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All the Amusement

I have a long, serious post waiting in the wings for the right time to finish it, but yesterday deserves a post of its own. I was feeling pretty threadbare by the time Thursday came along, but it sure kickstarted my four-day mini-holiday in the most perfect way possible. We had decided that if the weather was favourable, we’d spend the day at Tivoli Friheden, since we got season cards (for free entry and some discounts) and one-time-use wristbands that give access to all the rides as a Christmas present from M’s parents. The day dawned with sun shining from a clear sky, and as all weather forecasts pretty much said that the day would be beautiful aside for some small showers in the afternoon, we headed to the fairground as soon as it opened.

None of the attractions were open quite yet, so we took a walk around the whole park to see what they had and what we definitely wanted to try. I knew from my visit to the Finnish tivoli last summer that my stomach doesn’t handle the wild rides quite as well as it used to, so I’d have to pace myself, and so the plan was to do one fast thing at a time and then do slower things until I’d feel up for another fast one, and this was fine with M. We chose Cobra as the first ride, and while it was way too short, we both enjoyed it immensely. It reminded me a great deal of the Demon in Copenhagen’s Tivoli, which I fell completely in love with on my visit there a few years ago. (Demon was better, but still.) After that we headed to the Haunted House, where we got to shoot up some zombies, and M got the second best score of the day. (My gun was broken, so it refused to shoot 3/4 of the time, which was really sad.)

On our walk around the park, M had remarked that on his last visit there some 10 years ago, he’d loved the Pegasus the most, so that’s where we headed next. It was one of the two attractions I was pretty sure would mess up my stomach because it rotates in all directions, but it also looked like a blast, so I definitely wanted to try it. The ride turned out to be absolutely squeal-worthy, but also perhaps just a tad too long, and by the time we got our feet back on the ground, I felt like a break was in order. Amusingly the plan was to hit the Ferris Wheel afterwards to calm us down, but that turned out to be a huge mistake. By the time we got to the top of the wheel, I felt more nauseous than I had after either of the fast rides, and M felt the same! I don’t quite know what caused it, but I think it was the fact that the little cabin we sat in kept swinging back and forth just a little bit, and somehow that was really causing motion sickness. Defeated by the Ferris Wheel… Didn’t see that coming!

By the time we got off the ride, we’d been in the park for some 1,5 hours and I felt like maybe some food was in order as that might settle my stomach a bit, so we went to eat chicken paninis for lunch. Generally amusement park food is overpriced and not particularly good quality, but the paninis were actually really big and tasty, so while the price was high, we at least didn’t feel cheated. The break did us good, too, so once we were done with eating, we were ready for some more amusement. We both still felt that we weren’t feeling quite as stable as when we started in the morning, so we decided to start slow, and hit the Illusions Factory. Which in hindsight wasn’t the best choice, as it’s all about optical illusions and such to mess with your head, and some of it was pretty effective, too. Nonetheless, fun was had, and once we were through, we felt up to giving the Wave Swinger a try. After some initial difficulties (including M banging me in the head with a metal bar and almost sliding off his side of the chair), we enjoyed it a lot, although it was one more thing to make our heads spin.

It was time to stay at ground level for a bit, so we headed for the fairly long queue for the Bumper Cars, as I figured the waiting time would be enough for my head to stop spinning. There was a short discussion about whether we should sit in the same car, but we both wanted the wheel (of course), so separate cars it was! I had a lot of fun chasing M around the arena, and he got a few good bumps in, too. Afterwards we figured we were up for another fast ride, so it was clearly time for the roller coaster. While we were queuing, we noticed there were some clouds gathering in the sky, and by the time The Hurricane took off, the first drops started falling. We enjoyed the ride, but afterwards it was time to find some shelter, as it started to rain a little harder.

We found a café that still had seats left, and opted for some Belgian waffles with ice cream and chocolate sauce with our coffee. The price was again pretty extravagant, but once we got the waffles, we had to admit they were worth it. They were warm, delicious and quite filling, and the ice cream on top was heaped so high I was seriously worried I wouldn’t be able to finish mine. By the time we were done with them, we were both so full it was pretty evident we wouldn’t be able to stomach another fast ride, and as it still kept raining, we decided to head home, all tired and happy.

