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.