Because it has been a while...

Hey everyone, it has been almost a month since I last updated, and I know that I shouldn't go so long in between posts, so here is a new one for you.

Not all that much big and noteworthy things have happened to me lately. It is really really hard to believe that it is almost the end of january! It really seems like January just started. This means that I am halfway through my exchange! I already have my departure date for when I go back! Which depresses me beyond compare. I think about going back to my life in Colorado, and as much as I like home, I am such a different person here than I was there. I have changed so much, that going back to my high school seems like a nightmare. I have moved on from that part of my life, and now I know the day where I go back to it. It is really scary. But I still have a while before I go back, and I am told that as fast as this half goes, it is the better half, so I am looking forward to that. For all of you at home, Mark your calendars, I return to Summit County on the 27th of July.

And the end of January means....my birthday is coming up! I have been looking forward to this day, because finally I will be able to tell people my age without getting weird looks from everyone. That is because I am technically not even old enough to be in finnish high school. And it seems like half the people who go on exchange to Finland are 18. Sadly I will only be turning 16, and therefore still won't be able to do the same stuff as all the other exchange students, but at least I am older...And it is my sweet sixteen, which is not a very big deal in Finland, 18 is the big deal in Finland because everything becomes legal so that is when you party. I find it a little sad that I will be celebrating my sixteenth in a country that it isn't a big deal, and then when I celebrate my eighteenth, I will also be in a country that it doesn't matter...so I get no big birthday bashes....but I may celebrate big on my seventeenth and make it a big deal. Just for the party....and of course I know that the summer after I turn 18 I will be abroad, so then I will party.

So anyways, January, what has happened? Well for starters I went to my first presidential debate. No, not american...finnish. Which is something that I never though would happen..my first live presidential debate and it is in a foreign country in a language that I don't understand...you could say that I never saw that coming. Finnish elections are tomorrow, so there are lot of politics going around in Finland. I haven't kept up with them really at all. I feel like I want to start understanding american politics before I take up another country's, and if I ever do pick up another country's politics, it will be Norway, since that is another country where I have citizenship. But it was seriously cool to go to. I didn't even plan on going to it, either. My best friend from Colorado, Monica, who I have mentioned in this blog before, was visiting me from her host city, Kauhajoki, and I was showing her the sights of Turku, and then we were going into the main mall, Hansa, and then we stumbled upon the debate, just as it started, and with my amazing crowd pushing techniques, I managed to get us in the second row. The debate itself wasn't all that impressive, like any other presidential debate, in finnish, but it was cool just being there. One of my favorite parts of living in Turku is the fact that you can randomly stumble on random, awesome things like a presidential debate.

The bridges across the river have pictures of all the candidates

(Also the flag in the corner is of Turku's coat of arms)

They have popped up all over town

In the mall, there were paintings/drawings of all the candidates

My favoriet portrait of Finland's president...

All eight candidates in debate

I have to say, even though I know that Hansa is like the god of all malls and anything that is anything happens there, I was quite amused that they were having a big, televised presidential debate right next to H&M, a bit different from american presidential debates I guess....

I also got presidential pins for free, and they are on my blazer now :D 

Now the Oldies have left (Oldies are exchange students that came to Finland last January and stayed a year, most from Australia) and now it is time to get Newbies! The arrive in Finland tomorrow, and then they have a language camp, like we did. Many of us, now Oldies (feels so strange to call myself an oldie...) will go to Tampere, and meet the Newbies when they visit Tampere during their language camp week, like we did. And I am looking forward to that so much because I get to see other exchange students who live all over Finland. And that will be great to see them again. I think that I will get much closer to the Newbies than our Oldies, because with most of our oldies, we only got to spend Lapland Tour together, but with the newbies, most of them will go on Euro tour, which will be a much better bonding experience since it is so much longer. But I still miss the oldies that I had in Turku..

My neighborhood

The snow has finally arrived here to stay. The city is nice without snow, but it is much nicer in the winter when there is snow. I also have to say that there is A LOT of ice! So much, I am surprise that I haven't fallen and killed myself already! Particularly the stairs that I use to get from my bus stop to my school every morning, they are the most dangerous stairs that I have ever seen! And I have to use them every day! It is terrible, but I haven't killed myself yet, so there is hope that I may last the whole year without dying...but if I do die on exchange, my money is that it will be those stairs...or the crazy drivers in this city...either one is incredibly dangerous...

Believe it or not this is a walking path....

Ice Skating anyone?

I finally got my Christmas package! After 5 weeks in the mail....haha, postal service sucks, but I am really happy to have it!

School has started up again and it is nice. I like all of my classes, and am hoping to get credit for several. It has been good so far. I have been continuing with my dancing classes. They are good, though a lot of the time I feel a bit helpless, but I am catching up fast. We learned the Tango, which is awesome to say that I know the Tango now, and we also learned a dance to the song Party Rock Anthem, which was awesome, and I think it is my favorite dance.

I got some clothing from my school now. Some of the senior clothes, because they don't have any other clothes really for the school. I have a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. The sweatpants are awesome, and they have the school name, and Turku written around the coat of arms for the city. The sweatshirt is also awesome, with "Luostarivuoren Lukio 2012" written on one side. The only thing I find actually a bit amusing, is that I will not be able to wear my hoodie to my school back home, because on the back it has a picture of Captain Morgan and it says "cABItain Morgan" (ABI being the finnish word for high school senior) and that is technically a reference to alcohol, and against the school dress code at home...haha, I find that a little funny, and a bit annoying...i think that I will probably just wear the hoodie anyways and whenever some teacher asks me about it I will say, no it doesn't say "Captain Morgan" it says "cABItain Morgan" and I don't know and alcoholic drinks called that....


