Crazy Days

So the past few days have been crazy, exciting, and tiring.

On Saturday, I went out to dinner with my boss Tommi, and the other two interns, Tibo and Marina, both of whom are French.  We went out to Comico, a tex-mex restaurant, and all had fajitas.  They were really good, although a little too spicy for me.  Afterwards we went to a bar across the street and watched the ski jump event at the olympics, which, next to hockey, is the most popular olympic sport in Finland.  Unfortunately the Finnish star bombed his second run so went from being in 3rd place after the first run to 19th place overall, but it was still fun to watch.  After that, we went to a couple other bars and stayed for a while, so didn't get home until around 3:30.  Because it was so late, I decided to sleep in and go to the afternoon English service at a church here in Rovaniemi.  Got back from that around 6:30, and then stayed up for a little while surfing the web, but went to sleep fairly early.  On Monday, for Intercultural Communications class we took a bus down to Ranua, about 80km south of Rovaniemi, and went to the Ranua Zoo.  It was "only" -19 out, but was really windy, and we were outside in the open for like 3 straight hours, so by the end all of us were absolutely freezing, but it was a ton of fun.  We got to see a lot of stuff, but the highlights were of course the Polar Bears, the Lynx, and the Otters.  They had 3 polar bears, 1 male that was around 20 years old, and about 750kg, and 2 females, each about 3-4 years old, and 250kg each.  While we were there they fed them, so we got to see them rip apart and devour a few frozen fish, so that was cool.  After that we went to see the lynx.  Not sure what the plural is for lynx, so for now I'll just assume it's just like moose. (no, not moosen :P)  There were 3 lynx in the enclosure, and we got to see them eating too.  Lynx have always been my favorite animals, they look really cool, like a big bobcat with very short tails.  The last thing we saw was the Otters.  There were 2 of them, and I wish I had taken my video camera, because they kept wrestling with each other and sliding around on the snow, but unfortunately I only took my camera with me to the zoo.  We also saw wolves, wild boars, wolves, elk, reindeer, and about a million different kinds of birds, including a couple of golden eagles, which looked pretty cool. 
Today, I went with my boss and one intern, Marina, to see the Kemi Snow Castle.  It's in the city of Kemi, the biggest coastal Lapland city, located about 100km WSW of rovaniemi.  It was really cool (cold, even) and very impressive, all the sculptures and everything had incredible detail.  We left this morning at 9:45, and left to come back to Rovaniemi at 1:00, so had just about an hour and fifteen minutes there, but it's not all that big, so that gave us enough time to take several pictures of each area of the castle, so it was really cool.  Now I'm back and just relaxing for the rest of the day, and tomorrow it's back to classes. 
So, here are some pictures.  I'll post some here, but not all of them, as I've taken like 150 the last couple days.  I'll try and add all of them to Facebook and link to that in a couple days.

Me, Marina, and Tibo, in the -27 degree weather before dinner

 

Snowy Owl

 

Golden Eagle

 

Ice Cream Hut covered in snow...crazy Finns

 

The big guy

 

Two of the "little" guys begging for food

 

A lynx, tried to get a good shot of him head on, but camera kept dying, the cold is brutal on battery life

Entrance to the Kemi Snow Castle

Thermostat in the snow castle (-8.0 in case it's hard to read)

 

An ice bear guardian in front of the castle

 

One of the dining rooms in the castle

Frozen security camera in the "jewelry room"

The snow cathedral, a chapel inside the snow castle

Me hunched over in the tiny doorway to one of the bedrooms

View from the top of the Snow Castle

So it's been a while, and I've gotten comments asking for an update and for pictures, so here goes nothing.

The last couple weeks have been really tiring.  I've been working a lot, and studying too little, but still more than is normal for me.  At work I finished up checking both of the websites, joulupukkitv.com and santatelevision.com, correcting all of the grammatical errors and everything.  I have started to translate the entire santatelevision website to chinese.  I spent about 8 hours today translating, and am now braindead.  It's really tiring work, and takes a while, but it is nice to know that I am capable of doing the translating, which not too many people can say. 
My boss is back in town for the week.  He works about 3/4 of the time from his home in Luxembourg.  So today we talked a lot, I asked lots of questions about what all he wants translated and stuff.  On a good note, I don't have to write a chinese transcript for all of the videos yet, but that'll come later.  On that note, if anyone knows someone with a good chinese voice that could pass for Santa Claus, let me know, my boss is interested in hiring someone to do some voiceover work for a couple videos, and my voice is "too young."
I did find out a little bit about the pay.  The company is short on money right now, as are most companies, due to the recession, but today he guaranteed me 600 euros (300/month I'm working fulltime), and more if they can afford it come May. 
As for school, I finished up my Asian Business class last week.  Last Wednesday was the last day of classes, and our final paper (10 pages) was turned in yesterday.  I'm still in Intercultural Communications, Survival Finnish, and Business Communications, and International Sales Negotiations starts on March 1. 
Next Monday I'm going to the Ranua Zoo for Intercultural Communications, which should be pretty sweet, it's supposed to be the best arctic zoo in the world or something.  I'm mainly looking forward to seeing the polar bears and lynx.
Today was some kind of national holiday, so we didn't have any classes, but that just meant I had more time to work, so wasn't as relaxing as the other exchange students, some of whom just relaxed at the dorms, and some participated in a snow football (soccer) tournament across town.
Well, I'm gonna finish up my dinner and go to the sauna, so I'll leave you with this picture I took on the way back to the dorms today.  The sun's been out a lot longer now that winter's coming to a close (still -20 degrees though), so today at like 5:15 the sun was just finishing setting, and the sky looked awesome.

February

So it's February now, and It's getting lighter and lighter outside here.  Every day we get about 5 minutes more sunlight, so it's slowly changing.  It's been snowing a lot lately though.  Apparently we've gotten more snow in the past couple weeks than is usual, so that's been interesting.  I've been working a decent amount lately, mostly just doing editing of the English text on the website and a little bit of translating.  Haven't started editing yet, but hopefully will in the next week or so. 
So I finally got a new bike, and this one's much better.  It's a good size, and even has 3 working gears, so that's nice, especially since there are a couple of hills between the dorms and the city center.  The only issue now though is that the sidewalks constantly have around 4-5 inches of fresh snow coating them, so I'm constantly sliding all over the place and wiping out on my bike.  Luckily though, what with all of the layers I wear and the fresh snow, it doesn't hurt at all when you hit the ground.
I was told about a restaurant in the city center that I'm planning on going to with some other exchange students.  There you can get reindeer steaks, elk steaks, and even bear steaks, so we're planning on trying some new and interesting stuff.  I hear the bear steaks are pretty expensive though, so dunno if we'll actually get to try that one, depends on just how expensive it is. 
Oh, and I'm planning on meeting up with an American guy and a couple of Finns who are interested in American Football and watching the Super Bowl on Saturday.  Starts at like 1:30am here, so it's gonna be a late night, but I can't wait.  I hear they replace the ads with Finnish ones, so that will be disappointing, but there's always youtube for that.  Now if only I could find a way to get baby back ribs here...
I'm also planning on going snowboarding on Sunday afternoon (if I'm awake for it), so that should be a lot of fun. 
Well, that's all for now.
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