Finland

Welcome to Finland.

With minus 15 degrees, and white snow everywhere I am trying to walk fast enough so I will make it to school, in time for the guided tour. After 10 minutes of walking I cannot feel my nose anymore, the cold is biding my skin, and I cannot take very big steps, because the surface of the ground is ice.

Welcome to Vaasa, a small city in the vest of Finland. Vaasa is located by the water, and the people here speak both Finnish and Swedish, but they either see themselves as Finish or Swedish.   

There are 5 universities in Vaasa, and one of them is Åbo Akadami, the university for pedagogic and education.  The school is an old factory, and they have saved a part of the factory and some of it now functions as a computer room, and student room. – really cool.

I make it to the school after 25 min of walking, and I am excited to see the other exchange students for the first time.  We are all girls, but from many different places in the world, girls from Spain, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Slovakia, Italy, and that is just us from Åbo, there are many other exchange students at the other universities.  The bus takes us around Vaasa, the old and the new part of the city. The guide is talking and talking, but I don’t think too many of us are paying attention, because the views we are passing are incredibly beautiful. Everything is covered in snow, and the white goes as long as you can see. We pass a couple of bridges and out on the water, there are men sitting by themselves fishing.  In the woods we are passing, can we see people doing cross country skiing. Vaasa is city for students and nature lovers.

Finish Dinner.

We are invited to our first Finish Dinner, and we are on time, because if there is something we have learnt already, it is that the finish people are never late, if they say we meet at 7 a clock, then we meet at 7 a clock, and not any minute later. Traditionally Finish food is pea soup, meatballs, and potatoes, for dessert something that looks very much like a really thick pancake, and you put marmalade and sweet crème on top. The Finnish people tell stories about how the sauna became such an important tradition.

The sauna used to be the first thing the Finns would build when they had to build a new house. They would sleep in the sauna before the rest of the house was finished. The women use to give birth in the sauna, because it was the cleanest place in the house, and of course the warmest. Today there is almost a sauna in every house and in every apartment building.

My first experience with a real old wooden sauna was in the coldest of Finland, in Lapland, the very north of Finland. We went in to the sauna, and after just 2 minutes we were sweating, the wooden sauna is a different kind of sauna, it is more humid and you sweat more in the sauna. You put on more water to create more heat, and more steam in the room. Then we went outside, to a small lake, there were frozen, but there was a small hole in the water, where we could jump in, and really quickly out again, and then running back through the snow to the sauna. Our skin felt prickly and a little bit on fire when we came back in the sauna. Defiantly something everybody should try if the get the chance.