dolly stuff).

Today's t-time extension was interesting for me. It was culturally interesting and visually thrilling. Since I am a very visual person, proven by the fact that I tend to have more movies / pictures in store than music. And since I normally don't notice too much about who did the music as I do about who painted the picture. And especially since I describe everything according to visual senses (aka the music is sharp, like a pointy metal things). For most of the t-time, though talking, I was observing the expressions and gestures of both my counter-parts as we chattered on about language (mostly). Quite an interesting experience. Yet, the most interesting part of the t-time extension was when I walked down towards the railway station with Jannos (?), a Swedish-speaking Finn. I have been considering the cultural influences between different nations for awhile. Japanese and Chinese culture seems extremely popular in Europe, with Japanese culture winning big time. Maybe it's all the commercialization, I am unsure. The interesting thing came when he said that he actually practices martial arts (okay, you have to see the person to be as surprised as me). Basically, I would have thought he looked much like a tender gentleman type, which produced the shock. What came more interesting was that he had practiced 少林 style before, and is not doing "monkey" style. I felt all of a sudden quite the more smaller than I did previously as these are things belonging to my own culture, but I didn't care enough to understand them (hence, double shock).

Is culture really that big of a boundary then? If a Finn can learn martial arts (I was also considering the probable difference in physical built and its affect in martial art participations), and a Taiwanese can know more about European Rock than Europeans do, what is the boundary of the contemporary world? What makes Finns finns... Taiwanese taiwanese... Chinese chinese... Germans german...? It's all a very big blob for a very small container to spin around.