better late then never

Here a little flashback on my trip to Finland in March. I know it is already the end of May but i was busy and well better late than never :D

So from March 1st until March 8th I was in Finland, in Lahti, Turku and Helsinki to be precise. And I am so glad that I have so amazing friends there. I never had to pay for any accommodation just for trains and buses which were super expensive as always. But well it's Finland after all.

In Lahti, usual, I went to the Lahti Ski Games. Same procedure as every year you might say, just that this time I didn't have so many friends around. But well with 2 Katrins in the city I still had a fun time including a night out with dancing and watching ex-skijumpers, coaches and Nordic combined athletes getting drunk and hitting on ugly old women. Well if they need it! :D
Oh jeap and then there was 'some' wind again. looks like every 3 years or so Lahti weather just sucks. So half of my comps were canceled and this year i didn't had a press accreditation so no place to sit and warm up. Really need to work there next year to make it fun again. :)
But to spice things up I almost killed myself. Totally by accident of course! Stupid Steffi doesn't listen when people tell her: Don't walk over the frozen lake. Steffi just sees ice fishers on there and thinks: If they can do it, I can do it! I ended up ankle deep in water and knee deep in snow, made it to the shore, totally exhausted and scared as h*ll. After almost crashing my car a couple of years ago, I think this was the second near death experience in my life. I hope the last one. At least i won't go on a frozen lake ever again!

Oh and in Lahti I finally had the chance to watch an ice hockey match again (Ok not true I watched a regional league match in February in Leipzig but well that doesn't really count). It was a pretty cool game. The Pelicans from Lahti won, who later came in 2nd in the Finnish championship. Nothing compared to a match Turku but  we have the second biggest arena in the country so of course the ice hockey stadium in Lahti looked kind of cute to me. :D

And this year I got another cool souvenir from Lahti. During the last 2 years I started (thanks to my friend Katrin) collecting bibs (start numbers) from different Nordic Combined athletes. and this year I got one from my favorite ski jumper. Too bad that he fel in exactly the bib from the team competition that i got but he was Ok in the end and kind enough to sign the bib. Now i will have to frame it together with my Mikko bib from last year and then i will have some cool wall decoration in my new room.

All in all I was from Thursday till Sunday morning in Lahti. And if i say morning i mean my bus to Turku left at 4am! So after dancing half of teh night I spend the rest sleeping in the bus, or well trying.

I arrived around 7am in Turku, went straight to McDonalds, the only one in Turku and the only place open that early on a Sunday. I had 2 cocoas (I LOVE OBOY!) and killed 2 hours before surprising my friends. Oh my goodness. Who would have thought people could be so happy to see me. Surprise visits are just the best. I was for 2 more days in Turku and went on Tuesday morning to Helsinki to visit other friends. :D Seriously it is so awesome to see people again who you are so close to but haven't seen in 6 or 9 months! 
I then did some sightseeing with my friend Laura and just relaxed the last days in Helsinki.


I had to fly back early in Thursday morning. early means i had to be at the bus stop around 5AM. And of course the troubles started already there. i didn't have enough money for the bus and was almost kicked out of it again. But a nice man gave me the 15c that were missing. Can you believe it that somebody makes such a fuss about 15c. Ok in Germany nobody would have borrowed me that money and i would have been kicked out of the bus for sure but in Finland it was a surprise for me. The whole bus was full and nobody besides the driver would have checked if i paid or not and in Turku the bus driver would have taken me in for free but well Helsinki people are always different. So and then the bus driver almost drove the wrong way and we were so very late that i nearly missed my flight. So much stress so early in the morning. But also no surprise here, always when I travel everything just goes wrong. But I arrived eventually in Berlin were I spend the rest of the day.

Unfortunately the weather was really bad so i didn't really do anything besides waiting to meet another friend for diner. Around 9pm I finally caught my train back to Leipzig. Totally exhausted and somehow i caught some stomach flew on the way which made my next working day a very short one.

So much for my trip to Finland and Berlin. Don't know when I'll be back home in Suomi but everybody, especially the people in Turku told me to move back. Well if it was that easy. But I think if I ever go back for longer I might not leave again. third try is the charm, isn't it?

Next trip: Copenhagen in July. I hope! :D



 

Germany Visit (part 1): Berlin

So my first stop in Germany was Berlin, where i spent 3 wonderful days with friends.










Enjoy the pictures.



Thanks for Janine, Dana, Jennifer and Torsten for the nice company.

Helsinki, elections and the end of winter

After the 5 days in Lahti I went for 2 days with Nina to Helsinki. I've been so many times to Hki that I stopped counting and so I think I'm the perfect guide. I've done that also many time in every season by now. :D So since Nina is going to study in Hki next spring I've just went with her to the usual spots in the city enter including the Cathedral and the Kauppahalli. Since Nina was sick and I've seen everything so often we didn't really do much outside the city center. Although the weather was so beautiful but it was still very cold and when you are sick you cannot enjoy anything anyway. So just a small sightseeing tour this time.

March was also the month of the parliament elections. And how crazy it was. For the whole month all parties had their little campaign booth so the pedestrian area looked like it was Christmas market all over again. You got flags, candy, coffee and other things for free, if you wanted too.
And seriously I didn't noticed how annoying election ads can be if you are not allowed to vote. Half of my facebook page was full with ads from different candidates. Yeap new medias are great but you can also overdo it. Funny in Finland are the election posters. In Germany they are scattered all over the city on lampposts and you have very huge billboards sometimes but here in Finland you have all election posters from all parties together and usually there are not many slogans on there but instead all candidates from each party. And seriously people are standing in front of these billboards and actually checking them out. Well I guess most of the people heard about the populist party called Perussuomalaiset (PerusS) in English often called True Finns. And well yes they got a lot of votes. Too many for my taste and I can just repeat what a good friend of mine wrote on fb after the election: 'I'm so disappointed by the Finnish people.' So by now it is still not 100% sure what the government will look like just that my second favorite Finnish politician (first one is of course Muumin mama Tarja Halonen) Jyrki Katainen (to be clear: I just like him not his party!) will be the new Prime minister (Pääministeri). But seriously it doesn't look very good. Especially since the top 3 parties of the election are so very different from each other. Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) the Party of Jyrki as a liberal-conservative party, then the Social democrats (SDP) and the right wing PersusS. Very weird combination. And it looks like they may not include the Swedish People's party in the government which I very much dislike. I should maybe add that it is very common in Finland to have multi-party coalitions. The last governments had between 3 (2003) and 4 (2007) or even 5 parties as in 1995 and 1999. So Finns are not at all afraid about different opinions and parties in the government. But well we'll see what the new government brings. Everybody is already worried about the EU politics, especially concerning the Portugal financial aid, but also about immigration and the position of the Swedish language.

Last but not least winter is over. It took a while till the snow started to melt but it eventually did when the temperature rose at the end of march. Problem was for a week the whole city was one big ice skating ring. During the day all the now was melting and doing the night everything was freezing over again. So in the morning the whole pathways where covered with ice. It was horrible. So in the morning you could barely walk without falling every two meters, then in then afternoon it was even worse because at the same time your feet where wet because half of the ice had meted and the resulting hydroplaning is seriously not much fun. But after a week that whole mess was over so no slippery pathways anymore just water, lots of water. Hurray for my rubber boots. :D
At the beginning of April then the miracle happened: The river was ice free! :D Seriously nobody could believe how fast it was going in the end but now spring is almost here.