Yo yo people. I thought I would post a few blogs I wrote about 8 months ago but never remembered to publish. This is from my last farming in Italy experience(I'm about to go on another as well). The third one I didn't finish so yeah the end really is the end. Anyways I wanted to post them just for your reading pleasure. TOODLES

Farming Under the Sicilian Sun: Mosquito HORROR

I’m not gonna lie guys, WWOOFing might not be for everyone. At least in my experience, it could be quite trying. You know this isn’t necessarily from all the work you might end up doing, it’s more from the unforeseen things. I found myself in a situation in Sicily where somehow 2 weeks there made me more homesick or just familiar surrounding sick than I was maybe even all of the 5 months I was in Finland. At least for me, it was a situation I was not used to. That being said, holy crap was it really cool and worthwhile. There was at least a lot to learn, and I don’t know if I learned it all but I definitely caught something along the way. Here’s a nice description of my time farmin aaway.

There were some trials that went on, but there was one menace that blotted out the others in the same way the Persian arrows blotted out the sun in the 300 movie: Mosquitos. This by far probably the worst most horrible thing about my WWOOFing experience. Other comparably laughable problems were introduced by the incredible heat of the sun along with the lack of air conditioning, the inability to find internet, and the distance from town without public transport. That being said, some of the good things about WWOOFing were, the sun, the relief from the internet, and distance away from everything. Mosquitos were just unconditionally horrible though so no positive part about those bastards.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it, I’ve never seen so many mosquitos in my WHOLE LIFE. I think if you added up all the mosquito bites I’ve ever gotten for all time, I got that many in the span of time I was in Sicily. The things were a force to be reckoned with that could not be underestimated. You see apparently we got there at a funny time(no, not haha funny AT ALL though), this funny time meant that there wasn’t so much wind and there was also a lot of mosquitos. About 5 or 6 of the last days we were there the situation apparently turned to normal. The wind was often quite strong. The houses don’t have air conditioning so the farm house was generally with open windows and open doors all the time. The wind blowing around caused the doors throughout the house periodically every fifteen minutes or so to slam shut really loudly and scare the dang hell out of you.

Well usually the idea is that this wind keep the mosquitos at a minimum, but this time it straight up just didn’t for about half of our stay. Of course sure they had mosquitos, but the wind really helped….and really also when the sun comes they tend to scatter as well. It was quite interesting how after it warmed up a bit and the sun started to hit your body you were pretty much almost safe from mosquitos. Okay here we go…..give me a minute……okay….okay I think I’m ready now to talk about the horrors. Generally we thought it was a good idea in the morning to go out wearing things like for instance athletic shorts and a T shirt. It made perfect sense, the temperature was in the 90s everyday(in September!!!) and we had just come from Finland so yeah of course we were going to try to stay cool. I even sometimes thought it was okay to take my shirt off for work – this habit died very very quickly. This was an exceptionally bad idea when we would take a job watering the orange orchard. This job often entailed lots of water and tall grass….very bad. Also there were chickens you needed to feed, which I’ll get into later, and going in that pin at night was pure suicide.

So you would go out there bright eyed an bushy tailed only to be consumed by parasites. That’s right people, here is the monster in the horror you’ve been waiting to see after it’s been talked about so much. You could totally make a horrible horror movie out of this! So you go down to the orange orchard and everything seems fine. You figure you might be getting bit by one or two mosquitos but no big deal. Usually you don’t even see the mosquito, it just bites you then later you notice whoa I have a mosquito bite. Not these bastards, there’s too many of them. As you got to the bottom, descended upon you, and I don’t exaggerate, clouds of mosquitos. That’s right, so many mosquitos that they basically formed a smokey colored cloud approaching you.  As you looked around you could see literally hundreds of mosquitos swarming around you. Repellant only did so much, for every 50 mosquitos there was at least one willing to take the risk. That meant at any given time there could be 30 mosquitos trying to bite you at once. At one point I stopped counting how many bites I had, they’re just now all going away! It’s been two weeks!!! Eventually we gained wisdom and went out there with lose clothing. That’s right lose, if you wore leggings or something(I do that all the time of course) then they still bit you! Even when I had lose clothing, they still tried. I remember just watching one on my shoulder just walking around trying to find a spot. He would dip his little needle in as far as it would go till his face was right against my shirt then pull it out and try again. Little determined crazies!!!

I thought that was bad, and apparently Africa has a mosquito problem…..omg, I seriously can’t imagine. Alright, this is slightly lengthy, so I’ll break it up into two.

Farming under the Sicilian sun: the day job

Ciao freaks and geeks! Let’s get down to business on what life was actually like on the farm other than mosquito terror that will haunt me in my dreams well into my 30s and 40s. This is how the day went: wake up at about 6:30 for a nice shower before a meeting at 7. My the room I slept in was part of a long slab of about five rooms away from the main house with a bathroom in the middle of all of them. There was definitely a lizard roommate in my room. You woke up and went to the shower which was powered by solar thermal panels on the roof of the house. That’s one thing you notice in sicily and in general as you go further south, solar panels are quite common. There were many many at the farm I was staying at, they provided hot water for the whole farm. If you look at the power of the sun over the earth, North African countries like Lybia are some of the best places for solar power. Since Sicily is right around the corner, BOOM solar panels.

After your breakfast group breakfast meeting with the farm owner, you would split into separate jobs. Most of the jobs were something like pulling weeds or using different methods to water the orange trees so they’ll be ready for the winter harvest. From where we pulled weeds was a good view of the hilly surroundings, which was very cool. Not to mention that there was a great view of the enormous active volcano which we were about 40km from called Mt. Etna, but that’s for a different blog. There were other little jobs around the house we all took some responsibility for. This included feeding the dogs/cats/donkeys/chickens, watering the plants, turning on/off the irrigation systems, and putting the chickens in their house at night. This entailed the second largest horror of the farm: anything to do with the chickenz.

Of course as usual the mosquitos found the chicken house a perfect breeding ground and loved to ambush you at night when you went to put the chickens in, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the evil birds of death which were fired straight from the depths of the underworld out the peaks of Mt. Etna itself and then delivered to our farm – I’m talking about the damn hateful ass Geese! Now a goose seems like it should be a peaceful animal or at least somewhat funny, but these geese were not swans. These Geese were blood thirsty murderers!!! There were two normal ones and one weird looking Chinese one, and they were scary! They were used to scare off foxes who might try and come to take the chickens, and they were effective at this as well as terrifying people! As soon as you would start to approach the chicken pin, they would know you were coming and begin their intimidating sounds….Honhonhonkhonkhonk!....SCREEEEECH!

It was always the honk honk from the normal ones then a few seconds later came screech from the weird Chinese one. The Chinese one was bigger than the other two and definitely the alpha. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the future with china the US and the EU. All methods of predicting the future using Geese aside(if the Germans can use an octopus, why can’t I use geese???.....you might say I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I think that saying I’m comparing geese and octopi is a stronger statement in the first place), they would get really close to you and flap their wings and chase you and act like they were gonna peck you…..but then never did it. They were geese with a lot of bark and no bite, which is scary in the anyways because I didn’t know geese could do either of those.

