Trivia

Well, nobody sent me any questions, so I guess I'll just do a post with random little tidbits about Finland that most people don't know.

• You can use a credit card for everything here, from a pack of gum at a store, to a taxi, they accept plastic everywhere
• You can also pay for a ton of stuff with your phone...lots of vending machines have a number, you text the number with what you want, the drink pops out, and your account gets charged for the drink
• The language of the elves in Lord of the Rings is based on Finnish
• There are 187,888 lakes in Finland
• Finland is the least corrupt country in the world
• Finland was the first country to give women the right to vote

Well, there's not all that much to tell about Finland, so I guess that's it for now.

Please, send me some questions, or the next few weeks will see some boring blog posts.

Norway and work

So last Sunday we left at 9am for our trip to Norway.  The group was me, Jacques, Marleen, Laura, Andrea, and her boyfriend on the trip, along with Sammi, our student tutor/chauffeur.  We took a big van, so all of us were in one vehicle together.  The first day we went up to Inari (still in Finland), where we spent the night in a couple cottages.  On the way we stopped in Ivalo and went to a Sami museum, which had a couple of interesting things, but wasn't all that exciting.  Me, Jacques, Marleen and Andrea were in one cottage, and Sami and Andrea and her boyfriend were in the other cottage.  I was exhausted, so fell asleep pretty much right away when we got there, but the others went out and tried to build an igloo in the snow.  The next morning we drove to the Norwegian border and went on up to Alta in northern Norway.  The weather was absolutely horrible for the drive up, it was snowing a lot, and was really windy, so at times we had to go really slowly because of the poor visibility, but we did make it up there.  It did clear up some of the time, and we got some amazing views of the fjords, which looked so cool.  Everything there is really expensive though.  I thought Finland was expensive, but I was proven wrong.  At a little cafe in Norway we stopped and got a burger.  Regular size burger (small for the states) with some fries, no drink...18 bucks.  The same in Finland is like 10, and the same in the states would probably be around 5.  It's crazy.  

The next day we were going to go to Tromso, another city to the Northwest of Alta, but the road between the two cities was closed due to the weather.  We decided to go anyways, just a different route.  Unfortunately that meant we had to go back down south into Finland, over to Sweden, and back up to Norway, so it was cool to be in 3 different countries in a matter of 4 hours, but made for a long day of driving.  When we finally got to Tromso it was really cool though.  It was still snowing a little, but the weather wasn't too bad, so we could see the city.  It's built on an island, with a HUGE bridge between it and the mainland.  The next day we went in to the city center and explored for a while, and visited the Polarium, a polar museum, where we got to see some bearded seals being fed and trained, which was pretty cool, although I couldn't get many of the pictures to turn out.  Those things are a lot faster than they look.  They're like big fat torpedoes in the water.  Later that afternoon we left Tromso and headed back south and back into Finland.  We spent the last night of the trip in a huge cottage in Kiipisjarvi.  It was a tiny little town, so nothing to do, but we had fun.  We all played card games and truth or dare inside, and then went outside to see if we could see the northern lights, and we finally got lucky.  They weren't very bright, but they were amazing none the less.  

The next day we headed back to Rovaniemi, stopping on the way for lunch in Levi, a ski resort town in Finland.  When we finally got back to Rovaniemi we were all exhausted, so we all pretty much crashed right away.  The next few days I worked a lot on translations and stuff for work.  

This past week has been pretty crazy.  I've been in classes half the week, and working the other half.  I finally started video editing, which made work a lot more interesting, but it also means I've been working more than before, so I'm really tired.

Anyways, here are some pictures from the trip.

The van

The road

More road

The group at the Norway-Finland border

Lovely visibility, isn't it?

Me on the Sweden-Finland border

View from just out front of the cottage in Tromso

Bridge to Tromso

We at at the northernmost Burger King in the world.  Was almost 90 bucks for the 6 of us to eat.  

Didn't try the Whopper Nacho due to the jalapenos, but looked interesting.

The bearded seals at the Polarium

We stopped to take pictures in front of this huge wall of stone and ice, it's my new background on my iPod

The Northern Lights (silhouette is of our cottage)

Hope you enjoyed the update and pictures.

P.S.

If you guys have any questions about Finland or anything, let me know and I'll make a blog post next week about all kinds of stuff since I don't have any exciting things planned for the near future.

So I got back from my spring break trip to Norway and Sweden, but will post about all that's been going on later.  I've got a few big projects going on with work right now, as well as a busy week of classes, so probably won't have time to sit down and write everything out and post pictures and everything until next weekend.
More to come later.