The rest of the day was pretty lazy, and all in all I have to say it was just glorious. I felt more recharged than I have in weeks, and I still have three days left of my holiday! Today is all about cleaning the apartment and practicing for my upcoming Danish placement test, which is on Monday. Tomorrow we have some friends coming over, so I’m planning to bake pulla in the morning, and on Sunday I’m rather hoping we get to go and see the new Mad Max movie. Next week my dear friend S is coming to spend an extended weekend with us, which I’m really looking forward to, and we plan to watch the Eurovision Song Contest finale together, which I expect to be good fun.


I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Danish spring so far. It all kicked off with a sudden realisation that there are these white, blooming trees everywhere in April even though nothing else had even leaves yet. We had a bunch of them just outside our living room window, and you could spot them all around the city. They dropped their flowers as suddenly as they got them, after which the first trees began sprouting green leaves, and little flowers began popping up here and there on the grassy spots. The weather has become steadily warmer since, and while it’s not quite summery yet, we’ve had a few days when sandals were definitely appropriate.

Visits

Okay, so I cheated a bit. I wrote the bulk of the previous post on Sunday morning, but then all of a sudden time (quite thematically appropriately) got away from me, so I had to leave it as a draft when we left to meet M’s friends. Which became more of an adventure than we expected, because buses completely screwed us over, and we ended up spending 1,5 hours trying to get to where we needed to go, and ultimately reached our destination an hour late. Embarrassing, but not our fault! However, what I was trying to say is, I posted it just now, so technically I didn’t post an entry last week, and that means it’s penance time again. Hence you’re getting two for the price of one, lucky bastards!

Back to Sunday’s adventure: the first bus we took had to deviate from its normal route due to road work, which meant that we had to get off on the wrong stop, and by the time we reached the stop of the next bus we were supposed to take, it had already gone. Or it never went at all, because of the road work… I don’t even know. However, we ended up walking quite the distance to another stop where we ultimately discovered that we needed to wait half an hour for the next bus. Fortunately the weather was gorgeous, so sitting and waiting wasn’t so bad, and on our way there we glimpsed a shop I’ve been meaning to visit for a while now. We totally would have had the time to visit it, too, but we didn’t know that when we passed it, and by the time we found out, it was way too late… But even so, now we know where it is, and we’ll definitely visit soon.

Fortunately M’s friends didn’t mind our lateness, but instead welcomed us with a table full of all kinds of tasty treats. It was an interesting visit for several reasons. They got to meet the elusive girlfriend they only learnt about recently, and I got to meet a bunch of people M chats with on a daily basis, but whom he rarely meets in person. So why did they only learn about me recently, you may wonder, and the answer is both extremely simple and strangely complicated.

You see, my friends are people I share intensely personal things with. His friends are people who share interests with him, and in this particular case, the same university background and profession. Where I talk with my friends maybe on a monthly basis (if we’re lucky…), he talks to his pretty much every day, but the things we talk about differ wildly. My friends know me. I tell them if something important happens in my life, and even though we connect rarely, we do so on a deep, personal level. They aren’t an active part of my everyday life, but I carry them with me every step of the way, and I always know that if I need them, they’re only one email or phone call away (and vice versa, of course). M’s friends know next to nothing about him, personally, and so the subject of having a Finnish girlfriend move in with him simply never came up, until a few weeks ago it got mentioned entirely tangentially. Cue intense curiosity from their side, and a sudden invitation for coffee ;)

In person their curiosity was much more subdued, and only one personal question ever got asked, which was about what I do for a living. That one didn’t take long to answer, and soon we were back to talking about the horrors of software development in environments that are endlessly bogged down by layers and layers of procedure. Or how bad it is when there is not enough procedure. Apparently it’s a hard thing to get right. Made me feel oddly good about my job, which at least is clear and unimpeded, if not terribly engaging. All in all, I enjoyed the visit a lot, although I’ve no idea how much they got out of it. I guess we’ll see if we get invited again.


Today I reached a milestone of a kind: my first dentist visit in Denmark! One of my molars has been aching a bit lately, and on Sunday and Monday it was bad enough that I resorted to painkillers. So, on Monday after work I walked to the nearby dentist’s office and asked for an appointment, and got one for this morning. (This all sounds so easy now, but I absolutely detest having to use any health care services at all, especially abroad, so getting myself through that door was more of a struggle than is readily apparent.)