The heat on the farm along with the culture of Southern Italy meant we only worked until about 11 or 12 before stopping for a while. This was partly because of the heat, after 12 and until about 4 it go so incredibly hot that doing farm work was just slightly impossible. Also in Southern Italia they have siestas, and it was interesting how much everyone followed the siesta law. Of course followed it on the farm, and it was pretty nice. Thing was that sleeping could be, for me at least, quite difficult in the heat. I would always always always wake up sweating my butt off. I felt like I needed to drink a lot of water after sleeping because it dehydrated me. So even though I would wake up having gotten some sleep, I would feel a different kind of discomfort that was dehydration instead of sleepiness.

The siesta was such a powerful thing at least in the town we were at and in the big city next to us. If you tried to go to do something in town between 1 and 4 you couldn’t because NOTHING WAS OPEN AT ALL. The place seemed just like a Ghost town when this happened, no one on the streets, no shops open, no buses running or even cars. NOTHING. Because of this it seemed like the schedule in this part of the world was quite strongly shifted.  On the farm we ate lunch maybe around 3pm and dinner at something like 9pm. If you went out on the streets at 9, 10, 11pm they were completely crowded with people out doing things and having conversations. I guess it’s just so hot people try to stay out of the sun and out of the anything during the day then at night the temperature becomes acceptable to actually exist.

So this is my nutshell experience as a farmer. Oh yeah I forgot to mention one thing, the farm was a VEGETARIAN farm. Now that’s a surprise. Yup, that’s right people, I was basically a vegetarian for two weeks. I’m so proud of myself, now that’s perseverance! Alright till next time!

 Mt. Etna: What now Frodo?!?!?!?!!

When Maija and I were looking for farms, we didn’t have incredibly strict criteria. We wanted a place that wouldn’t work us like dogs, seemed like they had at least some of their ducks in a row(too bad we didn’t make criteria for geese..), and were near one of the places Ryanair flew to from Tampere where we were staying. It was a very interesting twist when we realized the farm we ended up choosing was positioned near an enormous 3.5 kilometer(2 mile) tall active volcano that on a clear day can be seen from over half of the huge island of Sicily. This volcano, named Mount Etna, is the largest volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world. Sicily is home to some mountains that can be quite huge and many many many almost bald or completely bald hills. Visibility can also be quite good, so the area around Mount Etna was always very interesting. The towns and cities basically revolve around Etna, and so when you drive to the next town, you can see that you’re just driving part of a hug huge huge circle around Etna. The landscape of small hills makes it so as your driving or even walking you can just see easily the neighboring towns, even if they’re 20km away and specially at night.

If driving a circle around this volcano to get to the next town didn’t make you notice that’s there for some reason, there’s still absolutely no missing or ignoring the thing! It’s no wonder that the ancient Greeks associated it with gods and so on. Apparently in Greek Mythology, Athena got super pissed at a titan and threw it in the ocean then threw Sicily on top of it. As the legend goes the titan still gets a bit agitated to have an island on top of it, which I imagine can be a bit annoying, and causes earthquakes which lead to eruptions etc.

Etna is huge huge huge and dominates the view of the landscape completely if you happen to be within half of Sicily of it. The hills around it are not very big at all then all the sudden there’s a huge volcano. The volcano actually at least at the base has a gradual slope so driving a circle around it heck might even take an hour I imagine. Very big!

It soon became obvious that we should take advantage of this very unique piece of landscape we just happened upon, and boy was that notion worth it! On our day off we decided to ascend this beast! We took the bus to the guide centers which were at about 1900 meters. Already you could see that you were way way up! The clouds were much closer, air much cooler, and there was forest. Now I found the forest interesting. It’s about 95 degrees at the bottom of the volcano with almost nothing except very small trees and bushes that sparsely covered some parts of the landscape. Mount etna was barren at the bottom like the rest, forest in the middle, then barren again above 2000 meters with lava stone covering the ground. I think this showed that the forest developed as a function of the changing climate due to the altitude. In short, perhaps the temperature dropped low enough for there to be forest on that particular mountain. Something like that, don’t wanna think too much.

Anyways, the point is there was a very strong difference between the temperature at the bottom and at the top. At the bottom it was something like 85-95 and at the top it was between 50-60 Fahrenheit – very interesting. So we decided to do the tour which took us up by cable car and off road bus 1 hour then a 4 hour walk down by foot. After the cable car we were even with the clouds. One interesting thing about the area from what I noticed is that generally there aren’t many clouds at all – except the ones that gather around Mount Etna. Sure there are some here and there, and on this day we could see some in the distance. But really any large amount of clouds gather around Etna. My entry level degree would tell me this is for two reasons. One is that Etna, as this happens with other high mountains as well, is so tall that the clouds that are there are generally floating around at an altitude lower than the peak crater of Etna. Etna is so big that the clouds have trouble going around so they just gather in masses around Etnas peak, unable to scoot by. This phenomenon causes mountainous places to become quite polluted sometimes because the pollution rises into the air but can’t spread out cause it’s stuck on some mountain. The second reason why this might happen is that Etna smokes constantly and probably emits small particulate matter which is what tends to cause the formation of clouds. Water droplets condense onto little pieces of stuff that float around in the air due high moisture levels in the air. This is more likely to happen if there is more particulate matter in the air, ie stuff from the smoke. So there it is folks, could be wrong but you should probably think it’s true.

Anyways so at the end of the cable car we were at the same level of the clouds, then we went up more. Ears were popping and popping and popping. These freaking buses were hardcore, huge wheels they were like heavy artillery or something. We got to the top, it was something else to be up there. It had taken a long time just to get up there with bus+cable car+badass bus! We were finally up there, the view was absolutely magnificent. In front of us and up was an enormous smoking crater, to our left were the towns and hills we just left to come up there, to our right were clouds in the distance we were above, and behind us was a huge huge cloud that was slowly creeping up to the peak of the volcano. One of the craters in the distance had snow on it! Crazy, it was like 90 degrees at the bottom! We were unable to go up to the main huge crater with snow on it because it was too active and there were all kinds of bad things we didn’t need to be near. We did however go up near the crater where the last eruption was, and where they thought the next one would be. The last eruption, which was 2 weeks before we got there, blew the side off one of the craters and the lava flowed down the side of the mountain. You see, this isn’t like a volcano like one thinks. Usually one thinks of a volcano as one steep steep mountain with one huge huge hole at the top. Well I would say it’s safe to use the analogy of a heart on this one. The symbol of a heart <3 doesn’t actually at all look like a heart. Hmm, I think that’s the situation here. This volcano had something like 10 craters all over in different spots on  the mountain. Right now there are about three that show activity either in the form of continuous bubbling or periodic eruptions, but the eruptions of yesteryears were in different places on the mountains. There are at least four other ones that are recent and something like 2 that are from eruptions hundreds of years ago. Generally it seems like it’s been from a different crater for every activity episode lasting maybe weeks or years or days etc.

