Adventures in Finland

I'm coming home

2010-05-25T08:09:00.002+03:00

So I'm at the Rovaniemi Airport. Flight leaves in just over an hour, and I'll be home in just over 20 hours.

Can't wait to just be home!

it's almost over

2010-05-21T14:27:00.001+03:00

So it's almost over. I leave in 4 days. It's been crazy, fun, and most of all, exhausting.

It's definitely summer now. It's almost 80 outside, which is about as hot as it gets here, and the sun hasn't really set in several days. It gets a little less bright out but it doesn't really get dark anymore. They say that this winter was the coldest here in over 20 years, and the warm weather the past 2 weeks is unusually hot for this time of the year. All the snow melted, and within 4 days, everything was green. Just thought I'd post some pictures for y'all.

First, this is a rullakebab. It's a huge tortilla shell that's stuffed with meat, lettuce, cucumber, mozzarella, and lots of kebab sauce, and rolled up like a burrito. They cost 8 euros, but considering it's all I'll eat for an entire day because of how big they are, that's not too bad.
That's 2 200g chocolate bars end to end, and still not as big as the kebab.

the path away from the dorms towards town

the walking/biking path that goes along the main road into town

the river

the river, facing Rantavitikka

river to the right, path to the city center on left

field in front of public library

and these next four pictures were taken at midnight, 1:30, 3:00, and 4:30

Work

2010-05-17T14:10:00.002+03:00

So it's almost time for me to head back to the states! I've enjoyed my time here, but it's been exhausting, and I can't wait to get back. It finally started getting warm here this past weekend. Up until last Thursday, the warmest it had gotten here was like 9 celcius, or 48 fahrenheit, but it jumped up to 22 on friday, and since then it's been around 26, which is 78 fahrenheit. It wouldn't be that bad, but there is no air conditioning in our office, which is on the top floor of the building, and on the corner, so it gets really hot in here. It's really nice for walking to/from work though, especially when there's a nice breeze going. The last of the snow melted over the weekend, and this morning for the walk to work I actually saw a little bit of green, and for the first time saw the river without any ice on top of it. It really is beautiful here, I can just imagine what it'll be like once everything starts to really grow in a few weeks. It's supposed to stick around 26 degrees from now until I leave, so should be pretty nice, just hoping the wind will pick up so we can get a cross breeze going in the office.

Since this is my last week at work, I am really busy. Pretty much done with all the video editing, just a couple of final things to do on older projects, it's mostly translations left. I am also going to be doing some voiceover work for one of the DVD postcards. They're gonna hire someone to do the voiceover for most of the stuff, but on one of them there's a section with someone asking questions, and an expert on the northern lights is answering them, so i'm asking the questions and doing the little intro bit, so should be fun.

Oh, and back to the weather...it's bright out all the time now. I fell asleep at midnight last night, and it was as bright as noon, and this morning i woke up with the sun shining bright in my face, and looked at the clock, and it was 5
ugh...

have the thickest curtains i could find for a decent price over the windows, but it's still way too bright in the room

i get paid my final paycheck this afternoon, so am planning on doing a little bit of souvenir shopping, then will start going through all my stuff and packing this week so I don't end up frantically packing at the last minute like usual.

can't wait to get back!

oh yeah, and don't remember if I mentioned this before, but I am now officially a college graduate. Man, time flies...

