Weather effects in Finland and the rest of the world

+15c Spanish wear caps, gloves and winter coats, Finns are sunbathing.

+10c French desperately try to get their central heating on. Finns plant flowers.

+5c Italian cars won't start. Finns drive with convertibles.

0c Pure water freezes. Water in river Vantaa thickens a bit.

-5c First people are found frozen in California. Finnish midsummer festival ends.

-10c Scottish turn the heat on in their houses. Finns start to use long-sleeve shirts.

-20c Swedes stay indoors. Finns are having last barbeque before winter.

-30c Half of the Greek people have frozen to death. Finns start to dry their laundry indoors.

-50c Polarbears evacuate North Pole. Finnish army starts it's winter training.

-70c Siberian people are moving to Moscow. Finns are furious since the Koskenkorva booze can't be stored outdoors anymore.

-273c Absolute Zero. Finns admit that it is quite cold outside.

-300c Hell freezes over. Finland wins the football World Cup.

Summer is here - jeah!!!

I hope you got the Sarcasm here.

It's unbelievable but we have around 30°C for almost a week now and I truly hate it. And if I here another person asking me 'Great weather, isn't it?' I probably going to lose it.

I just hate the heat. You are sweating all day long and when you are going everywhere by bike it is even worse. I wish I has a pool in which I could just lie all day long. But well I am definitely considering building my future summer cottage not in Finland but on Greenland or Iceland. ;)

Ok so much for now. Will try to post some pics and some stories about my parents stay here during the next days.
OH and I'm coming back to Germany on June 30th. I think. ;)

busy busy

sorry that i haven't written about the great survival weekend yet. I started but I have a lot to do at the moment, then I had a friend from Germany over for 3 days and now I pack the rest of my stuff for my 4 day trip to Lapland. Cross your fingers that everything will work out and that none of us 6 will freeze to death during the -17°C during 3 of those 4 days! I'm really a bit worried since I never drove a car in Winter and well it will be an interesting adventure. I survived 2 weeks in Russia without speaking Russian so 4 days in freezing Lapland should be really easy to handle. ;) Well, we'll see.

So hopefully I'm back next week with looooooots of things to tell. :)
If I haven't posted till next Thursday you all should get worried ;)

Moi, moi

Pitkästä aikaa!

You see I actually learn new things in Finnish! Not everyday as I would like to but well...
I'm just sitting in my room, eating freaking expensive but very delicious Norwegian melkesjokolade (Freia is the best in the world!) which Adam was so nice to bring me from his 10 day long trip to Norway for which I still hate him. Ok of course I don't, I'm just really jealous and now my wish to do a hiking trip along the Norwegian fjørds in one of the next summers is stronger than ever. Well maybe next year! :)

Anyway after a quite interesting week with lots of ups and downs I'm looking forward to a weekend of rest. NOT! 'Unfortunately' I signed up for the so called 'Survival weekend' of ESN. And I think for me it will be all about surviving. I was hoping to be back to 'normal' health again by now, but well if you never rest and just run around like a Duracell bunny all the time, the body has no chance to recover. So I still suffer from regular fever attacks but at least the coughing is gone. And now that my flat is silent for the first time in days (you cannot imagine how much noise 3 Greek girls can make and seriously they never shut up!) my headache almost disappeared. So I packed a lot of warm clothes like my skiing clothes, gloves, a had and of course my hiking boots. Better to have too many clothes than freezing. :D So we will go into the Finnish woods for 2 days including 2 nights (probably around -2°C then) camping in heated army tents which we of course have to heat ourselves. Hihi will be very much fun. Very interesting is that weeks ago the 50 places for this survival weekend were full after 15min and now more and more people are dropping out. All girls! Hahahaha cowards! Well more space in the tents and sauna for us then :P