We came at an interesting time really, because the volcano was so active. When we stepped out of the bus the guide immediately started telling us interesting things about the volcano, for instance about the volcanic rock we were standing on. The whole top of Mount Etna is seriously like a volcanic rock desert with many hills and mountains even on the volcano itself. The top is huge, don’t think of the peak here as something you stand on the tip top and it’s straight down on both sides. You could probably place a moderately sized town or a very small city on the area at the top covered by volcanic rock and sand. Apparently this landscape resembles the moon – either way it’s enormous. So the guide starts telling us interesting things like for instance that there was a meter thick layer of lava rock under our feet, but underneath that was snow…and furthermore that snow covers the top of the mountain the whole year, it’s just covered particularly in the summer by this lava rock. We then started to ascend by foot up to the crater of the most recent eruption. It was longer than it looks, the landscape lends itself to messing up your ability to judge distances. Haha within the first 10 minutes a couple people started to already have to stop and catch their breath. At this point I thought it was gonna be a long walk but luckily that was the most of the up hill climbing we did.

Although we couldn’t see it, the lava was quite close under us as we got closer to the crater, and you could start to really feel your feet get hot. It was really strange, your feet began to be too hot and quite uncomfortable while the upper half of your body was a bit cold as it was used to 95 degrees instead of 55 degrees with on top of that. If you held your hand over some cracks in the ground you could feel really hot air coming out. It was  also really interesting to see the cloud up close that had at this point gathered around one side of the peak of Mount Etna. The motion of the clouds up close is really cool, I wish I could describe it. If you see little pieces of cloud up close, they move around a lot. When the cloud would start to blow up against the mountain, it would begin to swirl around – really neat.

So we inspected up close the crater of the last eruption, which was on august 29. This was strange to know it was so recent. The guide casually then mentioned that they expected an eruption that day or the day after……!!! We were like uh haha yeah right. Then he told us if we started to feel the ground shake a bit to stay with him and not to just start running. Still we were like hmmm yeah noooo way. Then at one point we were waiting for the other group to go far enough ahead of us and we were all just chatting away…then he told us all to be quiet for 30 seconds and he seemed quite serious. He said he thought he heard something and he needed to listen for a sound that you hear before there is an eruption. After 30 seconds he said okay let’s go….haha still we were like suuuure sure. Hah well I’ll tell you in a bit why he was not joking at all!

So we moved away from the main crater to an overlook to have lunch. As we passed the main three craters at the top so close to them it was really strange to realize where I was….just like where am I and what am I seeing right now…..did I ever guess I would be here? So we go sit down and eat a pizza or two and look at the absolutely amazing view of the clouds and the hilly landscape below. We were about the height that you jump out of an airplane when you skydive. We continued after this down the hill a bit and to two of the old craters from 2001 and 2002 eruptions. They were quite interesting, as one of them was still steaming a lot. The steam was of course from water in the mountain, but it was from water which was being vaporized by lava that was running really close to the water. On the right also was this huge huge clearing of just volcanic rock, it really looked like a dark gray desert!

So we walked on the edge of this crater which was circular.  It seemed like the only way down was the path we came up, because both sides of the crater were just almost straight down. Confused I asked which way were would go next. “That way” the guide says and points down. I’m like WTF there’s no way. Then the guide continues to show us a way of “running” down the hill. If you lean back and are afraid to fall, you fall. If you accept the gravity, lean forward, and run then you do pretty well because you shoes sink so deeply down into the volcano stone with every step. Confused and afraid we did it, it was a pretty long way down! And it worked! I took a video while doing it, and on the video it looks like we’re not moving at all almost but we were really going fast! It was absurd. 

Italia: Passivity Used Aggressively

It was time to go to Italia for real. In fact, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve taken six semesters of Italian, had some Italian friends, made a 30 min movie in Italian, and eaten tons of spaghetti – the recipe for a trip to this wondrous country (not spaghetti, sorry). Now we will take a few steps away from Finland, which of course we’ll come back to in the future, and focus on a country that I would call very very different from Finland if I didn’t know about the East side of this Earth, word up.

So Maija and I decided to head on out from Finland to Italy to try this program called World Wide Opportunities for Orangic Farming, or made into a verb WWOOFing. We decided to go WWOOFing. That is opposed to BARKing…okay horrible joke. Anyways WWOOFing allows you to go to many many different countries, travel and remain in them for incredibly little money(at least compared to a vaction). The program works like Craig’s list (w/out the prostitution), you join the program for a small fee(25e) and some paper work, then you get access to a list of farmers who need help, you choose a farm that can speak a language you speak(sometimes they speak as many as four), then after some emailing with that farm you go there. The cool thing is that in exchange for your work on their farm, they give you a place to stay along and all your meals. This allows you for starters to meet other WWOOFers from many different countries, experience different countries for cheap, and sharpen you language skills – a really cool idea. Many farms also accept couples and children as well. This is not to mention that you get some hair on your chest, it’s free of charge.

Enough exposition, let’s begin a nice impression of Italia. I first experienced Italians while I was still back in Finland at the airport. If I’ve learned anything about Italians, or at least Sicilians, it’s that their manner of speaking is very comparatively intense than ours or any of the countries I’ve visited so far. They seem very much like I imagined Grecians to be, at least my impression of Grecians I got on exchange. Grecians were intense when they spoke but maybe even less intense than these Italians are, we’ll see when I go to Greece.

One of the first ways I could tell I was flying to Italy /Sicily and not somewhere  like for instance Germany or Finland(both of which I’ve ridden with on an air plane) was on the air plane itself. It was the time when we were in the air and the captain turned off the fasten safety belt sign because we were in clear skies. I think most people who have ridden on an airplane know what I’m talking about. Generally they tell you when the captain turns off the fasten safety belt sign that means you can go to the bathroom or get up and go to another part of the plane if that’s necessary, but in the meantime keep your safety belt buckled because turbulence can occur unexpectantly. Apparently those instructions mean different things to people from different cultures. For Finnish people those instructions seem to mean sit down with your safety belt buckled, don’t move or talk, and use the bathroom if it’s an emergency. Now for a plane full of Sicilians that means get up and wonder around the cabin aimlessly, stopping to chat with anyone who will speak to you.

The whole plane is loud and chattery the whole time, when the safety belt sign goes off you can hear a synchronous unclicking of everyone’s seatbelt on the airplane – you can hardly hear announcement over the loud speaker over the chit chat! So then we arrived in Trapani, Sicily, which is the place where our adventures started. Our plan was to take ryan air to Trapani, then traverse the entire island to get to where we’re supposed to be WWOOFing at….haha WWOOFing at, sounds so strange. Anyways, let’s just get one thing straight right now: I don’t know about the rest of Italia but at least in Sicily THEY DO NOT SPEAK A DAMN LICK OF ENGLISH. Now I’ve taken six semester of Italian, or at least that was two years ago…so I figured I would be maybe okay, well I started to realized when I arrived in Sicily that coming here was a dive straight into the lion’s den. We ended up deciding to WWOOF somewhere where there are almost absolutely no international tourists, so people sometimes at least have not the patience for foreigners, nor the ability to at all communicate with them in English.  These people apparently speak in some places (I can’t discern yet where) a hybrid of a Sicilian language and Italian.  Of course everyone here knows standard Italian in some way(I think), but the dialect is actually partly an entirely different language in the countryside. It doesn’t matter to me, they speak so fast I can hardly catch at all what they’re saying anyways. I’m just now really getting actually used to how it sounds and am getting some sort of idea of what conversations are about.