oh, and here's a picture taken at 11:30 pm

Turku

2010-04-27T22:57:00.000+03:00

So this past weekend I took a trip down to Turku. I had been talking about going down forever, but things kept coming up for me, Michael or Toni. Those are my two friends that live there in Turku. We met on the facebook game Hobowars, and have been playing that, as well as a couple other facebook games, together for a couple years. So I took the overnight train down to Turku on Friday. It left at 8:00pm and arrived in Turku at right around 9am on Saturday. I bought a ticket for a sleeper car, which normally would be 100 euros, but with my student card (which cost me only 18 euros) I got a 50% discount, so that was awesome. I was in a cabin for 3 people, but was the only one for the first part of the trip. We didn't have to change trains or anything, but it made lots of stops on the way down to Turku. The other 2 guys in my cabin got on in Oulu, about 3 hours in, and that's when they started drinking. After I finished reading through The Giver, which is in my opinion the best book of all time, I went to sleep and slept pretty much the rest of the train ride. When I arrived in Turku, Toni picked me up and we went back to his and his girlfriends' place where they had offered to let me stay for the night. Toni and I decided to walk through the town along the river over to the other side of town where we could see the Castle of Turku.
The Castle was pretty impressive. I've heard it's not that much compared to many of the other castles in Europe, but seeing as the only castle I've ever seen before is the one in the Disney logo, it was very impressive. It was huge inside, took us a good 2 hours to walk through and see everything inside it. They had restored sections of it to be like it was in the medieval ages, during the renaissance, etc. so it was really cool to see the progression of the architecture and furniture and everything.
After that we walked back along the river to see the city center, and went to meet Michael and Maria (Toni's girlfriend) for lunch. I had an awesome burger. It was called a panini, but it was just a big burger with sliced filet mignon instead of ground beef. It was one of the best things I've had since I've been here in Finland. After lunch, we went over to see the big Cathedral in town. It was humongous, and very impressive. It and the castle were a couple of the only buildings to have survived all 5 or 6 fires that destroyed most of the city several times over the years. After that Toni and I went to a hockey game, TPS (Turun Palloseura, from Turku) against HPK (Hämeenlinnan Pallokerho, from Hämeenlinna) Naturally, we were cheering for TPS, and they won 3-1. It was a really crazy game. We could only get standing tickets, so it was tiring, but it was insane. The stadium's capacity is 12,000, and there were 11,820 people there. It was so loud, and there couldn't have been more than a couple hundred HPK fans, so the cheering for TPS and booing for HPK was awesome. After the game we went back to Toni's place, where Maria made dinner. She made Karelian Stew, and it was amazing. Especially since they had fresh homemade lingonberry jam made from berries picked at their summer cottage, which, surprisingly, goes amazingly well with the beef, pork, and lamb in the stew. The berries here are to die for. She also made a blueberry pie out of fresh berries. Best blueberries I've ever had. After that, we were all pretty tired, so we went to bed. I slept on the couch, which was actually pretty comfortable.
On Sunday Toni had to go to work all day, so Maria and I walked around town for like 4 or 5 hours just seeing the whole town and walking their dogs and just talking about Finland, and Turku and everything. After a while I went to meet Michael again, and we hung out for a little bit and had dinner, and then I left on the train back for Rovaniemi. It left at 9pm, and arrived here at 11:30 or so. I just rested the rest of the day, and then today I've been working all day.
So, picture time.

The Train Cabin

The beds

Scale model of the castle

The Castle from the inner courtyard

Turku City Hall that sits on the banks of the Aura River

Mermaid Tail sculpture in the Aura River

The Cathedral

The inside of the Cathedral, and the biggest set of organ pipes I've ever seen

And this is back in Rovaniemi, the view outside, at 10:30pm

Anyways, looks like from here on out I'll just be working and waiting to come back to the states. That's all for now.

Chinese Food

2010-04-21T14:18:00.000+03:00

So I just got back from lunch. I went to a Chinese restaurant here in the Rovaniemi city center, along with 3 other exchange students. I asked for everything to be cooked like 地道中餐 (traditional chinese food), and it was all amazing. We all shared Szechuan Beef, Curry Chicken, Sweet and Sour Pork, and my personal favorite, 虾仁鸡蛋 (Shrimp and Egg), which tasted exactly like the Shacks' shrimp and egg, and of course, good, sticky white rice.

Talked with the owner for a little bit in Chinese, she of course wanted to know how I learned Chinese, so it was really nice to actually be able to speak with a native speaker. She's from Hebei, in central China.