This morning I was so nervous about the appointment, I left for work without my bike helmet, which is unheard of. I just simply forgot, and by the time I realised, it was too late to go back and get it. I’ve worn the stupid thing religiously ever since I got it, so it was the weirdest thing to just suddenly forget. Fortunately I only had a half hour of work before the appointment, so I didn’t have to spend the entire day dreading it.

Unsurprisingly, everything went very well once I got there. The dentist was extremely nice and spoke excellent English, and couldn’t find anything wrong with my molar, so the current assumption is that I’ve been grinding my teeth at night which then aggravated the tooth. The plan is to wait and see if it calms down on its own, and if so, then nevermind. (It’s been much better today anyway, so things look promising.)

Of course, she also found a broken filling and some cavities that will require two additional visits in the near future, which is not so great, especially considering the pricing of Danish dental health care, but so it goes. It’s been a while since I last got my teeth checked, so it’s not exactly surprising, and I’m just happy to have everything taken care of. Having my own dentist is another small step towards belonging here, as odd as it may sound.

Lighter

I’m somewhat annoyed by the “weekly digest” format my posts have taken. Of course, currently the only likely alternative is to not write at all, but even so, I hope to eventually reach a point where actual themes emerge. Until then I suppose digests will have to do.


This week was pretty much as average a week as it gets. Work was busy but mostly quite successful, and the language course went well. The combination of work and studies left me really tired by the time we got to Thursday, but this, too, is entirely normal. I had Thursday evening free of all responsibilities, which gave me a bit of a reprieve (and the opportunity to make tiramisu, which I had planned for the Easter break but then postponed due to being sick), and on Friday I hit the gym after work.

We spent Saturday doing things that needed doing, such as packing away winterwear, washing laundry and doing other chores, and then had a lovely date night as counterbalance. Today it’s been even more laundry, M continuing to try to fix a laptop as a favour to a relative, and in the afternoon we’ve been invited for some coffee with a few of his friends I’ll be meeting for the first time. The normalcy of it all has been a relief after all the time spent being sick.

The common theme for the past nine months seems to be “no time”. Always in a hurry, always tired. Being sick so much has just exacerbated the issue, because it is such a horrible time sink. Everything has to be put on hold, be it work, language course, chores, or even the nice, relaxing things, because you don’t even have energy for those. Eventually even the nice things become a part of a giant, neverending To Do List. It’s only recently that I feel like life is less about crossing things off the list and more about actually living, and it feels awfully good. I think the ever-advancing spring has a lot to do with it, because it’s not like my life has substantially changed recently.


Lately I’ve been diving into my comic collection a lot, starting from re-reading Jeff Smith’s entire Bone saga (including Rose), the entire Sandman collection by Neil Gaiman, the first three volumes of Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga, and now all the Elfquests I own, which isn’t quite the entire collection, but a huge chunk of it, anyway. I’m planning on continuing to Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (which I haven’t actually read before), and then it would be nice to take a crack at the Valhalla series, since I got the first two volumes of the Den Samlede Saga editions in Danish as birthday presents this year. Good language practice, I’m sure! Beyond that, it just feels good to be reading again.

Getting Back on Track

I ended up being sick for my entire Easter holiday. M recovered a few days before I did, so he got a few not-quite-so-crappy days at the end of it, but I was sniffling and exhausted all the way until work started again. Needless to say, I was not happy, nor did I take it particularly gracefully. My misery was somewhat alleviated by a generous amount of chocolate eggs, but even those were just a band-aid. Nothing could replace the plans we had had, or the wasted beautiful sunny days during which we stayed indoors out of necessity. I was grumpy all through the next work week as well, since we started the month swamped and understaffed, but my mood got slightly better towards the weekend, and yesterday was already very enjoyable. I won’t get another stab at a proper holiday until July, but at least there are some extra days off sprinkled here and there in April and May, so that’ll help a bit.

Yesterday was the only day I could vote in the Finnish parliamentary elections, so as soon as the Honorary Consulate of Finland opened their doors for voters, we made our way there. After a successful (and blessedly short) voting experience, we headed to the city centre for a delicious sushi lunch and some yummy ice cream. We’d been invited for dinner at M’s parents’ place in the evening, so we spent several enjoyable hours there, after which we came home and pretty much went straight to bed.

