Easter Basket, Boat Trip, and District Conference

Hey everyone. Wow, it's really been awhile. Sorry, I guess I've just been busy. It's really hard to find time to write in here these days. Between school, basketball, and hanging out with my friends I feel like I'm always busy. Anyway, here it goes.

On March 11th I went to the theater and saw a really cool show. It was called "Kvinna på halvtid" (Part-Time Woman). It was what is known as physical theater which is where there is more movement and sort of dancing type of stuff than talking. At first I thought it was going to be really boring, but it ended up being really great! It was nice because I totally understood everything they said. Usually when we go to the theater I can understand what happens and stuff, but I don't always get all the words because they speak so fast and it is often hard to hear them. However, this time I totally understood everything. So that was cool.

On the 13th I went with my host father to a modern art gallery opening. That was certainly interesting. I've never been to an art gallery opening before. We got all these nifty little snacks and sipped champagne while browsing the "art". Haha, some of it was pretty good, but some of it.....not so much. I swear there was one little corner where the art was like someone had painted the wall blue. It was a bit ridiculous.

One day I actually got a chance to walk on the ice. I was meeting my counselor and she had her dog with her so we decided to take him for a walk. We started walking on the ice, and by ice I mean on top of the frozen sea! At first I was a little scared because I wasn't sure how thick it was. However, people walk and skate and drive snow mobiles and stuff on the ice all the time here, so I wasn't really scared. Plus, I saw that there were fresh ski tracks there and they didn't end in any big holes or anything. So I knew I was safe. It was a pretty cool experience though.

Easter weekend was really exciting. I spent the entire weekend in Lahti (a fairly large town in Central Finland). We were at a tournament called Easter Basket. It didn't occur to me until much later that the name of this tournament, if you haven't become accustomed to calling basketball "basket", can be taken in a totally nonbasketball way. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not. Anyway, we were leaving for the tournament at the crack of dawn on Friday morning, but my host family was leaving Thursday to go to their summer cottage for the weekend, so I ended up spending Thursday night at my friend Ella's house. We basically spent the whole day eating tons of Easter chocolate and her grandmother's freshly baked bread. It was yummy, but certainly fattening. It's a good thing we were going to be spending the whole weekend playing basketball. Anyway, on Friday we drove to Lahti and played two games. We lost the first one pretty badly, but we hadn't been expecting to win it. However, we won the second game, so that was good. On Saturday we had to play our first game at 8:00 AM. Ughhhh! It would decide whether we would go on to play for 5-8th place or 9th-12th place. We lost by 3 points!! It really stunk. It's so hard when you lose and it's so close like that. Plus, we had woken up so early! After the game we went and ate some yummy hotel breakfast. Seriously, hotels in Finland have REALLY good breakfast. Later that night we played another game, with the absolute worst referees ever. They were apparently Estonian, and one of them actually didn't know some of the rules of basketball. It was ridiculous. To make things even worse we played against this team who apparently didn't understand the concept that you can't just attack people when you are playing. It actually got to the point where I thought someone might get seriously injured, and I'm really surprised no one got thrown out. However, we ended up winning. The other team really wasn't that good, just incredibly violent. On Sunday we played our final game in the morning. We ended up losing. We really didn't play very well. I think everyone was just tired and wanted to go home. One interesting thing that happened was that one of my friends ended up getting 6 fouls in the game. This is really quite the achievement seeing as you are kicked out of the game after 5 fouls. However, apparently you can still receive a technical foul after being kicked out. So, anyway, that was something I'd never seen happen before. We got back to Vaasa late and I went out to the club with some of my friends. These two clubs joined together and were having this special discount night. The club was so packed that they stopped letting people in at 1:00AM. It was really fun and I guess a rather unorthodox Easter. Oh, another thing I should mention about Easter is the really cool chocolate eggs they have here. They are made by Fazer, the Finnish chocolate company, and it's a real egg shell which the egg has been taken out of and they replaced it with chocolate. It's very interesting to crack open an egg and find chocolate. It's REALLY good though.

In the beginning of April I went on the boat to Sweden again. This time I just went with some of my friends. We got this really great deal: a bus ride to Turku, boat ticket, and a bus ride back to Vaasa all for 14 €! All of that would usually cost like 100€. Basically the only point of going on the boat is to party and buy stuff tax free, and that's exactly what we did. It was alot of fun. It's kind of funny though, I've been on the boat to Stockholm twice, but I've never actually been there.

The following weekend we had our big Rotary district conference. This meant I got to see all the other exchange students from our district, which is always fun. We went there on Saturday morning and sat through meetings all morning. It was really boring. Then in the afternoon we went bowling and then to this fancy Rotary dinner. Then we, all the exchange students, spent the night in this cottage thing. A couple of us, being the geniuses that we are, decided to stay up all night. It was fun, but I was really tired the next day. We had to go to church in the morning, and then we just waited for our rides home. Again, it was fairly boring. Rotary here is kind of bad at planning stuff for us.

Sorry it's been so long since I've updated. I will try to do it more often. You can expect another update really soon since I have to write about when Mom came. I'm not up to it right now though. I hope everyone is doing well. Thanks for reading.

P.S. Sorry about no pictures again, but I swear next time there will be some.

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