YAY for pancakes!

For some reason I feel that Spring is right around the corner, but this past week has reminded me it is indeed still winter in Helsinki. It snowed on Thursday and Friday. It is not a pretty snow though. It is a very wet slosh snow that is gross when it hits the ground- not fun to walk in. Luckily today, Saturday, was sunny with blue skies!! I am telling you, you don’t realize how much you love those blue skies until you only see them once in a while. I did see some very white snow this past weekend. A group of us went to Porvoo, the second oldest town in Finland. It was really neat! We had to ride the bus about an hour just to get there, but the view on the way there was beautiful. The sun was actually out most of the day then too. It is just so pretty to see the sun shining down on the white snow. I have been very lucky to have 2 sunny Saturdays in a row.

Porvoo is actually a fishing village, I think… When we first got there we saw a lot of ice fishermen, which I thought was so neat! I know they are in the States too, but I have never seen anyone actually ice fish! I thought about joining one of them and learn the ropes on how to ice fish, but I thought that might just creep out a Finn to the max. It surprised me how ice fishing is a very individual sport. Everyone had their own section where they sat by themselves, even though they were only a couple feet from each other. We actually walked along the frozen river, which I think would be so pretty to see in the summer. I was a little nervous about walking on the ice, but the one of the fisherman told me he was 400% sure it was safe. We really just walked around looking at all the colored wooden houses, most in a dark red tent. It was a very sweet town I would say. I just find it so amazing that I walked in a place with so much history! I mean, yea, we have history in the U.S., but not like this. Just to think of all the memories and people who had lived there was really incredible to me. We also saw this really old train station in Porvoo. The side of the train said “Soumi” which means Finland in Finnish. That was pretty cool to me as well for some reason. Basically, I was like a kid in a candy shop in Porvoo, or really anytime I site see. To give you a picture of what sweet Porvoo looked like, it reminded me of Maine. I have never been to Maine, so I could be wrong. But it was like a little sea-side town, that supposedly Maine is actually modelled after. It was also more “Finnish” than the city of Helsinki is, or at least what we exchange students think of as “Finnish”.

I have been going to the sauna on a more regular basis now. I may have already written about this, but my building has free sauna nights. Guys get Tuesdays and Fridays whereas girls get Wednesdays and Saturdays. We actually have two saunas in the building, one with a pool and one without. The one with the pool is only open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The past couple weeks we have been going to both the Wednesday one and the Saturday one. I am about to reveal way too much information, but I have also been going naked! I feel so European, kind of. Every week it gets less and less awkward. If you know me at all you know I am a pretty modest person, so this is huge for me.

As for classes, I have not been writing much about them. That is because I have not been doing much with them. I mean I am going to class and doing my reading, but it is almost like a joke. The amount of reading I do in a week here is about one days reading at Maryville. Attending class I feel like is also a joke. The Philosophy class I am taking doesn’t end until April 30^th, but our professor gave us our exam topics this past week. He also said that we could turn it in as early as we wanted. So, basically, I could write my essay, turn it in mid March or something, and never attend class again… not very smart on the teacher’s part I think. Don’t worry all you parents out there reading this, I am going to my classes and doing my work - I am just realizing a couple loop holes in the system. It is really scary though to think that my only grade for the course is the essay or exam I turn in at the end of the period.

This past week was a little hectic for everyone exam and essay wise since it was the end of the first teaching period. Next week is our “spring break”. I only had only course end, my Intro to Film and Music course. I simply had to watch a movie, write about a couple musical cues in the film, and submit it via email. That’s it. I am done. Crazy, right? I still have my two other courses, Anthropology and Philosophy. Next week after break I pick up two more classes that I am really excited about. One is another Anthropology course, which is the whole reason I am at Helsinki, and the other is a Theology course looking at song lyrics in Soul, Jazz, Blues, Rock-n-Roll, and Gospel music. How neat is that?

Monday, the start of out break, my Australian friend Asha and I are going to Riga, Latvia and then back to Tallinn, Estonia for a couple days. This is my first real travelling adventure outside Helsinki!! I am so excited! I can’t wait to see more of Europe. I am getting pretty anxious though too see everything, which is becoming a problem. I just want to see everything, which is impossible for the small amount of time I have to travel. The whole month of May is free for me to travel, but I have a plane ticket back to Memphis on May 30^th – So I have exactly a month to try and fit in everything I can. As of now it looks like a friend of mine and I are going to the UK, France, Belgium, and hopefully Italy. We only have two weeks to try and see all those amazing places because I am going to spend about a week with Abbie at her house in Edinburgh. Then, we will go from Edinburgh to Berlin, where we will meet up with Asha. Our goal is to go from Berlin to Prague, and hopefully to Budapest… but I only have a week to fit in those places because of my plane ticket. In other words, May is going to be a crazy busy month where I am going to try and fit in as much of Europe as I can. But I am not even hitting Spain, Greece, or really any Eastern European countries besides the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Whew, enough about my future plans which may not be exciting for anyone but me. I know this has been pretty long like all my other posts, but I only have one last thing to write about – Shrove Tuesday. As you all know this past Tuesday was Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday…. Anyways, it is also known as Pancake Day (really crepes). I have wanted to learn how to make these crepes from scratch that all the French just whip out like it is nothing. So, Abbie and I invited a couple people over to my room to try and make these pancakes. We printed out a recipe, but we were banking on the French and Belgians to show us the ropes. Unfortunately, they all had their own way of doing it. We ended up with 2 French, 3 Belgians, 1 Italian, and 1 Estonian all wanting to use their own recipe. In the end we kind of combined them all, but they were really good. Abbie and I had the honor of flipping the crepes, which we of course did not get as thin as the Belgians would have liked. It was really fun, and they turned out pretty good considering Abbie and I flipped them, but I still do not how to make them! When I asked them how much they use for everything (which is also hard since I used cups, they used litres, and Abbie used grams), they said you just have to look at it… so yea, I don’t know exactly how to make them just yet.

In Helsinki, Shrove Tuesday was also celebrated by this huge sledding event. There was a competition to see who could make the best sled. We saw the coolest inventions. Many people had couches on skies, which worked amazing as a sled! Another group had a huge stereo on their sled. It was crazy! There were so many tents with free hot drinks, pea soup, and the traditional donuts for Shrove Tuesday, as well as a DJ, and hundreds of people sledding down this huge hill! We were also right by the ocean, so this other American named Brad, an Australian named Ashley, and I walked on the frozen sea. I was freaked out the whole time, but I still stood on it for a little bit. Then, we saw this huge crack in the ice! That was the moment I jetted off that ice and onto safe land. It was neat though to be able to walk on the ocean, even though I walked on the river that weekend.

The pictures above are of Joanna and I on the frozen river in Porvoo, a group shot in Porvoo, a picture of me with the cool Suomi train, Abbie and I trying to make crepes, and a cool sled invention.