1990-1993
NEW VOCABULARY

So, 1990 came and me and my mother moved to a little bigger town called Kalajoki. It was located in the west coast of Finland. Back then, the town center wasn't very beautiful. I asked my mother on the first day whether she wanted to live here or dedicate her life to my happiness. I don't exactly remember what she replied, but I figured out she had to move because she wanted to study and become a wood artesan. Her education was to last for 3 years.

Our new recidence was a two-floored row house right in front of later-abolished Jokisuu school and the Kalajoki hospital. I was put in a daycare located in the same yard. There I started to learn to play with other children and watch children's tv programs. Even in my early games, there was some strange 'plot' to follow and I don't know if the other children in the daycare understood everything. For instance, I recall myself swinging and singing about biblical events I had read, namely about Prophet Daniel and his three friends.

At the age of 6, I was sent in a bigger kindergarten. There I read some Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles comics and watched anime for the first time! It was Ginga Nagareboshi Gin, Silver Fang, which for some odd reason reached Finland very early to become many Finns' favourite. Well I don't actually count it as my first anime becuase the contact was so short. I kinda liked it, eventhough, due to the biblical image of dogs as they were gods to some pagan nations and everything, I had to ask my mother if it was OK for me to like it.

I entered school in 1992 at the age of seven. The first 6 grades of the elementary school are called ala-aste or alakoulu and the second level is yläaste or yläkoulu. I was bullied since the very first day at school. As for the first things I was to learn, I learned the Finnish slang for 'having sex', 'nussia' and the word for the thing between woman's legs, 'vittu'. The latter is actually surprisingly common in Finnish, because it's the stem of the verb 'vituttaa', to be 'pissed off', although I never learned to be pissed off in the Finnish way. I had never heard such words before! I noticed I liked school itself though, and I was a good student. I also found more comic books to take example from, like Tintin and Asterix.

Yes, the comics. I actually had a brief friendship with a boy who had to learn our class early. I still don't know exaclty what happened, but before that, he saw my early Donald Duck copies and something told me he shouldn't have seen them. I regarded them as my secrets back there. I doubt I foresaw any reason related to copyright laws, but nevertheless, I was angry. We brought the dispute to school the following day, and even our teacher tried to make sense of it. The teacher said that only a little baby keeps on shouting everybody 'I have secrets! You are not allowed to tell everybody my secrets!'.

However, I was to miss the ending ceremony of the first grade because something happened with my mother and the teacher in the artesan school. There was probably some drama and we had to escape to my mother's friend who lived in the southern Finland. I couldn't sing 'suvivirsi', the traditional religious summer hymn in Kalajoki church because I was already in the south that day.