Totally Frenched Out

From the blogger formerly known as Samdebretagne

Thursday, July 31, 2008

The Disney post is coming soon guys, I promise!! I did a short video that is taking (literally) days to upload, so as soon as it's done, I'll put it up.

In the meantime, my grandma made it on Finnish TV!!! I think I've blogged about it before, but the Finnish community in the US is quite soudé, especially in the Midwest. They organize all kinds of events, from concerts to talks to dances. But the most famous is the annual FinnFest, held in a different city each summer. I was on the board and helped organize the one in Minneapolis back in 2002. Six years later, they are back to MN again, this time in Duluth. Most of my family attended last week and a great time was had by all. My mom even got to meet the Finnish President (who looks strangely like Conan O'Brien's long lost twin sister).

Here's the link to the report (in Finnish) about FinnFest - my grandma comes in at about 1:15. She'd just bought some kind of little cart thing for the farm and was pushing it around. It's so funny to hear her talk because after so many decades out of Finland, she speaks a mix of old Finnish plus English (I like to call it Finnglish). You can hear her use a few English words that have been Finnish-cized during the interview.

**Try this link if the above one doesn't work. It sometimes take a minute to load: http://areena.yle.fi/toista?id=1391244

Right afterwards, they do a short clip about Salolampi, the Finnish language camp I attended for several years. You can see my friend Susanna playing the guitar, as well as the camp Dean, Lauri (black t-shirt & beard). How cool is that? And I was suprised by how much I could understand though, I haven't heard Finnish in ages. Now I'm even more excited to start taking Finnish again in the fall.

PS. In case anyone's interested, next year's FinnFest will be held on a cruise ship in Alaska!!

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5 Comments:

Blogger MilkJam said...

sam i wanna see your grandma on tv but the link doesn't work! :-(

July 31, 2008 at 12:43 PM  
Blogger Ksam said...

I just tried it and it works for me - did you try pressing play again? It sometimes take a while to load...

July 31, 2008 at 12:48 PM  
Blogger L said...

It's not working for me either; I get a blank white page and it says it's done loading. I tried going to the main page, but, um, I didn't understand a thing. If you do a search for Finnfest nothing comes up, but there's tons for Minnesota. That didn't really help me though.

July 31, 2008 at 2:43 PM  
Blogger Ksam said...

Does this link work for anyone? http://areena.yle.fi/toista?id=1391244

July 31, 2008 at 10:30 PM  
Blogger MilkJam said...

That link is better but I can't get the plug in to download.. oh well! :-)

August 1, 2008 at 8:45 AM  

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