So much for this weekend. Last weekend was sort of interesting as well.
First I was at another Uniklubi concert and seriously I will never ever again go into a club with is usually for people over 24. It was soooooooo disgusting. The men in their 40s and 50s undressing each passing women with their eyes and when they are drunk they get really hmm don't know the English word but one of the girls I was with at the concert just punched a guy for touching her and seriously I would have done the same. Unbelievably gross! And the women were as bad as the men. If I, at any point of time, wear tight leopard leggings, a black short shirt, a belt and a golden handbag while having a weight of around 150kg PLEASE shoot me! Seriously it wasn't pretty. And when than women in their late 50s dance to Coco Jambo and Mambo No5 it's really time to go. Unfortunately that awful club just wanted to make money and so the band started to play at 0:30! Of course nobody of us knew so the few Uniklubi fans in their early 20s had to wait for around 2 hours and witness this surreal scenery. But the concert itself was great!

Then there was of course also a Halloween party the day before the UK concert. Surprisingly good at least from the music which was the first time not awful club music but really trashy 90s party music. And seriously a party cannot be bad if they play BSB's Backstreets back! :P

On Sunday I did my assignment for my 'Religion in Finland' course and went to a local congregation. :) If you want to get to know Finnish people join a church here! :D It was very nice and I was even invited for a family diner yesterday. :)

Uni is during OK. Tomorrow I have my last regular class in my 'Religion in Finland' course which was really interesting. In the first lesson I was wondering why people study comparative religion but now I'm quite surprised how interesting it can be and I think it doesn't really matter if you studied political science, comparative religion or English literature when you are a taxi driver. ;)

Anyway I started a new course last week: 'Swedish-speaking Finns as a minority'. I was hoping it would help me with my thesis but was worried at the same time that i know already everything they will teach us. Of course the whole history part I heard and read already a dozen times but there are actually really interesting aspects I have never considered or heard of. Well since the course if from the Sociology department I hear a lot about studies and interviews and research and projects which makes it more interesting. Because who would have thought that it makes a differences in the perception of a bilingual Finn towards other bilingual and monolingual Finns to what kind of school (regarding to language because there are Finnish and Swedish schools here) you went.

Ok enough about uni. Need to go to bed and get some sleep before my 8:30am class and the first probably sleepless night in the woods. Wish me luck that I return at all and preferably without a pneumonia or a worse disease.

*kramar*

PS its -17°C this weekend in Lapland! I'm going there in 2 weeks!!!!!

Sick :(

Finnish fall/ pre-winter hit me with it's changing temperatures and constant sweating and cooling down when going day and night by bike. So now I'm listening to the following song and hope that the coughing and fever attacks go away pretty soon.



Dedicated to all TBBT fans out there! :)

snow, sitz and, of course, hockey

God Kväll! (swd. Good evening)

Another week is over and time is running really fast.
After looking through the blog, it seams like the first weeks were just about crappy parties and now everything is just about ice hockey :D Crappy ice hockey of course, but still fun not like the crappy parties who were not that much fun.

So yesterday I was - surprise surprise - at another TPS icehockey match. They lost. Again. The 11th game in a row and there was no fighting this time, no blood, so really boring and if around 60% of the audience is for the guest team (and 15% exchange students who have no clue what is going on) then something is wrong :/ but that’s all for icehockey today since nobody really cares and those who care I already told about the match :D

Anyway, winter is coming to Finland. In most parts there is snow already and yesterday I also saw the first 10 snowflakes. :) Can’t wait till it really starts snowing. But since there are almost no clouds every day it will still take a while. The nights are freezing now and during the day time it is usually around +5°C. Good that I have now all my winter clothes here including a hat which is very important when you ride your bike at 7:30 in the morning or at 3am in the night. ;)

Hmm not much is happening at the moment. I have an exam next week. Which is my first real exam since my intermediate exam in 2008. Will be interesting, especially since it is a law exam. We'll see what's going to happen.