You know I used to kind of lump Europe into kind of one big entity, kind of in the same way I’ve heard a lot of Europeans talk about how they lump the US into one entity, regardless of state or region. Now that I’ve been around even a little bit, I can go ahead and say that I was pretty much just incorrect about my lumping. At least when you go from one of the most northern points in Europe, aka Finland, to one of the most southern points in Europe, aka Sicily Italy, it feels like an entire different world. Now I know from what I’ve been told and taught that the eastern countries are quite different from west, but as of now having not been to the east at all, this difference was like night and day. Now I went about a month ago to Berlin, and I didn’t really feel such a difference…the same with Cambridge. Berlin, Cambridge, and cities I’ve been to in Finland all seemed well not so much the same….but not so different. Coming to Sicily was a completely different story.

The traffic in Sicily is a NIGHTMARE. To rent a car here is through the roof because it’s bound to get hit at one point. People very very often just use the oncoming traffic lane to drive in if the other one is too full, then scramble to barely fit back into that full lane when they see someone coming from the other direction. If you remember the first pirates of the carribean movie when they say the pirate codes are more like “guidelines,” then that is the exact meaning of the lines drawn on the road here. People squeal around curves, and use the whole road if no one is around or they don’t think anyone is around. I’ve seen many go across the line on a blind curve, just gambling as to whether someone would be coming the other way. Horns are a standard here in the same way they are in New York City, except it’s like this across the entire Island. A lot of the public buses literally have clown horns instead of normal horns on their buses(?) for no other reason I can think of other than the bus drivers probably used them so much that public/city planners wanted the them to feel embarrassed to use it all the time.

There is trash everywhere, at least in the small city I’m close to and the big city it’s close to as well. As you walk the streets you see everything you might think of from broken glass to used condoms, even near the city center! We’ve come across some of the nicest people ever to some of the most dickish people ever just on the streets, public transport, and around as we’re trying to find our way. I would always go around trying to use my broken Italian, and well, maybe my Italian isn’t –so- broken as much as my ability to listen and understand having never been to Italy before. Usually I ask a question about where to go and they reply some garble of something that I have no ability of understanding. Short conversations I can totally understand, but any explanations or directions are completely up in the air unless the person speaks sloooowwwwwly.

If there’s anything that is for sure, Italians or at least Sicilians have straight up, personalities. A lot of the older folk just love love love to see that foreigners have come to visit their little city and will talk to you with a smiling loving face, and have an hour long conversation with you even if there is only about 15min of understanding in total. I’ve had some Italians speak, and very effectively might I add, with their hands and words to tell me the answer to what I ask and seem to absolutely enjoy every minute of it. On the other hand some that we’ve come across have had little to no patience with us. If we can’t quite understand something, or there is some sort of mix up because we’re idiots who can’t communicate, we’ve gotten really mean or sarcastic faces travelling around here. I tried to go up and talk to one girl about my age to see if she could help us. I spoke to her in Italian and asked if she spoke English. She said no she doesn’t and I said okay that’s fine in Italian and started to ask her in Italian. She literally just says “I don’t speak English” to everything I try to say(in spite of speaking in Italian). I said I’m trying to speak in Italian and she just says in Italian back “I don’t speak English, fair?” I was like uhh okayyy then I’ll just go and try to figure it out then. Luckily a few minutes later we met one of the older folk types that just loves us and he was totally able to help us out.

There was another typical and almost loony toons like moment when I walked into a Bar to buy a bus ticket…wait, let me explain something else….you don’t buy the bus tickets on the bus here, there are these random stores called tabbachi you can buy them from, then you get on the bus. Weird thing is that there’s not always one of those places around when you wanna get on the bus. There is an odd solution to this though, just walk into the nearest bar or café. Chances are that they sell bus tickets too. Not all places have them but I guess if you happen to be a business, there is some way that you can obtain and start selling public bus tickets. Actually I don’t think they’re public now that I think of it, there’s all kinds of difference buses with different names……anyways back to the story……So I walk into the bar to buy a bus ticket, it’s fine and everything goes well. My mistake was asking where the nearest bus stop was. At that time like 5 other Italians walk in the bar then plus the 2 people at the counter are there, and they all know where the bus stop is and want deeply to explain it to me. I ask and the whole room erupts with voices –“Hey I’ll explain it to him. No let me explain it to him! No I’ll explain it to him! Hey, they don’t know what they’re talking about, I’ll explain. No, he’s dumb, you go out this door and to the left…etc etc.” Soon some girl just grabs my arm and takes me outside to point and explain slowly.

Sicilians(which I right now use interchangeably with Italians because I don’t know any different yet) to me seem like very clever people, always making quick jokes and smart comments. Some of the names of the places I saw were clever. For instance a bar with a sign that said “beer in progress” or another place with a sign that said pizzeria and under it also said “birraria.” Haha. Beer = birra in Italian. There was another really funny one in English but I don’t remember, it was the best one.

Also, in spite of their crazy crazy traffic, they seem to have come up with a really clever way to travel around this near desert of an Island. The public transit way to go is bus, because trains are out of date and always late(date late haha). The guy who owns the farm here says that every train is two hours late, so if you want to catch the train at 11am, you always go to the station at 11am to wait for and get on the 9am train. And it seems right that the buses are the way to go, because the highway is very interesting. The highway we took on the 5 hour ride it took to get across the Island was almost entirely a bridge. That’s right, a bridge. This seems, although who knows maybe there is some other reason, like it’s to save energy. You see, Sicily is a bunch of almost dessert, some vegetation, and big hills. If you go straight in a car instead of changing your vertical position, and I won’t go into a lengthy explanation why, you save gas. If you make a bridge over and around a hilly landscape instead of putting the road on that landscape, the cars that drive on it will save gas and not change their vertical position as much. This is a really interesting way to rethink a “bridge.” A bridge put in place because it’s more efficient for the cars that drive on it, rather than just to get the cars over something they couldn’t drive on anyways like water. That’s pretty freaking clever. Or maybe they did that for another reason, I coined that idea, and I should go cash in on it.

Italians when they speak to each other can seem really angry, which is a shame because such a beautiful language doesn’t seem meant to be spoken in a harsh way. In the end it doesn’t matter, the language is still music to just about anyone’s ears it would seem. This place is also super super hot by the way, if you look on the map Sicily is really really close to North Africa.

Okay this blog begins to grow lengthy, so I will end with a note from the back of my mind and I hope you can keep it in the back of yours after you’ve read this: This is just my impression of Sicily near a small town called Paterno and a big city called Catania. Haha maybe some of the things I wrote up there sound bad to some extent, but don’t be phased by them or let them shape your opinion of Italy. This culture is quite different from others I have experienced, and it’s also my impression that Sicily kind of has a culture all of its own. Even if this were the culture of all Italia, it’s just something I’m not, or maybe we’re not depending who’s reading this, used to. This is on top of the fact that I don’t speak the only language they know very well and they don’t speak a bit of the only language I know well. That puts me in a position to get some frustrated vibes from some people in the first place, because situations where you can’t communicate are just plain frustrating. Either way, anything negative I said is through my cultural lens which has never seen a culture quite like this one. It could be completely different in other places in Italy as well. Either way, these are my perceptions of such a place. PEACE YO!

I went the next day to Joensuu.