Anyways, I should get back to work, just wanted to post, because I'm so happy right now. Haven't been able to stop smiling since the food first came out.

crazy weather courtesy of the volcano

2010-04-16T17:33:00.002+03:00

so the past few days it's been clear out, bright blue sky, beautiful, light from around 4:30am-10:30pm or something like that, and all the snow on the roads, sidewalks, and parking lots and everything has almost completely melted

then the volcano erupted. It's snowing really really hard out right now, and the temperature went down a few degrees, and it's darker outside

Tommi (my boss) called me this morning on skype (and woke me up) to tell me not to worry too much about the volcano affecting my flight out in late May. He studied geology in college, so was going on for about 15 minutes about what effects the volcano should and shouldn't have on us here. I don't remember most of it as I was only half awake, but I do remember that he said that the volcano ash that was thrown up into the atmosphere would normally be blown northwest, but for some reason the strongest winds right now are blowing southeast, which is why the ash has covered Finland. I didn't connect that volcanic ash with the weird weather until I left work to grab lunch and the weather was so weird.

crazy crazy weather

oh, and i forgot to mention...when i left for work this morning it wasn't snowing or anything, and i didn't think to check the weather report since it's been clear so much lately, so don't have my waterproof coat with me...gonna be a fun walk home this evening :P

Oh, don't know if I already posted this or not, but I am officially done with all of my studies for my undergrad work. YAY!!!!!

Oh, and Rachel, I asked one of the student tutors if he knew a place where I could get my measurements taken and he said he'll try and find one, and if there isn't one here, I should be able to find one in Turku when I visit there next weekend.
Can't wait to get back!

hmmm...this could be bad

2010-04-15T23:07:00.000+03:00

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63E1TM20100415

The link's to an article about the recent volcano eruption in Iceland and how it's halted all flights in and out of Finland and much of Northern Europe, as well as many cross-strait flights from JFK and Newark Airports. For now all flights are grounded for just a few days, but volcanologists are saying that if the eruption continues it's possible for there to be "intermittent problems to air traffic for 6 months"

I was talking to my boss about it and to try and make me feel better he said "don't get upset, anything can happen, and you can always take a boat..."

not very reassuring

I'll keep following the story and post if things change

school and work

2010-04-07T11:24:00.000+03:00

So first, the good news. I got my ticket back to the states. I will be flying back on May 25th, and I can't wait!

More good news, classes are almost finished. I only have one class left, International Sales Negotiations, and I only have 3 class meetings, with a project due in a week, and then I'm done with classes. Which means I'll be done with all my undergrad studies...man, time flies.

Now for the other news...

Yesterday I took my survival Finnish exam, and considering how little she actually taught us throughout the semester, everyone figured the exam would be pretty easy. We were wrong.
I failed the exam.
Every single person in the class failed the exam.
The closest anyone got was the two Dutch girls, who each got around 45% of the questions right.
After we finished the exam we went over it afterwards with the teacher, so we already know our grades, and she already knows that the exam was too hard and that everyone failed, so I figured she'd give us a curve or something. She just told us the date of the make-up exam.

So in two weeks I guess we're gonna have to retake it. Our only hope is that she either changes the exam to make it much easier, which I doubt she will do, or she keeps the test exactly the same, in which case we can just memorize the answers from the copy of the test that a few of us kept.

Anyways, enough of that. I start working fulltime this week. I still have sales negotiations on thursday and friday, and then next wednesday, but other than that, I will be working Monday-Saturday, 8-4. As I'm sure you all know, I'm not a morning person, but I sort of have to work early now. I was told before I came here that they would be getting me a laptop that I can do editing on, but it doesn't look like that's gonna be happening. It's still possible that they'll get one sometime, but it's been pushed back so many times now for one reason or another, I just don't think it's gonna happen. So in the meantime, I work on the computer here in the morning, and then Juha comes in to work in the afternoons, so I just work on translations and stuff on my own laptop then.

No pictures to post, haven't really done much lately, mostly been working and resting, and that's gonna continue the next little while. I am looking forward to the weekend of April 24th, as I will be going down to Turku to hang out with a couple friends. Other than that though, it looks like I'll just be working until I head back to the states.

Again, if anyone has any questions, leave a comment, email, or post on facebook and I'll have something more interesting to write about.

Trivia

2010-03-29T17:12:00.000+03:00

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

2010-03-20T22:05:00.000+02:00

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.

2010-03-15T01:34:00.000+02:00

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

2010-03-06T01:44:00.000+02:00

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

2010-03-02T15:14:00.000+02:00

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.