Today was mostly about catching up with chores, so I finished the work-related translation assignment I started yesterday, after which we cleaned up the apartment, I did my Danish homework, and finally got to spend some quality leisure time by finishing Tomb Raider, which I really enjoyed. It’s also the only AAA single-player game I’ve managed to finish in several years… Dragon Age: Inquisition is currently gathering (proverbial) dust, as I lost interest fairly early on. There’s a number of other titles installed on my hard drive that I’ve either started but not finished or never even started, so hopefully this will be the start of a new era of being able to focus on a single game long enough to finish it.

It’s been a successful weekend, both in terms of having a good time and getting necessary things done, and I think I’ve finally purged the disappointment of the missed Easter holiday from my system. We’ve also made some (hopefully long-lasting and beneficial) changes in our diet and added some vitamin D supplements into the mix, so hopefully there will be less illness in the future. I’m really looking forward to being able to rely on my normal routines without being constantly interrupted by one calamity after another. Also, the weather seems to be getting warmer all the time, so I think it’s fair to say that spring is finally here and summer may be just around the corner! Can’t wait :)

I have this habit of planning things down to detail. When it works out as planned (or when there’s only minor variation), I’m happy. When it doesn’t, I get very, very bummed. It’s a stupid, perfectionist habit that I should break, but when it works, it works beautifully and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Of course, the reverse is also true.

I had a lot of things planned for our Easter holiday. Not down to the finest detail, but in general. Then yesterday, M got sick. Again. It hasn’t been a full month from the last time he was sick (after which I had my nasty week-long illness), but here we are again. So that pretty much wrecked all my plans, which led to a meltdown last night that I fortunately recovered from fairly quickly, but boy it still stings. Of course, there’s a real chance I’ll get it from him again, although I’m trying to take all precautions now because I really, really don’t want to get sick again.

*sigh*

Spring, Chocolate Eggs, Music!

Like I mentioned in the previous post, this week has been insanely hectic. A part of it was the training of a new colleague at work while still trying to make the end-of-the-month project deadline, which meant I was more tired than usually after workdays. Add in the language course evenings and a couple of other lengthy errands I had to run during the week, and suddenly my days were very long indeed. M was gone the entirety of Monday and Tuesday, and the previous weekend didn’t include much together-time, either, since he was embroiled in a forum update project that took the entire weekend (and wasn’t even completely successful, so it will take even more time in the future). By Friday I was pretty much a wreck.

I decided early on in the week that the weekend would be all about relaxing, and what better way to start it than using the Christmas gift card for champagne brunch for two (from M’s uncle and aunt) in an Italian restaurant on a beautiful Saturday morning! The weather was sunny and gorgeous, so I wore a skirt and a pair of high heels to celebrate spring. The food was delightful, and we had a terrific time. Afterwards we shopped for some Easter eggs for next week, and while my collection isn’t nearly complete yet, we did make a few good discoveries. I fully plan to sample all the different chocolate/marzipan eggs they have here to see which ones I like the best.

The rest of the day went by with both of us lazing about. I played some Guild Wars 2, we watched last week’s episode of Vikings and later a movie (Whiplash). It was just what I needed to let go of the week. Today I might even consider doing something useful… I still have one or two days of work next week, but the rest of it is definitely off, and the language course is also on a break for a week and a half. I’m so looking forward to a little spring break!

In other, completely unrelated news, I’ve been listening to Von Hertzen Brothers’ new album New Day Rising on Spotify. I liked their first album quite a bit, but after that (and especially following one really unimpressive festival gig that left me completely cold) I sort of lost interest in the band altogether. I was really surprised to discover I like the new album a lot. For now it has completely replaced my other recent favourite (Say Lou Lou’s Lucid Dreaming), which continues my current trend of falling in love with female Nordic electro-pop artists for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, but hey, if it works.

Oops!

I genuinely forgot to update the blog last week! I realised it already much earlier in the week, but I’ve been so insanely busy that I simply haven’t had the time to address the issue. So today, as penance for last week, I finally decided to do something about the site theme since it’s Friday, I have nowhere to be, and I’m not completely exhausted.