You may have noticed the title of the last blog, then its complete irrelevance considering what the story turned out to be. Well here's what shoulda coulda woulda been in the last blog post story:

Now Joensuu isn’t the most eventful place on Earth, you can ask any Finn….NOT. Come on people, when are you going to learn that Joensuu is actually an awesome city? That’s right, most Finns think Joensuu is a joke…haha I learned this near the end of my time there. If you say you’re going to Joensuu, people react in the same way you would react if someone told you that they were going to Detroit, actually even worse – imagine that! Joensuu got its reputation back in the nineties, which back then was well deserved, because of a bad uhh…ehem…uh well a bad skinhead problem. It’s not like that anymore I swear!!!! I didn’t even know there were skinheads in Finland much less Joensuu before someone told me about this old problem. Weird thing is now that I’ve heard that, a few people told me that these days Finland is some sort of safe haven for those types of people. Of course I didn’t see, notice, or come in contact with any of them so it’s not a bad problem whatever it is. Anyways that’s a complete and total side note, my point is that when I went to Joensuu is was absolutely beautiful and bright with colors even more than when I left. Finns tend to complain about it because it’s away from everything, which I would say if you don’t like the place you live so much that it’s inconvenient that you can’t go somewhere else easily because you wanna leave where you live so bad….well, maybe you shouldn’t live there in the first place.

Anyhow, I know I love Joensuu so there’s no need to justify my undying love(or something). When I went there everything was in bloom, and oh how was I was sad that I missed the white nights there. By gosh Joensuu, I’ll see you one of my coming summers…I just know it. I wish I had taken pictures, but for a bit I had this been there done that mentality. NOPE. By gosh what was I thinking, my re experience of Finland at least in these days were just as blogworthy as other days back in exchange.

So now I’ll get really actually going to my Joensuu story and stop rambling. I got to Joensuu the day before a festival – the festival of the arts. If there’s one thing you have to know about Finns in the summer…okay two things……one is that they are damn happy as can be that it’s not cold anymore, and two is that they will be damned if they won’t take advantage of it. Taking advantage of anything in Finland usually means drinking in public. Now there is a no drinking in public law…..but there is one exception….you can drink if you are having a “picnic.” Hah, yeah that’s right, a picnic. So on beautiful festival days the Finns young and old, bookworm and skinhead, emo and jock all set out on the fields to have just a good ole fashion innocent picnic. Usually in the US you think hmm picnic….cookie cutter family, or hippies maybe….or…well okay maybe I’ll stop generalizing but anyways the point is that it’s very interesting the kinds of people you’ll see having a nice picnic on the grass sitting on a blanket because everyone loves picnics….cough…alcohol. It’s just part of the culture, period.

Luckily they’re a little more creative than that. If there’s something else Finns like, it’s very often rock and metal music. This particular festival had bands(about 4 stages strewn throughout the city), art exhibits in the museums(duh), and another thing I’m forgetting. The atmosphere is really cool, many thousand people in the city center, people having picnics, moving from place to place….it’s weird, everytime there’s a festival it’s like there’s a weird fog everywhere….maybe it’s just me…

So I arrived in Joensuu, immediately eating lunch with and meeting people. In the night me and two friends went to the sauna in the biology building(don’t ask). Then it was quite late and it was bed time alreadys. The next day is the real piece of odd, for real. The next day was festival time, after some floating around doing the thing, I met up with two of my choir buddies at 4PM(so good to see them! And well everyone too!) and we were off to the festival.

Okay this next part is gonna take a couple tangents, but what’s a roller coaster without a few twists, turns, and curves between the loops…right?

First we went to grab some alcohol (culture people! Cultural experience!), I got this ridiculous ridiculous wine called Valdemar. Come on I wasn’t trying to spend a lot of money, and how can you say no to this face on the front of the bottle?

So the people I was with immediately start making fun of me haha it was 5e and 15%(SUPER CHEAP IN FINLAND, WHERE THE ALCOHOL FLOWS LIKE WATERFALLS IN THE SAME WAY EUROS DO OUT  OF YOUR POCKET). It’s so sweet it doesn’t even taste like wine, people are like “are you really going to drink…all of that??” Thing is that I have nothing to carry my legendary wine in, aside from some plastic bag. Oh well. Then we go to grab some food, cause we realize we have drinking plans yet no eating plans. Again we go for the student option…well not that there was a student option, but by gosh we made one. My friend told me there were these little 1e refrigerated pizzas in the market, and we were off. Two of the three of us ended up getting a pizza and a package of turkeydogs for dinner. That’s right, unheated pizza and turkeydogs, which I rightfully dubbed “weeners” at the time, for dinner.  Wait, I don’t have anything again to carry this stuff in….you can’t move fluidly from picnic to picnic during a festival without something to carry your cheap wine 1e pizza and weeners in. There was only one solution to this situation: Manbag . It’s been a long time in the making, I need a manbag. I’d been seeing them around, my friends back in the states had bought them, they’re everywhere in Europe – it was time for me to conform. Luckily here’s another cool thing about Finland – they have super badass second hand stores. Usually in the US you have some random second hand stores here and there which you go to if you really can’t find a costume for an 80’s party. In Finland it’s completely different, you find for real stuff there. In fact, a have a couple of my favorite shirts from second hand stores in Finland. That’s not all, some of the damn things make a huge profit!! Some of them you can go there and sell your clothes to them, others you can go an buy a space for a table in the store with your clothes on it and you get all the profit after that. Maija makes something like between 150e and 200e every time she goes there to sell her clothes. It’s –cheap- too, I bought a full suit from a second hand store in Joensuu for 15e! The thing didn’t look bad at all either!

I think this is just because people in Finland actually give away stuff that looks good but they don’t wear anymore. I feel like in America we just hold on to their clothes even if we never ever wear them, even if they look good enough to sell again. If I got a suit for 15e, and shirts for 1e each…think about how much money, earth, and man power (or child power depending on where you buy from) you would save while still looking good if you shopped at these places all the time. Maybe we shouldn’t be tearing the skinhead pages out of Finland’s book, but by gosh we could definitely use an entire chapter on second hand stores.

So this means I knew exactly where I was getting my manbag, and you know what, I got one from my favorite second hand store for just 2e. Suuure this particular manbag wasn’t the most stylish one on the block, but it had personality and cost less money than taking the bus from town to where I used to live in Joensuu. So booooom, now I was in business. I started to carry this fashionable piece of equipment from picnic to picnic, getting why are you drinking that and what the hell are you eating reactions from everyone along the way…it was a blast! Then I went bowling with some friends, well they bowled I drank. My friend is a tutor and was helping the new exchange students get acclimated….whoa boy was it weird to hang out with them. Made me remember those days, it was just amazing. I’ve only been away from 3 months and I’m already having nostalgia. Whew!

So then by and by it was time to go to the club, which is where a lot of party and festival nights end up in Finland along with the rest of the world. There comes the krux of the night. At every club there’s an entrance fee, and a coat/bag check fee. The bag check is usually 2 or 3 euros, and back when I was a bit green I paid every time…then I got to know Finland. In Finland, no one really steals anything.. okay except bikes. But my bag, full at this time with an empty bottle and half a small bottle of wine, empty pack of weeners, and frozen pizza trash, was not a bike. There’s actually a saying in Finland I’ve heard from a few people that if your wallet gets lost, you find it with more money in it. Finns are just generally civilized people (at least in this respect).