Crazy Days

2010-02-23T16:39:00.000+02:00

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

2010-02-16T18:17:00.000+02:00

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

2010-02-03T15:14:00.000+02:00

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.
nähdään

brrrrr

2010-01-28T19:01:00.000+02:00

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

Crazy Sauna

2010-01-24T00:03:00.000+02:00

So this evening I went to the sauna, and decided to be crazy, so a bunch of us went straight from the sauna and jumped in the snow outside, then back in the sauna
it was insanely cold, and i thought i was gonna have a heart attack, but it was fun to try once
now all we needa do is go to the sauna just outside town where you can jump into a hole cut in the frozen river then back to the sauna, think a group of us are gonna do that in a couple weeks

Reindeer Pizza

2010-01-23T17:48:00.000+02:00

So today, Jan, Nada, and I decided to get some pizza. We translated the Finnish menu to English, thanks to Google Translate, and got a pizza with reindeer, salami, mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese on it. We also got one with honey marinated chicken, onions, and feta cheese. They were both delicious, but the reindeer one was a little better. It was tiny little pieces of reindeer that looked almost like bacon bits, so didn't really have a strong reindeer flavor, but it was still really good.

So here's a couple pictures.

The reindeer Pizza

The chicken Pizza

Work

2010-01-20T01:36:00.000+02:00

Okay, so I just got back a little bit ago from talking to Tommi, my boss, about what I will be doing and when. For the first couple weeks I will be focusing mostly on translating www.santatelevision.com into Chinese. I will eventually be translating the entire site, including either subtitles or dubbing for all the videos, or at least that's what the goal is. Once they order my work computer in early February I'll be doing more video editing. It's gonna be a nice computer. Sony VAIO FW Series VGN-FW51MF/H - Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz - 16.4 " - 6 GB Ram - 500 GB HDD. Can't wait.
The first project I will be working on is a DVD postcard for a city in Germany. All the footage has already been shot, and captured, so that is nice. Now I just need to go through all of the videos and figure out which clips to use and which to toss out. I have just over 4000 video clips, ranging from 5-30 seconds long each, which I need to cut down and edit into a 12-15 minute video. So it's gonna take a long time, but it should be interesting, since it's all beautiful scenery and stuff.
I will start working part time this week, and then in mid-April when my classes all end, full time. I am also going to be going through the various websites maintained by the company to check for any typos, grammatical errors, etc. since it was all written by non-native english speakers.
So that pretty much sums up all I know about the job so far.

Back to last week. On Sunday morning I got up and went to Santa Claus Village, along with about 10 other exchange students. It is just about 12 km north of the dorms here, so just outside town. For those of you that love maps (dad), the exact coordinates are 66°33'07" North, 25°50'51" East. We shopped a little bit there, and then went about 2km over to a husky farm. You could pay extra to go on a dog sled ride, but it was only a 1-2 minute thing, and was quite expensive, so I just settled for watching and filming some Japanese tourists go for a ride. We did get to pet a bunch of them and got a ton of great pictures.
After we got back home, I headed over to the local Lutheran church, which has an English service once a month at night. The service was okay, but definitely not what I'm used to, plus there were only 3 other people there, including the priest. I talked to some guys at school today and they said there are a couple of small independent churches that have English services in Rovaniemi, so I think I'm gonna try and visit those the next couple weeks.

Yesterday morning, school started back, so had the normal classes, and after classes, I went to the city center to buy a bike. The shop I went to had a bunch of used bikes out front that sell for pretty cheap, so I got one for 45 euros, and thought it seemed a little small, but would do. Then I tried to ride it home. My knees hit the handlebars any time I turned a little bit. Needless to say I'm gonna try and go back in the next couple of days to see if I can either exchange it for a bigger bike or sell it back and try and get another bike there or some other shop or something.

Today I woke up feeling sick. Not flu or anything, just a cold, so congestion and sore throat. Took a nice hot shower and felt a lot better, but was still feeling sorta bad after lunch, so I took a nap, and felt a ton better when I woke up, which is good, since I had to go to the meeting with my boss. I think I'm the 6th or 7th in the group to get a cold or something similar in the last few days, which isn't surprising considering the weather, but hopefully nobody will come down with anything more serious, otherwise we could all be missing a lot of classes.

Tomorrow I don't have class until 2:30, which means I get to sleep in! So gonna take some nyquil here in a few minutes and try and get over this cold fast.

