Ice Swimming 1

Yeah, I did it. I'm damn crazy, but I did it. I went swimming in a hole cut out of a massive ice lake, and it was F***ing cold. But you know what, let's back up for a minute. How exactly did this turn of events come to take place? Well I'll tell you.

I applied for housing freaking late. I kinda applied to the program late so it made some sense, but still.And you know I didn't really care at the time, but that was because I didn't really imagine there were huge differences in the available housing. I figured hey if my place is a little crappier and more sucky than some of the others it's really no big deal. I was dead wrong. You know what happens when you assume. You make an ass of u and me. Well this time I assmed. I was the only one who was made an ass of by gosh. My living spot is called karjamaentie 12, meaning building 12 on the street named karjamaentie. Karjamaentie is the last road of housing in Joensuu, about 4-5km from the University. And by 12, I mean 12/12. That is to say I live in literally the farthest location from the University I possibly could hahaha. damn it. The bus is fairly reliable, but not free, and it stops running at like 1040pm on weekdays and 1210am on weekends. This means that I have to stay on the floor in my friends' apartments when I wanna stay out, these friends live like 1/2 a kilometer away from the city center and university!! I'll be it, I pay probably more than 100 euros/130 USD less than they do a month in housing, but really?! Anyways, that's not the point.

At this point you might be wondering how this has anything to do with the topic at hand, which seems to have changed from Ice Swimming to living situation. Well here it is. Karjamaentie really isn't close to anything, EXCEPT ice swimming! BOOM bitches, take that! You had enough? Take that! Your awesome bars and clubs and university and food options and skating rinks are nothing! I can just jump right into that icy ass water any time I want! I knew I got put here for a reason, anyways..

So basically some of my friends from my Bioenergy Markets and Policies class(which is freaking hard) were going to go ice swimming for one of their birthdays, and they invited me along. One of my friends from that class was also put here to live, so we walked to the ice swimming together at about 5pm(already dark of course).

Before I continue, let me explain real quickly how ice swimming generally works around here just so we can have a clear idea. Basically you go, pay like 5 euros, and you go into a sauna by the lake then get out and go get into the lake.

So let us continue. At this point I had never been in a Finnish sauna, but I assumed it was probably more intense than saunas I had been in back in the States, so I had been hydrating all day. Drinking tons of fluids, because I just imagined getting weak and dehydrated was not a good combo with shockingly cold water. This mean that on the 30-40 minute walk there, I had to pee like a freaking race horse. Holy crap I had to go. You know I had not been in this situation yet either. The temperature at this point is -2 degrees F, there is snow everywhere(not quite as easy to cover tracks), and we're pretty much in the middle of somewhat of a neighborhood. I really don't care to have anyone see me because I'm not sure what the rule of thumb is about that here, but you know I had to go!!

Really people go in semi public all the time back in the states(I know I do). Well anyways, I was on a mission,  so I decided to go for it. We came to a bridge over a frozen lake(they're all over the place here, you think it's a big field or something at first then you realize there's a pretty massive bridge over it.). Beside the bridge there are two sizable wooded areas that kind of dip into the ground a little bit. "Perfect" I say to myself, then continue to tell my friend Alex to go ahead of me and I'll catch up to him. There's two big sidewalks on the road we're walking on and over the bridge(sidewalks are huge here btw.). As you might notice in my previously posted pictures, anything that gets plowed here has pretty sizable snowmounds right beside it because the snow builds up and sidewalks are no exception.

This means that in order to get from the sidewalk, and into the woods before and beside the opening/start of the bridge, I had to climb over a 1.3 meter snow mound that made a boundary between the sidewalk and the woods. You know what? I'll include a couple pictures just to give you a good mental image: note that the black lines on the left represent the road going one direction, and the black lines on the right the other direction. The two lines are where the tires go, often times the only black part of the road you can see is where the tires drive. In this case with the cold weather the roads were completely white, but I put black lines just for the sake of argument.

Here we go, theres a diagram, and here is a nice example of the kinds of snowmounds near sidewalks after they've been plowed. Anyways, the snowmounds are always much harder then the usual snow because it's been packed down after the plowing process, so I could very easily climb over one to try and finally reach the woods after much hesitation. So I climb the snowmound, then step off the well packed snowmounds into the natural untouched, unpacked, unplowed snow of the wooded area and suddenly sink all the way down to my waist in snow.....holy crap! This is not good at all. I still have half a mind to push through and still take a pee at this point but soon realize that if I stayed there for more than a couple seconds, the snow would start melting around my legs and make my pants wet. In the negative degree weather, that would be -unimaginably- uncomfortable. I quickly climbed out of the snow and dusted myself off, completely defeated by this situation. Epic fail, and I still have to pee. My British friend is still waiting for me in the middle of the bridge. I come walking up to him at a quickened pace with snow all over my pant legs. He says to me "how did it go?" I say, "Lets just walk fast." And we're back on our way.

