Alfons Mucha art exhibition

Last week I went to see Alfons Mucha's art exhibition with my czech friend Monika in Pécsi Galeria. Alfons Mucha was a czech art nouveau painter and designer. One of the reasons I love Pécs is because everything is so cheap here. For example the ticket to see this exhibition was less than 2 euros. Other reason why I love this city, is because it's one of the three European culture capitals this year:

http://www.pecs2010.hu/

There are so many interesting things going on all the time and I love to participate in them. Festivals, art exhibitions, concerts, opera, theatre...

The exhibition of Alfons Mucha was especially interesting. His works are basically posters, ads, paintings, calendars and zodiac maps from the late 1800's and early 1900's and they mainly present half naked women surrounded by flowers and ornaments.

This is my favourite piece, you can see all the four seasons here.

Living in Boszorkány dormitory

Since last February I have lived in the Boszorkány kollegium, Pécs, Hungary, because of my lovely ERASMUS exchange. Today I thought I would post some pictures from here in to my blog because this is a very important place for me. Sometimes it's hard to sleep because the people are more like wild animals sometimes, but then the best thing is to join them :) Sleeping is totally overrated. The atmosphere is something totally different compared to Finland. People always say hi and goodbye in the elevator although maybe 800 students live here (I have absolutely no idea how many...a lot) and almost every night we have a BBQ-party or some other kind of party. On the other side of the floor is the Spanish ghetto, and on this side, where I live, there are people from all over the world. People don't really knock on the doors here, at least not in Spanish ghetto. That's so strange for me because in Finland I'm always used to plan any kind of visiting into someone else's place and of course you have to ring the doorbell, because no one in the city has open doors. But I really like this kind of living. At least for 5 months :) This small room is for two people, so there's a huge lack of privacy and not that much space in general...

Yesterday was the first time in a long long time when I really had time to clean up my room because I've been busy with my master's thesis. But last sunday I sent it to my university. It was about environmental sustainability as a part of company's brand strategy in the luxury interior design business. It was interesting, but of course I'm happy that it's over now. I had the best Finnish company as a case-company in my thesis, Artek, and I really became a fan of them during this year. But normally their products have difficult names, typically just a letter and numbers (for example the famous lamp A810). And I want to learn these codes. I always have to study something and I love memorizing lists. So yesterday I put this brochure on my wall so that it's easier for me to study them. Just for fun.

In our floor there are two kitchens. I was lucky to have a picture like this because normally this kitchen looks like a group of hysterical hungry hooligans just were there. Normally around 10-12pm there are ten people cooking at the same time all the time. But this picture was taken in the morning after cleaning. The cleaning ladies HATE us.

And this is one of our common rooms. The party room. Now there's only Murat studying.

Sometimes living here requires a lot of imagination. One reason is this: I have only one glass, one mug, one "plate", one spoon, one fork and one knife. And I still want to cook delicious stuff. Luckily there's always someone who can borrow stuff. Like my lovely slovakian roomie Katalin :)

Quite often my "cookings" are quite interesting, because I'm so lazy to go to the supermarket to buy food. This morning I only found one piece of wholemeal bread, margarin, sour cream, ketchup, sunflower seeds and chilli. (And of course a painkiller because last night I wanted to celebrate my finished marster's thesis...) But this sandwich was really good! I recommend! And with the best music, Chambao, it tastes ever better.

Easter grass tip

This Easter I decided to grow Easter grass for the first time in 15 years maybe. It looked good for two days, because I'm not really into growing grass and don't know how to keep that stuff alive. The reason why it looked good anyway was because of Iitala's Aalto "vase". I had never thought that I could use it for something else than keeping keys and change in it.

Then it started to look really sad. The same day I threw it away I got a bagful of seashells  and an Iittala's Irish coffee -fridge magnet and other stuff from huuto.net, which is kind of like the Finnish version of ebay. And I think the seashells look much better in this vase than grass or keys. It's a complete waste to use something so beautiful to something so practical.

Hungarian decor magazines

So, right now I'm studying in Pécs, Hungary. Even though I'm an ERASMUS student, I have a lot of time for actual studying (hungarian language course and writing my master's thesis in marketing ) and for interior design magazines. Of course I don't understand anything else than the pictures and the prices, but I don't care. I "read" them through and then rip off the pages where I saw something cool and then file them in my inspiration archive when I get back home to Helsinki.

For my dissapointment, though, the magazines seem to be dragging like five years behind... Being used to finnish and international magazines like Divaani and Elle Decor, it was interesting to read these. A lot of black and white "baroque" stuff and everything that's out of style everywhere else in Europe. But I think that it's the same thing in every country. I mean, in Finland at least, there are some lousy magazines too.

The positive surprise here was this "Szép Lak". A lot more stylish than all the others I have bought here. In the picture above there are some of them. I think I'm gonna keep buying these "Szép Lak" magazines until I go back home in June, but I'll also go on searching  for other good ones :)

Picasso

I went to the Picasso exhibit last week at Ateneum in Helsinki. Needless to say, the paintings looked totally different than in the photos so that was money well spent :) It made me extremely happy! Then I started to look at the creations like "If these were commercially worthless, which paintings would I wanna hang on my own walls". Of course they're all great pieces of art, but just too colourful for my taste usually... These are the ones I especially like:

Le Peintre et son Modele

 

Acrobate

La Suppliante

Jaqueline Lisant

Minotaure Caressant du Mufle la Main D'une Dormeouse 

 

Le Baiser

And this one I thought would be really funny in a hypothetical kids' room in the future

Enfant Jouant Avec un Camion

Bensdorp Cacao & Smith Kendon tablets

I adore these old "tin boxes". It's not easy to find a perfect one. The bigger one I found from an internet auction (huuto.net) for 14 euros or something and the smaller is from a flea market quite near our place. The second best flea market  in Helsinki (Valtterin kirppis). I needed a  can for my green tea leaves and this was just 1 euro. That's a bargain. And I think I'm not done with these. I rarely like retro stuff but these are just so cute :)

Chairs gone white

I'm not the biggest fan of reddish wood, but we do have that kind of furniture quite a lot in our place. Solution: paint :)  I bought some acetone, white paint and other equipment and then started removing the red from these:

 And then they looked like this. I didn't even know there was a beautiful light birch wood underneath. It kind of would've been nice to leave them like this, but the tone of these was quite unbalanced and the white paint was already waiting :)

And so they turned out to look like this. I love them now. Now they match so much better with the mostly black and white decor :)