brrrrr

So it's -24 right now, and it's really windy, which makes for absolutely brutal conditions, especially when you have to walk into the wind.  Even so, in about 5 hours, which will be midnight here, a group of us will be going on a 1 hour hike up to the top of a mountain here near town because apparently these conditions are pretty much the best shot we have at seeing the northern lights while we're here, short of going about 300km north of here to the middle of nowhere.  Hopefully we'll be able to actually see them, and if so I'll take pictures and videos and try and upload some stuff tomorrow.

Anyways, back to earlier this week.  This Tuesday was my first day of work.  I woke up early and walked the 30 minutes to the city center, and started work at 8:30.  I just did editing of the website and a few other documents.  This first week I'm trying to finish up all that stuff and then I'll move on to translating the site into Chinese.  I won't start doing a lot of editing until I get my work laptop, which they're gonna order sometime in early February I think.  So I just worked a couple of hours Tuesday, since I had class at 12:30.  On the way back to school, I finally gave in and stopped at the mall and got a prepaid mobile internet usb stick so i can have decent internet in the dorms.
In Survival Finnish that afternoon, I was pretty much brain dead, so tried to pay attention, but didn't manage to follow the teacher very well.  Even on a day when I haven't gotten up early and worked before class it's hard to follow the teacher, so that's gonna be a really tough class.
Then yesterday was another long day.  Asian Trade from 8:15-11:45, then lunch, and Business Communications from 12:30-2:00, then a 40 minute walk over to the Arktikum (www.arktikum.fi) where we went on a guided tour of the museum for Intercultural Communications.  It had a bunch of exhibits on the history of Rovaniemi and the Laplands, as well as the Sami people, who are sort of like the aboriginal people of the Laplands.  It was interesting, but a little long.  After the tour, a group of us decided to get something to eat, so we went the the northernmost McDonald's in the world, and I had a Big Mac, which tasted exactly the same as every other Big Mac I've ever had.  A couple of the others got ice cream, but I think they're just crazy.

That brings us back to today, where I just got back from a far too cold and windy walk back from Survival Finnish.  Now I get to relax a few hours before venturing back out into the cold.

Then tomorrow I don't have any classes, so will be going into work in the morning and putting in my first full day of work.  I should be able to finish up all of the english stuff tomorrow and start doing a little bit of translating, depending on how many distractions there are throughout the day.  My boss works 3/4 of the time from his home in Luxembourg, so uses skype to keep in touch with everyone, and he really likes to talk, so should be interesting.


edit: back from the hike, no luck :(  saw some vague outlines of what might have been the lights, but too cloudy to see anything exciting