Verena Hausmann — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 14:00:29 +0000

The Mall Mylly is supposed to be one of Finland’s largest commercial centers. As it is only 9km away from where we live we thought it would be worth going there. So we took our bikes and started our tour. Arrived there we expected a few nice hours of shopping. But, we are in Finland and “one of Finland’s largest commercial centers” doesn’t mean that it is big! We visited a few shops but did not buy anything and were ready in less than 45 minutes. As the ikea was quite close we than decided to have a chocolate and a cake there. On our way back we again visited the market at the river as we had to try this Finish crepe with marmalade and cream we saw the day before. It was really tasty!

Verena Hausmann — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:03:26 +0000

As people from Germany are telling us since a few weeks how nice the weather is, how often they barbecued already and how nice it is to be outside we were really looking forward to the spring in Finland. Even though that in a few areas you still can find a little bit of snow today was the first spring day in Turku. Not only that we had 14°C (!), but it was a totally different day in all areas. It felt like there was a change in people’s minds and behavior today. It might sound funny, but we now really understand what people were talking about when saying in summer everything is different.

Because of the nice weather we started our day with a little bike tour through Turku. We drove to the open air pavilion and the mill they have here. When coming back to the river we saw that there was a market along it. Walking over the pedestrians’ bridge you could see a lot of nice planted jonquils (Osterglocken) and there were plenty of people on the street. The market was really nice and nearly half of the booths sold fish, pastries or honey. So we had lunch there, sitting outside and enjoying the day. In the afternoon we saw a lot of kids playing football, families collecting “Weidenkätzchen” and people running along the river…

It was so nice to experience this day. Finland seems to be a totally different country again.

Verena Hausmann — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:00:58 +0000

Within the happenings of the European Capital of Culture there is this main place called Logomo here in Turku. It is close to the railway station so we walked there today to visit the two exhibitions “Only a Game?” and “Fire! Fire!”. Only a Game? is an interactive UEFA football exhibition which already has been in Liverpool, Istanbul and Brussels. Besides interesting facts about football they had football shirts of many different counties including information about the country hanging around. Furthermore and most interesting you could play a whole bunch of different football games, including table football and playstation games. They also had an xbox 360 which you use without controllers just with your body to play athletics. That was real fun.
As the name says the exhibition Fire! Fire! was all around Fire. It started with “The Gate of Fire“ where they showed a short video about how people discovered and used the fire up to now. The movie is without speaking and uses stick-figures. It is quite brutal in a way, but really nicely done. After this gate you enter a big hole with the exhibition. There you can learn a lot of things about fire in general and about the historical Great Fire of Turku in 1827. You can learn how to make fire, play funny games trying to catch people who virtually jump out of windows and use a fire pump. All really nice!

Johannes H. Glitsch — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 21:03:45 +0000

Today we went to our first sea side sauna It’s a public sauna in the south western part of Turku at the sea. Went there at about 6 p.m. and went back at about 8 p.m. Nice place You can jump into the cold water after sauna or just sit on a bench on the pontoon. The water is still frozen, but they’ve made a big whole in it to go for a swim

Verena Hausmann — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:13:28 +0000

We just came back from a very nice 4 day trip together with another German girl, Andrea, and one Spanish guy, Saul. We started our trip in Turku at 7 p.m. taking the bus to the airport. We wanted to pick up our car there, but nobody was at the desk. So we called the number which was written on a paper and finally one person came (he expected us to come with the next flight). We guess he was a little bit out of his mind and so he forgot to charge us for the third driver and for being under 25 … good for us. As we had to wait for him he gave us a bigger car (double-upgrade) than we ordered and so we got a Mercedes B 180. So we started our at around 8.30 p.m. Around 12 hours later we arrived in Rovaniemi where we wanted to have breakfast in the most Northern McDonald’s in the world. But we were 45 minutes too early and it was closed. So we continued our way, stopped at the Santa Clause Village for a couple of minutes and arrived in Inari at around 1 o’clock in the afternoon.

Day 1
As we were hungry we went to Siida, the Sami museum to have lunch. After that we drove to our hostel in Kaamanen. There we had the possibility to get cross-country skis for free. The sizes of the shoes did not fit all of us so that we drove to the next “shop” 1.5km away to rent one more skis. In the evening we then had our first cross-country ski experience in Lapland. After that we drove to Inari to get some ice cream and relaxed at home. We went outside for a couple of times to see if we can see the Northern Lights, but as it was snowing so there was no chance to see them that night.