Then something about Finnish student culture. On Friday I was putting on my lovely red student overall (swed.: halare) and went to my first sitz-party of the semester and it was really much fun.
So a sitz-party is a party were well you sit together (no way! :P) with a bunch of people, get a dinner and all the time you are singing and drinking. The songs are usually traditional sitz songs, who are very funny, sometimes a little mean against the former rulers of Finland (SWE + RUS) but in general very nice. So the whole sitz last for a few hours, depending how much you sing (and drink) and how fast the food will be served.
The sitz I went to on Friday was the famous 'Megasitz' by the student clubs DaTe (computer science) and Kleio (history) with more than 100 people. That's not so common, since my student club has usually a sitz with not more than 20 people, so it was really something special for me. We sang a lot and thanks to my previous sitz experiences I knew quite a lot of songs, unfortunately just very few by heart but well I have to start learning a few more. The food was good as well, although it took ages till the main course was served but well. More time for everybody around me to drink, a lot!
And well that's as always the only part which I don't like. What is the reason of getting completely drunk during a sitz or any other party? What is fun about not remembering a whole night, or that you don't remember how you got home in the middle of the night? Seriously I don't get it and probably never will. And why do people look at me strangely if I said that I never been drunk in my life. It is not something to achieve or be proud of, people! Not even when you are 17 or so! Well at least that's my opinion. ERASMUS students see it a little differently. But well they are young, one day they will grow up as well. I hope, or drown drunk in the Aura river. :P

Ok enough for today, need to study the Finnish court system, how to get divorced and what punishment you get for murder. Very important things to know here! ;) [Law is sooooo depressing!]

Last but not least the opening song of every sitz 'Helan Går':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyZpCs3i71s

rain, icehockey, travel plans

so it's weekend time after my lecture at 8.30am this morning to which i went after just one hour of sleep (I'm very keen on not missing any class even though my physical condition is very very bad). But since I just have courses on Wednesday and Friday my weekends are kind of ... long. :) Which doesn't make it easier to get some work done, it just makes me lazy. :(
I would love to go out more, ride my bike to Naantali or just around the Turku area but since almost a week we just had rainy days and it is not so much fun to be wet and sick all the time. So usually i have to problems with rain but since this weather will stay like that for another 5 days I'm wondering why Finns get depressed in Winter when you have the beautiful snow everywhere and very often blue sky and actually sun here in the south. One should get depressed in fall when it is gray and wet all the time.



Anyway, winter is coming in big steps. And the most important thing for me this week was that the ice hockey season started yesterday. The winner of the last season of the so called SM-Liiga is TPS, so the team from Turku. They played last night against Hämeenlinna and it was a hard match. One could see that TPS was putting themselves under pressure. As the reigning champion they had to win, which they did in the end but just through penalty shot out. So it was not a very good game but the season is long and I probably have many opportunities so see a few better matches. :D

At the moment everybody is making travel plans and the sign-ups for all the ERASMUS (ESN) trips happened during the past 10 days. Certainly nothing is in my budget or at a time where I'm not able to travel anywhere. So i have to arrange something else for me. I'd love to do a few trips as well but since I've seen almost every part of Finland it is not my Nr 1 priority. Of course Stockholm is on the list, as always, together with saying hello to the Joulupukki (Santa Clause) in Rovaniemi again. i haven't been to Porvoo and Tallin by now, so these cities are a must and well for the rest I have to see, visiting friends in Hki, Tre and Niinikoski is very important as well.
In 2 weeks I'm going to Lahti to see the Finnish summer championships of the skijumpers and nordic combined. That will be the first time that i see Lahti without snow. Will be interesting! Hopefully the competition will be also nice and the results according to my preferences. ;)

So much for now. Have a lunch date and need to discuss the last party night with a few people. But I noticed again that parties are more fun if you are not drunk but almost everybody else is. :) But the problem then is that you worry too much about everybody else. My advice of the evening was 'Stay away from the river!' Since at least 2 people drowned there already this year.

So have a nice weekend or as we say it in Turku: Hauskaa viikonloppua! :)