Lapland: Snow Castle and a Fun Yet Sleep Deprived Morning

Wow, there was literally so much freaking stuff that happened in the Lapland trip that I'll be blogging about it forever. It's interesting how stuff can just be hunky dory for a week or two then all the sudden you can't get the info down on the net quick enough to do justice to what you've been up to.

I'll start with the beginning of the wonderful trip to Lapland. So first of all, Lapland isn't a country, or even part of a country. It's kind of a region that that is spread over 4 different countries. It's the region where the native Sami people live, their traditional land. Now I'm no history buff nor do I know exactly how the Sami people got there, but perhaps wiki can provide extra knowledge. Here is the region which is considered "Lapland."

Lapland includes parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and a tiny tiny bit of Russia

Now for those of you who didn't know where exactly in Finland I'm studying, the University of Eastern Finland is in the following Finnish location:

 

Now UEF is broken into three places which are pretty far apart. I am studying in the Joensuu part of UEF. 

So when we went to Lapland, our central hub destination was Saariselka, a small town in Northern Lapland:

The most northern dot highlighted in green.

As you can see, we had an extremely long bus ride up there, so we made a couple really nice stops on the way. We left Joensuu at 1130pm, and arrived at our first destination around 10am. First sight to see was the biggest ice castle in Finland, annnd I completely forgot what it's called. Either way, it was really close to Oulu( a place called Kemi) , as you can see on the map.

As one might guess from the length of the trip, everyone was kind of out of it when we got there after traveling all night. Let me add a video to give you a good idea of how this bus ride went. This is us at a bus stop a few hours before arriving at our first destination, and in fact, I kinda stay this loopy throughout the day as you will see:

Not terribly long after these videos were taken we arrived finally to the ice castle to take a nice look around on 1-2 hours of sleep. 

Here are some pictures from fairytale land(makeshift name since I forgot the actual one):

Strange, I've been in a salt mine church made of well...salt. And now I've been in an ice church made of ice. Next it'll something crazy like wood, or fire.

Ice hotel rooms are a nice touch. The beds were actually quite comfortable.

 

Spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a spider pig does. We actually watched that movie on the bus, it was a damn hoot! A hoot!

Me and some of the gang

Then I came across a nice igloo.

Then I got done in the actual ice castle and decided to go for a nice slide outside the ice castle where you could go to the top of the slide and have a nice view or just slide on down. Look at how I'm sitting, this is sleep deprivation at it's finest, folks. 

So that was the ice castle......or was it. As I was making my way out of the ice castle I came across this fun little contraption.....unfortunately.  It was a sled connected at the side to a board that connected to this pivoting post in the middle. So basically it was a ride. You got in the sled and had someone push the board and your sled traced out a circle in the snow. It was set up like one of those G force simulators they use on astronauts. Like G force sled! I was like whoa awesome, I saw people getting pushed in it. I decided to take a video and ride in it at the same time....you know, for the blog to give you guys some good perspective.....but wait....I didn't have anyone to push me :(

Ah ha! Here is a big group of dudes from different countries that have come up near the sled. Maybe I'll ask them! "Hey guys would mind pushing this sled for me while I take a video?" Mistake number 1.  The dudes get this hell yeah look in their faces and we go up there. Here's the video from that:

Yeah so it was a lot harder to hold on than I thought it would be, let's just put it that way. I didn't really notice that most people riding in the sled were holding on for dear life even when they had only one person pushing. I was filming and couldn't hold on, like a damn genius. A real genius.

And of course such an event needed some commentary after the fact. Whew, that was ridiculous. After this I just ran to the bus like a little dog with it's tail between it's legs. No more interest in the little pieces of fun like that damn thing. Alright guys, more coming later. This was just the beginning of the Lapland trip, which started out with a bang! Or actually it started out with a thud. dang it. Peace!