My gosh, this has turn into a long blog. I'll post another with the rest of the story soon. BOOM

Finally figured out how to load pictures on here, so I can show some of the stuff I have been talking about

This is actually not my picture, but is from my friend's flight to Helsinki. This is the exact kind of view I had from the plane when I was flying in, which made me realize I had reached Finland.

This is Right about at the center of the Joensuu campus, note the flags indicating a central location. Note that the flags are flapping about, yup that's why the wind chill here often makes it feel ridiculously colder still.

Looks like sun up/sun down right? Nope. This is about mid day. The sun stays in that exact spot all "day." I put day in quotation marks because the day here is about 5-6 hours. The days are getting longer by about 5 minutes a day though, so by the end of February we should have a pretty respectable day, then after that the day will get longer and longer until it hits about 19-20 hours. Then I will putting night in quotes as well.
      This picture looks dark but it really wasn't as dark outside as it looks. You might note oddly that when I put up pictures where there is cloud cover, the day actually seems brighter. That's because it is. At least in my experience, cloudy days are brighter than days with a clear sky and sun. This could be for a number of scientific reasons, but I imagine it has something to do with eye adjustment or the reflectivity of the clouds. Either way, it's brighter on cloudy days, and it's also warmer. Clouds act as a huge insulator, so you pretty quickly notice when you get here that it is often warmer on cloudy days. Clouds also often imply a gentle light snow(as it's almost always snowing here), so really, at least for my experience in Eastern Finland, you hope for those beautiful, warm cloudy days.

Good example of the food I've been eating. Doesn't it look good?? haha. Nah it's okay, all I've had here so far is cafeteria food, so perhaps more on traditional Finnish food is coming. Also the next pictures will show something that apparently the Finns just -love-. Anyways, this is a picture of a pretty standard cafeteria meal here at Joensuu. Those boiled potatoes are served soo much......

This is a candy called, as you can read, Salmiakki. It's basically a candy of extreme variations of the licorice flavor. When I say extreme, I mean holy shit that's ridiculous. It's perhaps almost as basic as coffee with all its variations. There's also a liquor that tastes like this stuff, think Jager with a lot more salt and licorice flavor. If you're not Finnish, you may have already made a strange face while reading this thinking about different licorice variations. To the Finns though, it's apparently very delicious. I suppose it has a lot to do with what you've grown up with. My Finnish flatmate was very surprised to know there was only perhaps one(if that) choices of the licorice flavor at American candy stores, because here there's like 8-10 different choices at all of them here. Some of them are hot, sweet, bitter, salty, chewy, soft, tough, all of those, etc, etc, etc, and etc. They are really strange to a foreigner, I'm not gonna lie. Some people just hate it right off the bat, but I kinda gave it some time ya know....I can see how it could be really good as an acquired taste. My flatmate brought in all of these in the above picture for me to try, I got through about three different kinds before saying perhaps we should continue this tomorrow. I mean seriously, one of them says you should eat too many if you have high blood pressure. Now that is hardcore.

Anyways, back to the subject of freezing ass cold, here are some shoes that I bought that have been keeping my toes at a reasonable temperature. My indoor running shoes definitely did not cut it after a few days. My toes began to freaking freeze, so I bought these really comfortable and warm pumas. They're nice high tops, and as you can see, very warm and fuzzy inside.

This picture is of the side of the side walk after the bad ass snow plow came and plowed the side walk. That's right, they plow the sidewalks here like all the time. Remember how I said that snow was literally caked on the road and the sidewalk? Well this picture gives a good example of that fact, take notice of the huge chunks of ice among the rest of the snow. Those ice chunks were, before the plowing was done, so caked and hardened on the sidewalk that it might as well had been part of the side walk. Those are huge chunks of the thick layer of ice that is often underneath the layer of snow that's already on the sidewalk.

another

Remember when i said that they don't salt the roads or the sidewalk, but just throw this sand-gravel material on it and drive? Well, those little black spots are what I was talking about. They remind me of pieces of the soft asphalt they put on running tracks these days.

Lots more to come, right now I'm good though. Talk to you again soon!