Anyways, picture time.

Me just across the arctic circle.

The first reindeer I've seen, just outside Santa Claus' Workshop.

The thermometer in front of Santa Claus' Workshop. It was a warm day.

The dog sled you could ride at the Husky Park.

One of the Huskies.

The flags out front of Santa Claus Village, thought they looked cool, and didn't mean to take it with flash, but the flash made the snow flakes look pretty awesome.

The first week

2010-01-15T16:47:00.000+02:00

So I am now done with my first week of classes. I actually didn't have any classes today, so was technically done with them yesterday. Today, I walked the 3.5 or so km into the city center to find Joulupukki TV, which is run out of an apartment downtown. I met one of the guys who will be my supervisors, but won't meet my boss, the one I've been communicating with the most, until our meeting on Tuesday. They gave me 4 of their most recently produced DVD postcards to look through so I know what kind of format will be used for my work. This way I'll have more of an idea of what to talk about for the meeting. I'm gonna try and find a place to buy a bicycle, as it will make the trip much faster, because the 25-30 minutes each way is way too long of a commute each day, especially with classes added in there.

I finally found out my class schedule for the rest of the semester, and it is definitely different from the American format. Different classes begin and end at seemingly random times throughout the semester. For instance, Asian Trade, which started this past week, ends in the beginning of February. Also, I still have 2 more classes, Business Communication, and International Sales Negotiations, which have not yet begun. Business Communication class begins January 25th, and Sales Negotiations begins March 1. My last class will end around the middle of April, which will be really nice for multiple reasons. First, it will give me more time to travel some. A group of us are planning on visiting Norway and Sweden one week, and I also plan to go down to Helsinki to visit some friends that I have been chatting with online for a few years now. Secondly, it also gives me lots of time to just work without worrying about school. Finally, it allows me the flexibility to return a little early for Rachel's wedding!

So yesterday I went to the gym that is just across the street from the dorms here. It's not huge, but is really nice. Has all pretty new equipment, leg press, bench, and some other stuff, and my personal favorite, a heavy bag and boxing gloves. So, I exhausted myself there yesterday with some of the other guys, then we all went to the sauna, which felt great after a workout.
The weather's been a little colder than earlier in the week, averaging around -9 to -15, so has been pretty good for the most part, although the walk back from the city center today was pretty brutal because the wind was in my face the whole time.

Anyways, time for more pictures.

The view outside my dorm room window, the building on the left is the girls dorm, and the one on the right (single floor one) is the dorm office, laundry room, and sauna.

The rock path that lines the road I take to school every day.

Another shot of the road I take to school.

Closeup of branches of the trees lining the road to school.

Main road in town (Valtatie 4) on left side of shot, I'm on the bike/pedestrian path off to the side of it.

Harjulampi (Ridge Lake) frozen over, and those dots are people walking across it. That's the fastest way to get across town since the lake sort of divides the city.

Closeup of these trees that lined the road right by my work, they look really cool with all the branches frozen.

The buzzer to call up to the apartment that Joulupukki TV is run out of.

Classes

2010-01-12T17:02:00.001+02:00

So I just finished my second day of classes. They're so different here.

Yesterday morning I had Asian trade from 8:15 to 12:30. Yes, 4 hours. But we had a 45 minute lunch break at 11. But still, long class. I had to leave the class early too, because my Intercultural communications class started at 12:30, and is in the Rantavitikka campus, whereas Asian trade is in Viirinkangas. The two campuses are about 7-8 minutes apart, plus time to put on and take off all the coats, hats, scarves, etc. required for the walk.

I really enjoyed the Asian trade class. The teacher's english was pretty good, and there were some cool people in the class. I sat next to a couple of chinese girls who were freaked out when I started speaking chinese to them, so that was fun. And then there was actually another American in the class (only other one I've seen in Rovaniemi), and we got to talking, and it turns out he's from Birmingham. Small world. He's here with his wife. They're both doing part time studies, and also working with an episcopal church in the area.

For lunch I ate in the Viirinkangas Restaurant (what they call the cafeteria), had an excellent pork and root vegetable stew. It had carrots, potatoes, turnips, and radishes. Very good, and also very filling.

