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
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