Read two blogs ago before reading this one

Okay so I decided to break it up into three blogs. I figure I'll get to some other stuff now, there's so much surely I can't write it all. Let's talk some about my impressions so far of Finns. First of all, wow. They have a very interesting and admirable society and culture. Now, I don't really know much about Finnish history or anything like that yet, so I can't say much as far as old Finnish cultural history or anything like that. One thing I can tell though, is that everything I've been told about Finns is basically true thusfar. I mean, it's usually not good to generalize and go by stereotypes, but these generalizations are actually complements or self recognized features of the Finns. The Finns, from what I've personally noticed, are very shy. Not really shy in the way a lot of people think. A lot of times shyness can be mistaken as snobbishness or being stuck up, but certainly not in this case. Some Finns when you speak to them, look at you like they're almost scared of you. Obviously they're not, I've thought to myself that perhaps they just don't feel too comfortable speaking English. Then I saw interactions between two Finns that didn't know each other and they both seemed scared of each other too hahah. I mean I guess that's better than America in some respects, a lot of places you go people look at you like you're an asshole or perhaps their competition.

You know after you get Finns talking though, they're actually quite confident, all intelligent, and extremely well spoken. And when I mean extremely well spoken, I mean in English they're well spoken. It's almost embarrassing how well they speak English haha. Many of them i would guess were from Canada or from England because their accent sounds more like the accents of the people who probably taught them English rather than a Finnish English accent.  I have run into a few people that cannot speak English, but they're certainly in the minority. The country is practically trilingual, as the they already have two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. This is all not to mention that most of them are proficient in or at least speak some of the other major European languages. Strange, it seems like every Finn I run into that can't speak English, the same thing happens every time. I try to speak English, they do this motion with their arms as if saying "safe!" at a baseball game, exclaim "No English!" and run and get someone who knows English I can speak to.

The Finnish language, uhh Finnish, seems interesting but also seems so incredibly complicated I just can't imagine how they go about their daily lives. The other day at orientation, we were shown a Finnish word that is 61 letters long. Now just to get an idea, that is a word of the following length:

Adfadfaineihchnwpowenceoiqpoioernonceioshteanzmuenbewokmcewuiw

Yeah....yeah. So anyways they also have a bunch of these things called "cases" which they use instead of really common words such as to or from or at. Instead of saying any of those types of words, they just add a new ending to the main word and that's a case. Apparently there are 50 cases. That's just ridiculous to me. No wonder they can learn so many languages, everything else is a piece of cake to them! Can't be nearly as hard as their mother tongue so why not? 

A few more interesting notes about their language, it's monotone. No rising tone or anything when they ask a question like us. They don't have a future tense. Strange. Also, and this is pretty cool I think, no gender. We are all a bunch of its running around everywhere. No she, no he. This level of equality shows in their politics, as they have a female president and a large proportion of government is also females. The Finnish female is apparently also very career driven. Perhaps too much so with both sexes, as they can't seem to get people to have as many babies as they would like. Opposite problem to much of the world. 

The education system is consistently ranked among the best in the world, and I haven't had many classes yet, but I can certainly see how it's very very different from other systems I've heard of. The semester here is way different from the semester in America. A semester in Finland is more like a series of minimesters and summer semesters. I'm taking 2 classes right now. One is on Monday and Wednesday, and lasts till the second week of February. On Monday it's two hours of class and four on Wednesday. The other one I'm taking right now is Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday, and lasts one week. That's right, it ends this Friday. It's 4 hours of class a day. Here, classes last anywhere from 1-9ish weeks. You have finals throughout the semester. If that wasn't crazy enough, you can take the final exams more than once and take the better grade. If you fail a class, you can take it over as many times as you want. When you fail completely, it doesn't show on your record. If you make a bad grade, you can retake the course and the better grade will go on your record. 

So absurd, and pretty different, and pretty awesome. Surely many countries, including at least to some extent the US, could really take a page out of Finland's book. Alright I'm gonna leave you with that. I'll write more about my specific events in Finland pretty soon. 

Peace!

Describing stuff, read the blog before this one first.

Alright so I left off on the amount of snow there was there and all that. Okay more. So in Joensuu there were 2-3 story mounds of snow like in Helsinki, but here(probably Helsinki too) they take huge dump trucks and clear out the snow mounds that are more than like thigh height every week. There is huge heavy machinery driving around all the time clearing walkways, roads, snow mounds, etc. There are two sidewalks in Joensuu that do not have snow on them, and that's because they are heated sidewalks in the city center. They have piped warm water running in pipes underneath them. Since I've been here, which has been about a week now, it has snowed between 3-6 inches every night. Last night it seemed like all was calm then I wake up this morning and there's strong gusts of wind with powder everywhere and it's snowing like crazy. Here it does this thing I've never seen before really where there's just an ice mist blowing around and accumulating. The small pieces of ice make the ground sparkle as if someone poured glitter everywhere.