Then we went over to Rantavitikka and had Intercultural Communications, another 4 hour class. We had a 15 minute break in the middle and got out about 45 minutes early, but it still seemed like an eternity. Finns seem to speak really slowly. Not so much in the time between individual words, but they'll say one sentence, then wait about 15 seconds, then say something else. I don't know if they're just doing that so that everyone can understand better, or if it's just a habit many of them have or something, but it made for a really long boring class. The material itself was okay, we basically just did the introduction to what culture is, culture shock, etc.

After class I walked to Prisma, sort of like a Finnish Walmart or some other huge store, which was about 500m or so off a path on the way back to the dorms, so not too bad. Got some food and stuff there, and headed back. I was exhausted from the long classes and everything, so stayed up a little while and read some of The Giver (one of 3 books I brought with me, already finished the other 2), and fell asleep around 7. I woke up around 4 this morning, and tried going back to sleep, but pretty much just tossed and turned and read a little until 9:30, when I got up and showered and everything. Then I walked to Rantavitikka (the one that's 1.5km from the dorms) and had lunch, same stew as yesterday, and went to Survival Finnish.

That was an interesting class. It's gonna be extremely hard to follow, for several reasons. The Finns have 8 vowels, all with different pronunciations than in English. They also have 16 consonants.
The vowels are what really throws me off. For example, a is pronounced like we'd say "ahh", e like the e in pet, i like the ee in see, etc. None of them sound like their English counterparts. And then they have, in addition to our 5, y, ä, and ö.

Also, the way they say things is different. For instance, the Finnish for car is auto, and the Finnish for "in the car" is autossa. Also, if I was to ask "is there any mail for Joshua Courson" at the post office, I'd say "anko sinulla postia Joshua Coursonille" the ille meaning "for."

One of the first phrases we went over was "where are you from", which is "Minkä maalainen sinä olet?", to which I have to answer "Mina olen usalainen", usalainen meaning from the USA, which they pronounce like "ooh es ahh.", so usalainen sounds like "ooh es ahh line in," which I find quite amusing. The Finnish teacher's english is really bad, so she had to constantly stop and think for a minute to tell us the English meaning of any word she said, which is why she just tended to repeat the phrase a bunch until someone caught on and got what she was trying to say. Hopefully it'll get better, but today was pretty bad.

Tomorrow it's back to Asian Trade and Intercultural Communications. However, I won't have to do as much walking, since on Wednesdays, we meet at Viirinkangas for Communications, since there are 2 different teachers for the class.

The weather's been really nice the last couple days. It's been between -5 and -10, which is realy nice. Don't have to bundle up nearly as much. This morning it snowed for the first time since I arrived. I was told it was too cold to snow before, so it made for a nice walk, although a little more slippery since the snow on the ground wasn't packed down much yet.

Now for pictures.

The sign out front of Viirinkangas Campus

The front entrance of Viirinkangas Campus, complete with huge pile of snow out front (you can see part of the front doors behind it)

A bike leaning up against a bench in front of the dorms. This was before today's fresh snow. The bike apparently hasn't been ridden in at least a week.

Well, that's all of them for now. I'll try and get some new shots and post more soon.

Sauna and Pictures

2010-01-09T16:07:00.000+02:00

Just got out of my first sauna. It was crazy. You get in the sauna, which is like 95 degrees Celcius, then jump in a freezing cold shower, then back in the sauna, then repeat again. All in all I think we were in the sauna probably 40 minutes or so. Really clears out your sinuses and all your pores and everything. I'm definitely looking forward to doing it again later.
So I went to the welcoming party last night, it was at a club called Onnela. Nice place, but the band they had playing for the first couple hours was playing like country music type stuff, so it was boring, but then after they quit the dj played some good stuff. They had drinks and quiche and chips, pretzels, nuts, etc. for us to snack on, so it was fun just sitting with a group of people talking about stuff.
The group I sat with and have been hanging out with a lot since the first day is my roommate, Jan (with an accent over the a, pronounced yan), from the Czech Republic, his girlfriend Nadia, also from the Czech Republic, Marleen and Laurentia, from the Netherlands, Olesya, from Russia, and Andrea, from Germany.
The church in town is a Lutheran one, but all the services are in Finnish, so I think I'll try to go once I've got a little bit of Finnish down, but for now I think it'd be kinda pointless, so will just have to do something at home. They do have a special night service once a month in English, so will be going to that next Sunday night.
The weather's getting a lot nicer. Was only -20 today, and by Monday it's only supposed to be -10, or as the Finns call it, T-shirt weather. :D

Now for some pictures. This first one is of the road that I take to school and back every day.