I can already feel the reader thinking…wait, no, he’s not going to leave his bag somewhere like…outside or something is he? Nooooooo of course not. Well your senses serve you well, unfortunately. If you didn’t sense that then go practice watching predictable movies or reading predictable books or something. So yeah whatever, basically what ended up happening is my friend had my bag in his bag and then checked his bag…..but then wanted to leave before me. I told him to do with my bag what had done many times before and have probably over the life of the habit saved at least….10 or 15e come on so worth it! So I told him to leave my bag outside beside a tree which was right in front of the club sticking out of the sidewalk.

My friend felt a little funny about doing this, but I assured him I had done it a million times and it would be fine. He was like….well, okay….here goes nothing.  Really he was gonna see me the next day so he would know then what happened to the bag. I went outside after clubbing….hm, no bag. This is strange. Surely no one stole it…come on it was a 2e bag and no one steals in Finland! My friend must have felt just funny about leaving the bag and figured he would see me the next day so he just took the bag with him. I was sure that’s exactly what happened.

So the next day I went to meet my friend and others. Everything is in disrepair with trash everywhere and a faint but ambient smell of vomit everywhere. I walked with my old flatmate to town from my old flatmate’s new place. It’s about a 30 minute walk so we were just walking and talking doing the thing. We’re about 3 minutes from the center and about to cross the bridge into Joensuu when I notice something on the ground……hmm…..odd…..there’s an empty frozen pizza package…..hm, wow those things must be pretty popular during festivals…..yeah hmm….well……wait….that….hm…hm, that….that looks suspiciously like uh….yeah uh like an empty weener package on the ground…..wow what a coinciden…….WHAT THE F***!...that was MY weener trash from MY manbag! I knew in that moment that my friend DID leave the bag like I told him to….and someone stole it…IN FINLAND!!  Not only that, the Finn thief wasn’t just a thief, he was a litterbug! That’s insult to injury, at least the person who stole it could be environmentally friendly but no! How the hell did I run into MY trash from MY manbag the next day? What are the odds? Even though he is the jerk who littered I still felt some responsibility to clean up my stolen trash, so I threw it away. There is hardly anything more humbling than cleaning up after someone who stole your stuff haha.

Here’s the funny thing and the amoral of the story: if I would have been safe and checked the manbag at the door, I would have paid more than the manbag was worth itself – 2.5e was the coat/bag check cost. By having my manbag stolen instead of giving my bag to bagcheck I saved money! I saved money by having my stuff stolen!! Now that, my friends, is the beauty of good second hand stores. Case and point, even though I miss my poor manbag!!! PEACE

Joensuu – reunited and it feels so good

It seems that my recent lack of internet has lead to a bit of something I would like to at this moment call a blog clog. A blog clog is where I've been writing some blog posts, but they've failed to get posted due to my lack of internet. This causes the blogs to add up and be unposted, causing the clog. Well this clog will now be cleared by some blog drano. Here ya go:

Alright people, so I know it’s been forever since I’ve updated my blog. There have been stories upon stories to tell, yet I have left you deprived and unspoiled with these adventurous gems. Well, I’m not making promises for starting this thing back up per se, but by gosh I made a trip back to my town away from town. Revisited the city of my life away from life. I once again traversed my heart and found the place where I was not so long ago. I took a trip to Joensuu.

Friends, Romans, people of Joensuu: kiitos.

Alright so I won’t exactly restrict this blog post to Joensuu per se, although I will talk mostly about my good good Joensuu friends. The story starts back in a place called Tampere, Finland. Tampere apparently means City of the Gods. Psht f**king lame, I like riversmouth, which is how Joensuu translates into English.  Yeah riversmouth, how badass is that….yeah right anyways so I was in Tampere visiting my lovely girlfriend Maija Koljonen. That’s right I have a Finnish girlfriend now, to all of you who don’t have facebook and can muster up the enthusiasm to care haha. Maybe that sentence was for an audience of 1 person.  People are always like dude who the hell are you dating and why the f**k does she have so many j’s in her name?? Haha just place j’s in funny places and the world suddenly flips upside down.

So I was visiting her and my good friend Ilkka from the finnish choir I was in during my time in Joensuu contacted me saying he was from the City of the Gods and we should chill before we go to riversmouth. I said sure thang and we went for dinner at a place his friend owns called jack the rooster(Finns are so unoriginal that they can’t come up with names in their own language, the damn thing is that jack the rooster is a more original name than I could come up with in English…..bastards!).  This place was pretty sweet, having bands from time to time etc….but the real gem of this place was the fateful Death Burger. That’s a spicy burger, if I were to make an understatement. Me and my friend were not that brazy(brave and crazy) so we had normal burgers. Thing was that the owner my friend knew was just so nice and generous that he brought out a little cup of the stuff they put in the death burger so we could try. We’re both curious so we’re like awesome and just take a finger tip worth each of this stuff.  Now I’ve tried hot stuff before, that’s for dang sure…but this was a horse of a different color. Within seconds I couldn’t take it  or keep myself quiet in the restaurant. I put it in my mouth and started shouting thing that went  something like this:……Moaather F**KER! !  Wooo! WOooo!! DAMN that’s hot!

So people started kinda looking at us and Ilkka’s friend immediately brings us some milk with this look on his face as if he was kicking himself for the situation he just caused.….hmm Ilkka was actually a bit quiet although the look on his face spoke perhaps louder than my shouts.... the point is I was the only one yelling like a jackass but my social barriers had been put at the mercy of this relentless fire in my mouth.  I mean this stuff was RIDICULOUS. It was at least the second hottest stuff I’ve ever tried, both sweating with noses running. After the initial burn I calmed down(kinda) before there were complaints or police calling(sometimes a finnish solution to such social situations)….but we did spark the curiosity of this random girl that was sitting behind us haha uh oh next victim. You know sometimes it doesn’t take peer pressure to get people to do stuff, they completely screw themselves out of pure curiosity. We didn’t even have to try to get her to have some, we’d given up on the idea since we had made such a public display of discontent. So she of course talks and beats around the bush a bit before continuing to steal a fry, dip it in the stuff, and try it. Hah, wow she had put a lot on that fry too. She then takes a couple steps back and goes into a half fetal position still standing with legs straightened and upper body curled into a ball. After about a minute we’re like uhh…...are you alright? She quickly replies with “-I’M GOING TO F***ING DIE!-“

The damn hotness lasts about 20minutes before you feel okay again, so me and Ilkka had only drank about a third of our milks at this point but before we knew it the girl we didn’t even know had downed both of them hahaha just wow.

So now I’m gonna make a longer part of this story short. We left there, split up, and Ilkka took some of it to his friends. He felt like being a bad ass while he was with them and took even more of the stuff, like two spoonfuls! So then we met back up later and he was just suffering so much. Then we went out and I left early, but Ilkka was complaining before a little about his stomach, the milk, the hot stuff, and the alcohol not mixing so well. Well Ilkka drank quite a lot at the club after I left and then had a wonderful next day hahaha omg. Now think of this, a finger tip of the stuff made me crazy. They put 30g of the stuff in the Death Burger. They also have this other one called the Ultra Death Burger, where they put -90- grams of the stuff! They have some rules though, you can’t have the Ultra Death Burger without first eating the original at one point…..haha and after that you also have to sign a waiver!!! Dude how awesome is that. WTF. Alright that’s it for now, till next time people. 