In fact, it's snowing right now. Yup, snowing pretty good out there. When I got here it was probably about 30 degrees F, which is not what I was expecting. All the Finns were running around talking about how great the "warm weather" was. Of course, just three or four days later it was -4 degrees F. People still talk about it like it's not too bad even then, they only say wait till when it is -20 or -25. So the Finns still run around barefaced even when it's in the negative degrees and there's a nice breeze to add to the wind chill. You can really tell who is from out of town a lot of times because they cover up their face. I know I do. It's windy, it's negative degrees, I cover  my gosh darn nose. Nope, the Finns don't care. Oh no it's not just the big orange coat that indicates I'm from out of town, but now people can tell I'm from somewhere else cause I'm a wuss. That big orange coat has worked out beautifully by the way, people always recognize me -and- I stay very warm. A Scottish guy came up to me today and told me I was offending the Finns by implying they were terrible drivers.

Whew, I'm gonna write now. Getting there.

Hello people, I've been  here in Finland about a week now. 

Well I'm not really sure where to start with this thing, so I guess I'll just start it.

My first day of travel was exactly that, a day, or 24 hours, of traveling. My plane left at 6pm on Sunday and I got here about 11:30pm here on Monday. There is a 7 hour difference, so I guess that's a little under 24 hours, but if you count that I got to the airport 2.5 hours before my flight then it definitely is over 24. Anyways, so I flew into London and started being immediately amused by the British accents. Also I got this whoa I'm not in Kansas anymore feeling, which, it was way too soon for that considering what I was about to be in for. 

I first knew I was actually in Finland when I was riding in the plane and we took a pretty sharp turn towards the end of the London-Helsinki flight. We had dropped our altitude substantially but still weren't through the clouds. The sun was still bright, even though in Helsinki it was almost time for sundown(3:15pm). The sharp turn left an opportunity to see though the low clouds we were about to descend through to the ground. Everything was just completely white down there. Seemed like every bit of countryside was covered.  We descended through the thick clouds and almost immediately landed because the clouds were super low in Helsinki. 


The first thing I noticed when I got off the plane, other than damn I'm actually in Finland, is that the air here is really crisp. You just get off the plane like yeah, crisp. So we go through like a ten mile long customs line and then we're in Helsinki. As I frantically take the bus to the Helsinki train station(running a bit late, had like 45 minutes to get to the last Joensuu train  and the bust ride was 30min long.), I noticed a lot about my surroundings. First off was, holy crap that's a ton of snow!! Feet and feet of snow everywhere. I mean, I was kinda prepared for it, but I guess I never imagined what it looked like nor did I think Helsinki would have as much as they did because theyre in Southern Finland. There were cars that had obviously been left in parking lots unattended and they were almost completely buried. Also their parking lots had like two story mounds of snow from where they've had to scrap the parking lot. Weirdest thing was, everything was completely fully functional and there was absolutely no snow on the roads. There were salt and plowing trucks everywhere, and the place ran like you'd think a normal city would. Helsinki also seemed like a really neat city, I'll definitely be visiting there. 


We got off the bus and there were sidewalks completely covered in ice that you had to be really careful on. Well, I had to be careful. The Finns were just running around on it like it wasn't there. Soon after was a train ride of another 4.5 hours. At this time I've been up for 24 hours with no real sleep on the plane so I was pretty out of it. On a side note, I can't sleep on planes almost at all! Everytime I would doze off I would start having a crazy crazy dream and wake up to the loud plane not knowing where I was and have a tiny 1 second freak out moment. Anyways, so I get to Finland exhausted and famished but my Finnish tutors picked me up and took me to where I lived. You know when I was in Helsinki I thought the snow was crazy. In Joensuu it's completely ridiculous!!! It really is an interesting feat that people actually figured out how to adjust to this climate, go Finns. I mean the snow in Helsinki was bad, but in Joensuu it's almost beyond words! Snow covers almost every inch of the ground in Joensuu, including the roads. Yup, snow and ice is just caked and matted on the road. They don't give a D either, they just mix some sand in and drive. The sidewalks are very well packed with snow, so much that you can squeak your shoes on it. There are some...some parts of the road you can see under the snow, but then most of the time when you go up and take a better look it's just black ice under the snow. They don't even try salting the roads, it would be of no use. It's generally so cold here that throwing salt on and lowing the freezing temperature of the road couldn't lower it enough to keep it from freezing. It is law here to have "winter tires" which have small metal studs on them and really deep tread. 


I'm gonna break this thing up into two blogs, so people can catch a break.


BOOM


Lucas Macon

Haven't left yet, INTRO

Ciao(not Finnish at all by the way, don't get it twisted)

I'm studying abroad in Finland, finishing up(graduating) in England. I am preparing to depart in one week! I will be back on most likely after I have gotten done traveling to the university where I'll be studying(University of Eastern Finland - Joensuu) and have gotten settled down and all that. Until then, have a good week my numerous and loyal followers!!!!!!!