Anyways, I'll have more updates later :D Moikka!

The Biggest Inland City In Scandinavia

Caution: This post is long because it has a ton of pictures in it. I really went overboard and uploaded all the stuff that I was going to put on Facebook.

Tampere. It is a very cool city. And like the title says, it is the biggest inland city in Scandinavia, which I thought was very cool. So on wednesday the 10 of August the entire language camp took a trip to Tampere, since it was very near to the camp, Karkku, which is near the town Sastamala. We left Karkku at like 12, right after lunch. It was probably about a 20-30 minute bus ride to the city. The bus ride gave me a little bit of a stomach/headache so I just stared out the window the whole way there. I love the scenery here. It is similar to Norway, and similar to Hawaii (in that everything is very green) but it is also unique in its own way.

On the bus (Canada and Chicago) 

 So then when the bus drove into the main part of the city and we picked up our tour guide. Then we drove around in the bus some more with our tour guide, and she told is about the parts of the city that we passed. It was a very nice tour, I thought that it was very informative. The city is very historical even though it is not a really old city. It is as old as the United States. But what I thought was very interesting was that it used to be a town with many factories, so they have a lot of abandoned factories, that now have been refurbished and made into apartment buildings and such. Which I thought was very cool. I would love to live in an old factory. It was very cool, and there were many old factories in the city. We also visited a cathedral in the city that was old, and it was very interesting because in like 1906 there were tons of painting in it that were very controversial at the time, and they make the church very unique. It was painted almost everywhere in the church. My favorite painting was the one of the ceiling which had the snake and the apple from genesis. It was very cool, and because it was on the ceiling it was even cooler.

A church in Tampere 

The girl from Chicago and I in front of one of the lakes of Tampere 

The view from the top of a hill of one of the lakes of Tampere 

This house was overlooking the same view, it also was the home of a famous finnish writer that lived a long time ago and now it is the home of some other writers. 

This was the Cathedral from the outside 

In front of the Cathedral 

Right in the Entrance 

Inside the Cathedral 

Inside again, you can see one of the paintings 

You can see the second floor, and there is the painting with several naked boys all carrying a vine, and each of the boys represented a different person from the bible, and you would be able to tell which is which by their face expression, if you were familiar with the bible. The weirdest thing is that one of them looked like a kid that was in my spanish class back in the US

The Organs 

The ceiling, with the serpent of paradise 

Kind of a blurry picture of the serpent, but the lighting was terrible inside 

The picture that was in the center of the room, though I don't think that it was the most famous picture in there 

 So Tampere is also the 3rd largest city in Finland. The First is Helsinki, the second is the Helsinki-Espoo area (I think). But when we were in the city and driving around, it didn't strike me as a huge city, for one thing, there were too many trees, so it made it feel like there was less of a city feeling because you couldn't see much. So it didn't have the city feeling that I have gotten from cities like Denver, Vegas, San Fran, or L.A. It didn't even have a similar feeling to the one that I get when I go to Norway and I stay in the "city" of Stavanger. It doesn't feel the same because you can't look around and see many building that are big and tall.

Nordic Walking!!!!! Yes, I took a picture of some old guy just because he was nordic walking...

After the tour was over we drove back to the city center and got off, while there we had several hours of free time in the city, we could've gone as far as we wanted as long as we could get back to the city square at the designated time. It was nice, I have not been used to that kinda of freedom, they basically just let s go and told us to be back at 5:45. So, I went with three other friends that I was sitting with on the bus. The other girl from my home district in Colorado, a girl from Chicago, and a guy from Canada. We all walked around near the city plaza, and down near a harbor of one of the lakes that is near Tampere.  We first when to Hesburger, which is like finnish Mcdonalds, except they have Mcdonalds here, so it is not the same, it was pretty good, and I would say that it is better than Mcdonald's but Mcdonalds is basically in it's own category of taste, both bad and good. Also when we got off the bus and inside Hesburger we met a lot of the Australians that have been here since January, they are called Oldies and then they will leave in December and then in January new Australians will come and we will be their oldies. I met my Turku oldies too, a girl from Australia and a girl from South Africa, because all of the southern hemisphere (not counting south america) leaves in January.

Inside the Hesburger 

Finnish Fast food

It says Kiitos in finnish! (thank you) 

Then, when we were down by the harbor we bought some mansikkat (strawberries) from a vendor there, and we split it between the 4 of us. Then I also found a vendor there that was selling scarves for cheap, only 3 euros each, which I thought was very good for Europe. So I bought two. Then I also bought some Ice Cream from a vendor there and it was very good. I also ordered it in Finnish! Even though it was only two words that I actually spoke I just said "Yksi Softis" and then she said something really fast but I recognized the word for Chocolate so I said "Vanilija" knowing that she was asking for the flavor, so it was so great. Then we walked around some more and went into a bunch of different stores and we tried pronoucing and speaking Finnish as much as we can. It was great to be around those kids who wanted to speak finnish just as much as I did, so we were all very motivated and it was very fun to go out and take our newly learned vocabulary and try to test it out. It was very fun. Different than anything else that I have ever done. But very great. So then after we had wandered around for several hours we went back to the bus and eventually drove home to Karkku. After a dinner at the camp we went to a church that was pretty close to the camp and at the church we hung out for a little while and a some people read poems and sung songs, it was pretty cool, and the church was huge. Then we came home and maybe stayed up for a while longer then went to bed.

The other church 

Inside it 

This post is kinda late because I am already at my host family's home and we went there on wednesday, so I will post again soon about my new home. Hopefully before school starts on Tuesday!