This next one is me all bundled up on the way back from my second day of orientation. It was still light out because it was just 2:00 or so.

This last one is my dorm building. The top left window there is my room. The one next to it is another room, then there's another window half hidden by that tree, which is our living room/kitchenette window. The tiny window on the end of the building is in the shower room. And in case you're wondering, those aren't parking meters, they're outlets to plug block heaters in. I was standing at the end of the road pictured above when i took this picture.

That's all for now.

brrrrrrr

2010-01-07T14:03:00.000+02:00

So I'm in Rovaniemi now, and it's cold. Very cold. Very very cold.
When I walked to school this morning, it was -31 C. The nice thing is I haven't had any allergy issues since I arrived in Finland.
It's light out right now, but not for much longer.
Orientation started this morning at just after 9. We got informational packets, and then different people came in to talk to us about weather, culture, language issues, laws and regulations, the churches, and stuff like that. After lunch, which was schnitzel and potato soup, a nice big bowl for 2.13 euros, we went on a campus tour, which ended here in the computer lab.
We have a bus tour of the city planned for 3:00, so that should be good, and then after that, we're done for the day.
Tomorrow we're gonna have orientation again in our own school.
There are 3 schools within RAMK.
Today we were at Rantavitikka (School of Forestry and rural Industries, and Technology)
The school I'm gonna be at (Business and Tourism School) is called Viirinkangas
The third school is Ounasvaara (School of Health Care and Social Services, Sports and Leisure)
In that orientation we will go over our classes and everything with advisors, so I'll know more about when and where classes will be and everything.

The dorms are pretty sparse, have a 2 desks, lamps, closets, and beds in the 2 person rooms.
Little bit bigger than the dorm rooms at Tech, but smaller closets. The dorms are arranged sort of like suites. There are 4 of these double rooms per suite, plus a little living room/kitchenette, a shower room, and bathroom. They are nice and warm, and the water is hot, so that's all that really matters right now.

Well, off to ride a bus around for a while.

That's all for now.

2010-01-06T10:00:00.000+02:00

So I just arrived here at the airport in Helsinki. Went through a 3rd round of security, and am now sitting at a computer with an hour's worth of internet. It's snowing a little bit outside, but it must have snowed more earlier, because all the planes are covered in snow. It's beautiful out. And cold. It's -15 out right now, but it's nice and toasty in the airport, so that's nice.

It'll take some getting used to learning to type on these Finnish keyboards, as several extra keys are added, moving the apostrophe over, and shrinking the enter key to about half it's normal size. They add öäå to theirs, so i keep on typing "itäs" instead of "it's"

I'll try and update again once I arrive in Rovaniemi if I find internet there. It's a national holiday, so pretty much everything's closed, so don't know if i'll be able to find a coffee shop with wireless or anything, but should be at school tomorrow morning so can post then.

The Adventures Begin

2010-01-05T04:36:00.000+02:00

So I'm flying out of Richmond at 10:40 tomorrow morning. I arrive in Rovaniemi at 1:35 on the afternoon of the 6th, and will start to get settled and everything then. The weather forecast for Wednesday when I arrive is a high of 6 degrees, and a low of -16 Fahrenheit. I will have the rest of Wednesday to get settled in the dorms and get to know the city a little bit, and International Student Orientation begins the next morning. Classes then begin on the 11th.
This time of the year there's only supposed to be around 2-3 hours of sunlight a day, so that should be an interesting adjustment.
I don't start my internship with Santa Claus TV until later in January, so will have plenty of time to adjust to life in the cold and the dark before starting to work.

The thing I'm looking forward to the most is the internship. I will know more about it later, but so far what I have been told is that I will be doing some video editing and tranlating from English to Mandarin.

All done packing now so just need to get some rest and get ready to leave for the airport in the morning.

That's all for now.