I never managed to do what I wanted when I first created the blog, and finally I just decided it’s the words that are important, not the wrapping. Of course I fully knew that it was silly to believe I might be able to ignore the aesthetics, but I didn’t have the energy to tackle with the issue then. Today it just somehow worked out with relatively little work, which was a welcome change compared to the last time I fiddled with the CSS. I’m quite pleased with the end result.

B is for Bronchitis

So, last week really sucked. First M got sick (well, this happened on the weekend before last), and on Tuesday I started coughing as well. On Wednesday morning I woke up to a 38 degree fever, which only got worse during the day. The highest temperature I measured was 38,7, and the blasted thing lasted for four and a half days, until yesterday my fever finally broke. (It broke intermittently during nights as well, so that every night I would wake up swimming in my own sweat, but that really doesn’t count. However, massively gross.) The coughing has been pretty much a constant, although my version is much less severe than M’s. There was some sniffling and such as well, but that only really lasted for a few days and is mostly gone now. The fever was the real deal. It drained me of all energy, and most days I spent sleeping or desperately trying to. When I was awake, I was in this weird haze of not really being able to think. My body was so weak I couldn’t sit up for an extended period of time without feeling woozy and having to lie back down again. Obviously doing anything beyond that was a lost cause.

Timing was also important, as E was supposed to visit us this week. The original plan was for her to come on Wednesday evening and stay either until the weekend or Monday. But as the plague hit, we figured it would be best if she stayed in Copenhagen for a few days first to give us a little time to get better (and possibly be less contagious) before her visit, and that’s how it went. She arrived on Saturday instead, and fortunately I was feeling a little better by then, as the fever had gone down to 37-38 degrees instead of 38+. The jolt of suddenly talking quite a bit backfired on Saturday evening when my throat simply decided “no more!” and started feeling like someone stabbed me there, and I’m still recovering from that, but it’s getting better all the time. E taught me to make this vile-tasting ginger/orange drink that really soothes the throat, so that helps, too.

Yesterday afternoon, M and I were finally contemplating getting me to see a doctor because the fever just wouldn’t go down and it didn’t really react to painkillers either, and maybe most worryingly, because I was increasingly lethargic. However, by the time he had looked up the necessary information and I took my temperature one last time to let the nurse know, it had gone down and was only 37. For the first time I also genuinely felt better. The fever stayed that low for the rest of the day, and while I still sweated a bunch during the night, it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been before. My temperature has been normal today, and hopefully that’ll be the end of it. I still called in sick today because my voice isn’t functioning, but I will go in tomorrow and hopefully by then I can do a normal day’s work.

It was a delight to have E visit us, and I’m so glad we didn’t have to cancel altogether. This has been a really hard six days, but at least M and I are both well on our way to recovery by now.

Of Home Things

There were a few things I was very worried about losing when I moved to Denmark. One of them was my “private” gym at the basement of the apartment building I lived in that was really meant for all the people living there, but which only I used regularly. Every now and then someone else would go, and once I even had to share it briefly while doing my own workout, but for the 1,5 years that I used it 2-3 times a week and for several years before that when I only went sporadically, I pretty much had it to myself. It was very basic, but it had what I needed and I absolutely loved the privacy. I hated the idea of having to go to an actual fitness centre after moving, and worse yet, a place where people predominantly spoke a language I don’t yet speak. I kept procrastinating about it for the first 5-6 months, but fortunately a colleague saved me at the start of this year by suggesting we start going together, and now it’s become a weekly habit I’d like to start doing twice a week if only I could find the time.

However, that’s not what I wanted to focus on today. Another “thing” I was loath to lose was Paula, my hairdresser for I don’t even know how many years. Some people love variety when it comes to hairdressers and flit from blossom to blossom, forever finding new flavours. Me, I want a relationship. Much like my friendships and romantic relationships, I tend to focus on only one person (or a handful, when it comes to friends), and I want it to last. I can’t remember when I first went under Paula’s scissors (or more often, knife), but she was the very first hairdresser in Oulu that I began to ask for by name. (I had a long-term relationship with a hairdresser in Raahe that took years to replace after I moved away.) But when she handled my wedding hairdo with such ease and grace, I knew I had found my match.