Day 2
We got up early because we wanted to drive to Norway and the arctic see on that day. The border to Norway was not very impressive, but the countryside changed completely. We drove along a very nice valley with little mountains and finally came to a point where we could see the arctic see. It wasn’t frozen and there were more snowy mountains around there. It was really nice to see. We then also saw reindeers in the countryside and fishing areas within the sea. We drove along the coastline for a while and enjoyed it a lot. Back in our hostel we cooked Spaghettis and decided to go out for cross-country skiing again. This itself was not a problem, but we decided to go into another direction than the day before. We were thinking that we were skiing on a lake, but later we found out that it was a river. As it started to get dark we decided to go away from the snowmobile tracks were you can easily ski and cross a few trees to get to the other side of the ‘lake’ and go back there. That was a bad decision. Once away from the track we sunk into the snow up to our hips. It was not possible to go on with the skis and we tried to crawl. It was really hard and took us hours. We finally made our way back to the hostel. This night we again drove the 60 km to Inari and back to get ice cream J. We furthermore had a look at the Inari lake in the night because we were hoping to have a better chance to see the Northern Lights from there. But even though we saw stars in this night we could not see anything else.

Day 3 and 4
It was a really nice and sunny day. We had to pack our stuff in the morning. After that we drove to the Inari lake to do cross-country skiing on it. It is amazingly big and really beautiful. At around 2 o’clock we again had lunch at the Sami museum. We than had to bring back our skis. On this way we saw a lot of reindeers. Some were lying on the river and others were standing on the street and not going away … But we then actually made our way and went into the museum we up to now just had lunch in. It was interesting and explained things about the Sami culture and the different animals and times of the year in that area. At around 6 we started our way back to Turku. On our way just a couple of kilometers before Ivalo we saw a wild spirit park. On a sign it said that it is open every day until 8. But another sign said closed and had a telephone number on it. Luckily we called that number and 10 minutes later a woman came. She kind of did a tour with us and showed us the 32 sled dogs (not many huskies) they had. She knew the name and race of every single dog and explained us a lot. She also showed us a raccoon-dog, a red fox, a polar fox, wild pigs, a ferret, etc. It was really cool! After that we continued our way back home. We always looked out of the car window to hopefully see some lights, but nothing. We arrived in Rovaniemi at 11:20 and now were early enough to have dinner at the McDonald’s before it closed at midnight. We went out further South and then finally saw some blue/green lights. We stopped at a lake to have it dark around us. And really, yes we could see some northern lights. But we have to say that they were not very bright or colorful this night and so it wasn’t really spectacular. After another long drive in the car we finally arrived Turku on Monday at midday.

In total we drove 3204 km which took us 42:37 hours.

Verena Hausmann — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:06:25 +0000

I know we are crazy, but as we haven’t seen wild living reindeers or the northern light the last time we were in Lapland we are getting a car tonight and driving up there ones more. Together with Andrea, a German girl and Saul a Spanish guy this will be lots of fun. So we have around 1250km lying before us for this night! You will get to know more about this trip after we are back on Monday evening.

Verena Hausmann — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:00:06 +0000

Today was a really nice and sunny day. After ice hockey we took the bus to the home of our Finish friendship family. Once there they already have been waiting for us outside. We walked to the side of the houses and found a small but nice hill to sledge on. Not only the kids had fun, but we also!

Afterwards we backed Flammkuchen and ate the Marmorkuchen we had prepared the day before. It was a really nice Sunday afternoon and we enjoyed it a lot.

Verena Hausmann — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:59:52 +0000

As Katie had birthday on the 19th March she decided to celebrate into it with a few people. We backed a cake and went to her place to meet and play cards. At around 11:30 we took the last normal bus going into the city. As the Irish pub was too crowded we decided to go to Monkey and celebrate there.

Verena Hausmann — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:42:58 +0000

Together with 5 other erasmus students we took the bus today to get to the island Hirvensalo just out of Turku (if you wouldn’t know you would rather say there is a big river that divides it from the main land instead of the sea!). Even though they just have a very small hill they have two skiing lifts and three slopes there. So we decided to ski for 2 hours. It was really expensive and for Johannes probably not as funny because he can ski quite good. But Verena tried to ski today again after 8 years not standing on skis and doing snowboarding instead. That was quite interesting. Even though she had troubles going down the slope the first times she did better than somebody who hadn’t stood on skis before. That’s what it looked like:

Verena Hausmann — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:30:30 +0000

As we now have a few days off before our second period starts on Monday Johannes’ mum is coming this afternoon. We will meet her in Helsinki, stay there for one night and then get a car and drive around a little bit until Saturday. Stops will be Porvo, Tampere and Rauma. You can read more about this next week.