Happy Friendship Day indeed! Photos to dream by and lose my sense of time by.

And the same to you!!

Hyvää ystävänpäivää!
Hienoja valokuvia! Kiitos vierailusta blogissani. Hyvää vuoden jatkoa!

Oh, how pretty! Happy Friendship Day, Marja-Leena!

Same to you, Marja-Leena.

And what happy photographs which smell of salt and sand and an iodine rush of seaweed - some of the best smells in the world.English Bay is not only well named; it looks beautiful.

Evocative shots. I find it fascinating that you are looking out westwards physically so far away from me in landlocked southern England, and yet here we are exchanging shared thoughts. This is good stuff.

And to you, Marja-Leena! Do the two days always fall together? Is Friendship Day celebrated only in Finland or in other countries in the North?

Gorgeous. Especially the first and the fourth.

Thank you and kiitos for all your comments and good wishes. I've just come home from a weekend in Victoria (on Vancouver Island) visiting dear friends. We were unable to connect to their wifi so it was an internet free time. Catching up now...

Rouchswalwe, I only know of Finland's choice to make this a substitute for Valentine's Day. Actually it's 'friend's day' which I like for beint much more inclusive, don't you think,? I think there is a friendship day in August in many areas such as US but that's new to me.

Powerful pix. By the way, if you ever run out of subjects to post, why not a little essay on why Finnish depends so heavily on the umlaut. Which I'm sure is not called that in Finnish.

Barrett, that's a tough assignment! You do know that the Finnish language is not the only umlaut heavy one? As a non-linguist but a native Finnish speaker, I can say in the language's defense that it's a very easy language to read as it's exactly how you hear it and speak it. Every letter has a precise pronunciation that does not have any of the numerous exceptions to the rule, no silent letters and no weird ght's and such nonsense that English is so notorious for. Look at how many ways you can say the vowels but can't tell by looking at the word, so each word has to be learned individually. I still make mistakes!

The umlaut tells you how to say it. Maybe that's why Finland has the highest literacy rate in the world.

What great photos!

Happy Valentine's Day, Friendship Day, and a Belated Happy Birthday!!

Loretta, I hope yours were great too! Thanks for dropping by!

Finnish: not just umlauts but long words too. As to English's "ght" nonsense and the rest I'm all for it. Most of my six years in US publishing I got paid to correct Americans' English. An amusing situation. Especially when I found myself telling some irate MIT professor that he didn't understand the application of gerunds (they were always impressed by grammatical jargon): he still paying off his expensive education, me having left school at 15 in order to grab hold of the practical end of my mother tongue.

Back to Finnish. What you said makes sense. It's a WYSIWIG language; looks complicated when it's written down, but provides all the necessary pronunciative rules.

Am I allowed to make two comments to the same post?

BB, you do impress with the grammatical jargon! I'm sure I make mistakes all over the place. Good thing you can't read my Finnish because it isn't as good as my English. But of course you can make as many comments as you wish, though we are off topic here, but that's how interesting conversations happen. Maybe you can write a post about how you came to be so interested and expert in grammar.