State of Finland Address

Well folks, you know what time it is. It's been too long since I've hopped on that blog train. The world has been spinning in more ways than one(actually I can think of quite a few right off the top of my head, I'm not gonna tell you though). Everything has been nutty so it's time to go nuts on this blog again. That's right folks, because when life hands me lemons I say f*** it and make orange juice. Let's do this thing.


Alright I thought about writing this blog post like a speech, after realizing that's a horrible idea I thought I would just tell you what this place is starting to look and feel like. Don't worry, we'll soon do some real catching up on some of the cooooool stuff I've done since March. As for now, I thought this was becoming quite necessary.


You know since I'm not at my computer right at the moment, I might have to add some more pictures later.....just because I think I don't have all the necessary tools. But hey, for now, we'll work with what we got, k?


The snow is almost gone!!! Holy crap it's amazing how it just peaced out. If the snow were staring in a movie right now, the movie would be called "the last stand." It would then get sued.

First week of April we had temperatures around 0 degrees Fahrenheit, then the next week it shot up to about 40 degrees. At that point it started raining and literally feet of snow started melting per day. Before it had played around with the idea for a few weeks, maybe the snow would melt one day a little bit but then it would go back to below freezing and snow like a mofo. This time it was serious, the weather had hit the snooze button for too long. It was time to get up out of bed and make a nice warm breakfast with something we call the sun.

The snooze button analogy can be extended to the Finnish people as well. I'll get to that in a minute though. Right now we're talkin about snow. SO hold on. The amazing thing is that the temperature has been well above freezing for something like two weeks now, and the snow is not really -completely- completely gone at all. So maybe I was wrong, the movie with the snow would be called "Die Hard." That would be waaay more badass. It would still get sued though.

Grassy areas are still at least partly covered with snow deep enough to jump in at some points. I would never recommend that though. This snow is very very very gross looking. Not to mention that the melting and freezing has caused some of it just to be a huge lump of ice. So jumping in the snow might yeild so much fun. Not. Perhaps a bloody nose and a disease. It's interesting how the dirt in the snow slowly overtakes the snow as it melts.

When it snows, there is always a little bit of dirt that gets on it somehow. Either it's the sand/gravel they put on the roads, or dogs poopin in the snow(people here love their dogs, and their dogs use a litter box called any place with snow), or whatever it may be. So each time it snows, that layer of snow catches a little dirt, then it snows again, etc. So when those layers start to melt, all that's left is the dirt that got on the layers. So the smaller a snowpile is, the more it just looks like a pile of dirt. Some snowpiles are just black completely, it's sexy.

So I've started biking to campus, I know be proud. Either way, this causes a bit of a ridiculous problem. Why? Well what's the theme people? The snowmelt again. OMG. So absurd. soooooo absurd. In fact, I probably can't fit everything in one blog I now realize. wow. anyways, so first biking is really absurd for at least a week in there, because all the snow on the walk ways melts a but then freezes. It's literally about a 4 inch thick sheet of black ice on the side walk. Yes, I've fallen. 4 times now I think. Then after that, the snow on the walkway melts and you still have water on the walkway because the snow on the side of the walkway is melting for weeks after. When it's still a bit cold in that stage, the weather/walkway likes to do magic tricks. One in particular it likes is the old disappearing and reappearing black ice sheets trick.

Yup the oldest trick in the book. You ride along one day, taking note of where the ice is and where it is not. Then the next day you go on the bike and make sure to take care on the parts with the ice but then go a little faster on the parts without ice. After all, you do want to get to campus one day. BUT hold on, the ice you saw earlier the day before melted sometime later in the daytime, it's gone. Oh good. BUT HOLD ON AGAIN, snow melted onto the walkway in another place along your path and then froze during the night. Oooops, going a little fast for this parCRASH!!! Very funny Mother Nature, you're a natural commedian. Get it? Natural? hahahaa. Now look who's the natural commedian.

So then you get to the stage where it's all water. This is okay for some people, but as always, I have bike problems. My bike doesn't have a sufficient mud guard, so I come to school looking completely ridiculous and spotted with mud. Somehow mud even gets on the front of my coat. How? I have no idea. Really the worst part is the seat of my pants. If I may, I will now express this pictorially:

That's exactly what my face looks like too.

Here is what some of the mess looks like. So endearing haha. 

Sometimes I try to protect the seat of my pants and my comfort for the rest of the day in general by putting my glove in harms way. I used to do it open palm but now have learned that just makes my glove wet. This is an art people, an art.

Don't even start to think I'm done with this enormous blog post. Well actually I might be almost done. Because I think I need to break this thing up. It's probably because of the 90% rambling I do. Alright people. I'll finish this bad boy soon. We'll get all caught up! Peace out blogosphere!

Trip to Russia: Don't try this at home, kids.

SO. I'm not done with Lapland blogging yet(will I ever be?), but by gosh I just went to Russia and I wanted to share something that can't be at all explained by uploading pictures. This was a bit of an interesting situation which left me with a quickened heartbeat and a tinge of adrenaline, symbolizing a nice level of uncertainty I experienced which people refer to when they say "Anything is possible in Russia." Now of course, this is one story out of one city from one guy in this one country. So don't let this be your impression of Russia, I'll post the absolutely gorgeous pictures of the city and other great things later. For now here we go.

So let's do a really quick intro to get you up to speed so this story actually makes some sense in context. We went last week to a place in Russia called St. Petersburg (OR LENINGRAD IF YOU'RE A SOCIALIST, YOU SOCIALISTS!). It's one of the largest cities in Russia, the second largest to be specific. The damn place has a few hundred thousand less people than -Finland- aka the thing is huge. Something like 4.7 million, where as Finland has 5.something million. Moscow is even bigger, something like 10 million people. So instead of saying thousand or million let's just say Finland. So St Petersburg has something like 0.85 Finland people, and Moscow has something like 1.8 Finland people. All necessary conversions aside, St Petersburg was originally named.....St Petersburg (I should never be a tour guide), and then got it's name changed at one point to Leningrad during the Soviet Union times. So just know that Leningrad = St Petersburg so there's no confusion on where I was. Okay I think we're good now, I'll add maps and all that stuff later. Right now let's just get to it.

So we took a cruise ship to St Petersburg, as it's a city of many many interconnected waterways. When we got there, we were accommodated in a hotel: Hotel Moscow. It was really nice until you got past the second floor(we were on the 4th), but even after that it wasn't so bad. Just like the city the hotel is freaking huge. So on the first night we went to a traditional "Russian Dinner Party," it was really fun stuff that I'll blog about later. The main thing to take from it is that we had shots between every course and then some, so by the time dinner was over we had all had something like 6 shots of vodka. It was a respectable amount, but not enough to make us damn crazy. Either way many of us decided not to go out that night because well, we didn't get so much sleep on the boat. Actually I got almost none. There was a club on the boat and the cabins were really hard to sleep in for reasons I'll explain later. So a large minority of us were ready to just kinda chill a bit and hit the sack.


