Tuesday, February 3

Itäkeskus metro, 7:50
The weather was the same as yesterday: downpours of wet, heavy slush on an already wet and slushy ground. Naa has a much later start so I leave on my own. Now I am at the metro, looking at a poster that bemuses me. If I am reading it correctly it suggests that HSL, the Helsinki transport company, is broadcasting a talk show on their web site, starring Tuomas Enbuske. Odd, I think, and then board a metro.
I will spend the morning doing the final planning for the Social Gaming course with Andrej. We will work out the final adjustments to the road map, gather all the documentation, and upload everything to Its Learning.
I will take a break from this for an hour to have a tutorial with a student who has, through not fault of her own, got behind. We will work out a detailed plan to get her back on schedule by the end of the school year, and I will skype Jutta to check that her role in this plan is acceptable. It will be.
In the afternoon Andrej and I will begin the Social Gaming course with the quietest group I have dealt with all year. Since a large part of the opening session was intended to be discussion this will force me into performing mode. In the end we will make contact and my monologues will begin to turn into dialogues.
At some point in the day I will discover that I was right. HSL are running a five episode talk show, filmed on the metro with guests getting on and off at different stations. The guests will be a mixture of Finnish celebrities, rappers and experts on transport. The whole thing appears to be a clever way of informing the public about the planned extensions of the metro into Espoo, without distributing thousands of leaflets that nobody will read.
Each episode of the show is about fifteen minutes and the few minutes that I watched looked and sounded interesting. Certainly Tuomas Enbuske has a way of drawing people out so that the transport managers seem as lively and interesting as the guests who are used to being on-screen.