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.