This notion left about 6 of us out in the lobby type area of the floor we were staying on. By lobby I mean a table and a couple comfortable chairs outside the elevators. So we start playing some international card games, I don't quite remember what they were but by gosh they were pretty fun. So we start playing and having some fun and being almost sort of loudish. Not really that bad, we were all pretty dead from the night before. So as we're playing some cards this dude, maybe in his early or mid 30s comes wandering slowing around and eventually settles close to the table and chairs where we're sitting and just watches. He's pretty tall, maybe an inch or two taller than me, and a bit heavier than me just in terms of build and muscle. He's not fat.

So he seems slightly on some sort of low gear auto pilot, perhaps drunk I would say. He's carrying a huge water jug in his right hand that he only holds in one way when he's walking. Just down by his side with his arm completely elongated only bending it to take a sip. He's got jet black hair with a thick dark green sweater and skin that was white but still slightly dark. Not pale like me. Perhaps you'll understand why I remember him like I could file a police report on him in a second. This dude watches our game, looking pretty friendly and jovial really. He watches us play and laughs along with us whenever something funny happens and is smiling and seems to be having almost as good of a time as we're having. Pretty cool.

So after we play one round that lasts half of forever we decide we're all ready for bed. So we start down the hall to get ready for bed. Once again the guy kinda gets this "huh?" look on his face and starts walking around aimlessly. The 4 girls immediately went in their rooms and shut the door, I think they were slightly creeped out by this guy for some strange unknown and outlandish reason. Well he seemed nice to me. He was just watching our game. Maybe he didn't have much to do. Took a night walk and found some foreigners and enjoyed watching them have some fun, maybe he needed something to lighten his day.

So me and my French roomate/friend Killian start getting ready for bed. We have the door open and we're just doing the normal thing, brushing teeth and such. So then I notice this guy walking slowly down the hall, again a bit aimlessly. I happen to be out in the hall when he passes by. He looks up at me(he was walking with his head hung before), and gives me a smile. I'm like okay cool this guy is really friendly. I say hey how are you?? Oops.

We get into a conversation, at this point Killian comes out of the room as well and joins as the conversation starts. How are you how are you, good good blah blah......Where are you from??........So, I'm not one to generalize, or at least I try not to. I've made jokes about not telling people in Russia where I'm from, but I was never at all serious. I've heard a couple stories about Americans having a slightly hard time in Russia, but really none of them were even -that- bad at all. I mean it's been a while since the Cold War right?

Killian: I'm from France, Me: I'm from the US......(Oh shit). The expression on this guy's face completely changes, he does a double take and his tone does a complete 180. Now in discourse that follows this I'm going to try and mention a few memorable points and give the jist, but there was a lot more filler out of no where mumbley stuff. He is just kind of like Oooh.. Well what do you do in Russia? The US is a very beautiful place. Me: it's beautiful here as well, this is an amazing city. Russian dude: You know I love the US in a lot of ways, I love your nature, I love your freedoms, but your government..is nothing. Your wars are not good, you know you will not win in Afghanistan. Me: Yeah I    Russian dude: There is too much money. It's stopping you from winning. (it was as if he meant to say there some sort of money deal going on with corruption that made us unable to push through). Your Afghanistan is like our Chechnya...If we just had 1000 men all with a grenade in hand, in one day Chechnya would be destroyed(whispery voice). But there is too much money involved, we can't get past the corruption. Now as a side note,  I'm not really sure where he got this thousand dudes with a grenade battle plan. Doesn't really seem like a well thought out idea to me, but I'm no expert.

He then goes on to tell me he's an ex-Russian soldier( F*** F*** F***)..... Which, that makes me wonder even more about the thousand man grenade battle plan. But I'm not thinking about that anymore. Russian dude: You know we were in Georgia protecting somebody(can't remember who, maybe it's a small population who is sided with Russia that Georgia was apparently attacking), and Russian soldiers risked their -lives- for those who were being innocently murdered. A Russian soldier is a good man. He would protect you, and me, and you(points to all of us). He would jump in front of you in the line of gunfire. And you know in Georgia, you know there were some Russian soldiers killed much because of American involvement.

At this point I have NO CLUE what to say. What do you say to that? So I start to try and be like I'm sorry that happened, I would like to change bad things when I get older. I've just learned about a lot of bad things in our government, I didn't make any of these decisions(something like that). So he goes on to say Oh I know I know that it wasn't your fault, it wasn't you....But you know you are a citizen of your country....And if an enemy of my country, steps on -my- land, I will protect it.......There. will. be.......war. Okay so now my heart rate has begun to rise, this pleasant conversation has not turned out at all how I ever thought it would go! Is this guy gonna give some sort of speech about how bad me and my government are and then proceed to attack me??? This guy is quite bigger than me AND an ex-soldier. I start scanning his body/pants to see if he maybe had a weapon on him, and I'm not even being perverted!

I thought quickly, maybe if I mess up his thunder so he can't finish his speech he won't be so enthusiastic as to attack me. I thought maybe I could just knock him off his high horse or try to filibuster or something he'd be confused enough not to rile himself up. I try to change the subject, Me: Hey you know St Petersburg is a beautiful city! What do you do here in St Petersburg? What are your life plans in the long run??? Every time I ask a question he gives me a few sentences of an answer and just continues right back on his rant. It's not working! I thought about just quickly running in my room, slamming and locking the door. But then Killian would be left out there with the crazy. Not to mention that making any sudden movements didn't seem like a good idea in this situation.....

So I continue my efforts unsuccessfully but at once see a security guard walking down the hall towards us. Okay cool, maybe if he attacks me the security guard will try to handle things enough for me to get away. I figure the ex soldier might make quick work of the security guard but at least that would buy me some time. Luckily, the security guard walks right up to the Russian dude and asks for his hotel card. The guy gives the security guard his card, security dude looks it over and says come with me(I assume, it was all Russian). So they both just randomly stroll off down the hall........sigh of relief!!!! I was still in one piece! So we just shrug our shoulders nervously and hit the sack. Wow. I put the chain on the door that night, and that's a fact!! Never saw him again, crazy.







P. S. Now you should please fact check what I'm about to say before you run around telling people this or use it to base your opinion, but I got most of this information from the book Blood and Oil. Check it out if you'd like to know more about what I'm about to say. As a political side note. Holy crap America, we need desperately to get off oil. It's my impression that one of the main reasons we're even hanging out in Georgia is for oil.  We have a pretty productive pipeline there, which I think Russia feels should be theirs anyways. Not to mention Georgia and Russia have political turmoil. Like many countries we get oil from, we, like assholes, trained funded and armed their military. Sometimes when we go in for oil in a country that isn't first world/has need/political strife, there's some sort of uprising against it. So we have to arm these places a lot of times to ensure our pipelines are safe. Russia, having been at war with Georgia, probably didn't like that very much. AT ALL. A few years ago Russia invaded Georgia, and we all wonder why gas prices go up sometimes. Just watch current events for a clue. It is unfortunately not my impression that other a lot of countries have an entirely better track record for being nice to countries they get oil from, so let's all take note of this. My fellow Americans and people of the World, we must know where our oil comes from and the price that is paid for it not just at the pump, but in blood. We have to find alternative energy and fast! Otherwise people like me will keep having weird experiences like this, and that's the least of the problems from it! Peace!

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!