The Safari

So it's been a couple days, but I'm finally getting around to posting stuff about the safari.  It was a ton of fun, but exhausting.  We met out front of the dorms around 8:45 and walked in to the city center to the safari company, where we put on all the winter gear, on top of our normal clothes, an extra pair of wool socks, snow boots, snow suit, scarf, mittens, balaclava, and helmet, and then we left on the snowmobiles around 9:45 or 10.  There were an odd number of us going, and I got lucky enough to have a snowmobile by myself, so got to drive the whole way, which was awesome.  It was around a 40 minute drive across the lake and up a mountain to the husky farm, and it was an exhausting drive.  When steering on a snowmobile, you have to not only turn the handlebars, but also lean way over in the direction you wanna turn, especially if it's a sharp turn, so it's a lot more of a workout than it seems, plus when you're going 45 mph and hit a bump every 50 feet that makes you leave the seat, you use a lot of energy holding on. 
The snowmobile was by far the best part of the trip, and I wish I had some pictures or video of it, but it would have been impossible to get anything like that while driving.  Once we got to the husky farm, we went on a short dog sled ride, on a circular track, probably about 1/2 to 2/3 of a mile long.  It wasn't all that fast since there was a ton of fresh snow piled up on the track, and i'm sure the dogs got tired since they were going pretty much constantly taking all of us around the track one by one.  It was a good experience though, and although I didn't get a picture of me on the sled, I'll post a picture I took of Filip (Polish exchange student) on the sled so you can see both what the sled looked like and what our safari suits looked like.

After the sled ride we went inside and had some hot berry juice and they talked to us a little bit about the different kinds of dogs they have: alaskan malamutes (strong ones, closest to sled), alaskan huskies (fastest ones, the ones used for competitions), and siberian huskies (they have the most of these, they're not as strong as the malamutes, and not as fast as the alaskan huskies, used for lead and middle of dog sleds).  This particular husky farm had around 350 dogs I think, and they all had different names, so I tried to find familiar names, but only managed to find one.  Most of them had Finnish, Swedish, or Inuit names.

Oh, and there were two absolutely adorable puppies that loved chewing on our mittens.

After that, we walked about half a mile over to a reindeer farm, and went on a reindeer-pulled sleigh ride.  It was more like a little sled pulled by a single reindeer that didn't wanna go more than a slow crawl, but it was still fun, and that made it last longer.  After the ride, we went inside and watched a DVD about reindeer in Finland, which just happened to be the DVD made by Joulupukki TV, which I thought was awesome, so now all the other exchange students have seen something made by my company.  After that we had a light lunch, which was diced potatoes, reindeer, and onions stirfried.

I'm really sore from the trip, so have just been relaxing a lot and doing some translating from home the last couple days.  My shoulders and arms are really sore, and so is my back, although I think the back is just from getting banged up so much from going over all the bumps.  Overall, it was an awesome trip, and I'd definitely do it again, especially the snowmobile ride.
I leave on my spring break trip on Sunday.  I'm going, along with 7 other exchange students, up to Northcape, the northernmost point in Europe.  It'll be a 5 day trip, and we'll spend each day in a different city on the way up and down from Northcape, so it should be a lot of fun.

Welcome to March

So yesterday was the first day of March, and we had a nice welcome.  We got a lot of snow.  Don't know how much exactly, but i'd guess between 1-2 feet.

Here's my bike out front of the dorms.

And a parking lot in front of the school yesterday morning.

Should make for an awesome safari tomorrow though.  Can't remember if I wrote about the safari yet, so I'll go ahead and tell about it.  Tomorrow morning a bunch of us are going out to somewhere in the middle of nowhere outside of town, and we're gonna go on a snowmobile ride our to a husky farm, where we'll get to go on a dog sled ride out to a reindeer farm, then on a reindeer pulled sleigh ride.  Not sure exactly how long each ride will be, but it'll be a whole day event, and I can't wait!  I've always wanted to do all 3 of those, so it's gonna be awesome, and I'll have plenty of pictures to post tomorrow evening.

Oh, and I found out that the Stockholm trip that I had planned for next week, our spring break, isn't going to work out, but we are going on a trip to Northcape, the northernmost point in Europe.  We're gonna stay up there for 4 or 5 days and it should be fun, and cold.  Think we're gonna do some skiing/snowboarding, and just sightseeing and everything, so even more pictures to come at the end of that week.