Every five to six weeks, pretty much like clockwork, we had an appointment and she would take me through red and brown phases, short and longer cuts, symmetrical and asymmetrical hairdos… We’d talk about what summer festivals we might visit the next summer, or what we might do for Christmas, or what was going on in our personal lives. She once came in early (like ridiculously early) in the morning just to fit me in when I had forgotten to make an appointment just before Christmas, and was in every way a total class act. I was sad to say goodbye to her, and horrified by the idea of having to try and find a replacement that could measure up in any way.

In Aarhus, I postponed finding a hairdresser for as long as I possibly could, but short hair demands attention a lot more often than long hair does, so I couldn’t avoid the issue forever. My first try was with a lady who didn’t speak English very well and who did an okay cut, but we were clearly on a different wavelength. I returned to her once to cut my fringe (she offered it free of charge, so I took advantage of that), but I had already decided I’d keep looking until I found one I was really satisfied with. Luckily for me, my second try was pure diamond.

I found Michael in a hair salon that was well hidden in a second-story space along a tiny alley that breaks away from a larger street barely a block away from where I work. He’s in his early twenties (I assume, haven’t asked), impeccably dressed in either all-black or black and white, thin as a whippet, skilfully coiffed and always with absolutely perfect manners. Every gesture seems somehow well planned, and while his English isn’t perfect, we communicate effortlessly. From the start we just hit it off. I explained to him what I wanted, he agreed and then somehow made it all his own, so that even though I had given the guidelines, he made the cut into a work of art all of his own design. The way he cuts hair makes me think of an artist working with a brush. He’s perfectly concentrated and he absolutely will not stop until he is satisfied with the outcome. And the way he gently but firmly moves my head to the angle he wants at any given moment is both mesmerising and somehow incredibly relaxing.

So no, he’s not Paula by any means, but he cuts my hair to perfection and we get along swimmingly. I was sold as soon as he got started the first time and aside from M and his truly lovely family, Michael has probably done more than anyone to make Aarhus really feel like home to me. It’s extremely rare for me to trust anyone to do anything to me without me trying to control the situation to at least some extent, but somehow he puts me completely at ease, and as a result, the salon he works in has become a true oasis of relaxation for me. (Admittedly the massaging chair I get to sit in when my hair gets washed helps.)

(Yes, I realise how bizarre it is that something like finding “the right” hairdresser can mean so much to a person, but there you go. When I tried to explain this to M the first time, he found it really amusing.)

Being Present

This week has gone by so fast. My cousin A was supposed to visit on Monday, but she got a nasty stomach bug on Sunday and couldn’t travel after all. We had made a restaurant reservation for Monday evening that we decided to keep even though she couldn’t make it. We figured it could be an impromptu date night, and I was quite looking forward to it all day. It turned out okay: food was good if not great, and we had the place mostly to ourselves, but something was off about the evening. It felt like M’s thoughts were elsewhere, and I just felt invisible. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and once we got home, I let myself get totally distracted by chatting with a friend online instead of spending time with M for about an hour, after which we proceeded to watch the latest episode of The Walking Dead as we had agreed earlier. The evening wasn’t a bad one by any means, but neither was it what we had expected.

I woke up insanely grumpy on Tuesday, and couldn’t really put my finger on it. It took me pretty much the whole day to figure it out, and once M came home from work, we finally took a moment to talk about it. I told him about having been disappointed by the restaurant portion of our “date night”, and he told me much the same about what came after. We both felt better afterwards, and decided to give it another go on Saturday.

The rest of the week until the weekend was exhausting, and on Friday evening I was so beat that I went to bed quite a bit earlier than normally and slept like the dead. Saturday, however, was perfect. Lots and lots of extremely good together-time, yummy Chinese food and a movie we both enjoyed. But the best part was, we were both there, present, focused on each other. Such a huge difference compared to Monday.

It’s so easy to get distracted by everyday things. We both have a lot of things going on that have relatively little to do with our relationship with each other, and we spend the majority of every day apart because of work, my language course, our hobbies, and our friends. Not to mention the occasional alone time we both require. It’s easy to accidentally bring that disconnect into our time together as well, but I think for us to stay happy together, we really need to try and not let that happen. Saturday was living proof of how incredibly good it can be when we succeed.

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