Religion: A Useful Aspect

It's blamed for wars, stops human beings from different sides of the world trusting each other and promotes a lot of mistrust all over the planet. Sure, it provides spiritual guidance to those who need it but I think we can generally argue that religion has caused as much harm as good over the centuries. However, today I have it to thank for my situation. It's Monday, it's nearly 1pm, and I'm in bed and not planning to get out any time soon. Even though I'm completely unreligious, I still get a day off work to honour the memory of Christ. Fantastic.

Paris was fun, and longer than expected too. Last week I found out I'd get the Friday off work as well so I started looking for options to leave to Paris on the Thursday night instead of the Friday night and have an extra day there, an extra 24 hours is the company of M and her friends E, who I know well from Helsinki, and L, who is from England and who I didn't know at all. The buses were completely full for the weekend and so I wandered off to the Gare du Nord to see if I could pick up a train ticket there. 10 minutes later I wandered off again with a first class ticket (and yes, it was the cheapest one i could find !!) on the Thalys which cost half of the money I owned. For some reason, this seemed like nothing at all and left me wondering how much love warps all of your senses. At 10pm that night I rolled into the Gare du Nord, dropped my stuff off at the flat and headed straight back into town for what was to be one of the 2 main scenes of this weekend - the pub. The other main scene was on the sofa in the flat watching "The O.C.". Having already risked the ire of the religious with my comments on how pointless and destructive it is, and knowing how O.C. watchers are no less fanatical than church, synagogue and mosque-goers, I'll decide not to publish my thoughts on this particular series. Once again though, it's brought me one advantage. If I ever get a Trivial Pursuit question on series 4 of this vacuous show, I'll more than likely know the answer. Friday night, after a day of O.C. I got unreasonably battered, Saturday we watched O.C. and then proceeded to go to the pub again. Sunday we cleaned the flat and by midnight I was back in Brussels after a 4 hour Eurolines ride. We did manage to get out and about in town a bit as well though, took a lot of pictures and arsed around aimlessly, obviously the best type of arsing around. Another 4 days passed before the big move back to Helsinki then, and onto my final week in Brussels with everything nicely lined up. Tomorrow I'm back into the hamster wheel at the office, Wednesday there's France against England on TV, Thursday the BAT is arriving for a long weekend, Friday there's a Youssou N'Dour concert, Saturday there's the sister's birthday party which I'm going to shamelessly gatecrash as a leaving party, Sunday will be a lazy day and Monday I'm packing up, and staying up through the night with unreasonable paranoia as my train on the first leg of the journey up to Finland leaves at 5.30 in the morning. Hmm.

End transmission.