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Published: January 15th 2007
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Moi! (Hi!)
Mitä kuuluu? (How are you?) My first class - Survival Finnish 1 began today and I’m beginning to learn some basic phrases. Hopefully I won’t be as lazy with Finnish as I was with French because I’m still having trouble shopping at the grocery store and so I actually need to be able to understand a bit of Finnish (unlike French since everything at home is bilingual).
I had a great weekend exploring Helsinki! 17 of us international students took the train down on Friday afternoon and stayed in a hostel that is part of the Olympic Stadium near the city-centre of Helsinki. Helsinki hosted the Summer Olympics in 1952 and a section of the stadium is now a very nice hostel. The walk from the hostel to the city-centre is about 20 minutes and during the walk, you pass some really old buildings, a scenic lake and museums. I’m not much for walking but I didn’t mind this one because there were so many interesting things to see along the way. Because we’re all poor exchange students, we walked everywhere (which is common for Finns) so while I would rarely walk 20 minutes to get from
Cathedral
Manel doing his best Rocky impression place-to-place back home, it wasn’t so bad making the 20 minute trip at various points during the weekend.
The first night was spent settling in at the hostel and checking out the nightlife (i.e. partying!). Before you start thinking that the whole weekend was spent this way, I’m going to cut you off and let you know that we all experienced other aspects of the city than its bars and nightclubs! The nightlife in Helsinki is quite active as it’s the capital of Finland. Thankfully, the centre isn’t too spread out, so we didn’t have to walk far to get from place-to-place once we made it to the centre.
Saturday was the busiest and most productive day I’ve had in a LONG time. We found out from the night before that travelling in the entire group of 17 was really inefficient (and also very frustrating) so we each split up into groups according to what kinds of things people wanted to do. I ended up with the same people I spend a lot of time with in Jyväskylä and we had a great day! We began by heading to the train station where the Info Centre is found
Cathedral
The church organs and were told that we weren’t far from some major attractions (the Cathedral, Modern Art Museum, main shopping area and the Stone Church). While the big white Lutheran Cathedral was beautiful, the Temppeliaukio (literally ‘rock’) church was my favourite site of the day. It’s located in Temppeliaukio Square and in order to maintain the rock formation of the square, it was decided that the church would be built into the rock as much as possible. The architecture itself is impressive but the main reason that the experience was so great was because of the atmosphere inside of the church. It’s very simple inside: pews, an alter, some candles and the skylight, but, it’s so quiet, peaceful, and unassuming that you just feel really comfortable sitting there in silence. Some churches make me feel uncomfortable because they’re very formal and ornate. The Stone Church was a completely different experience and if anyone ever makes it to Finland, you should definitely make time to visit it!
After visiting the Cathedral (which was impressive!) and the Stone Church, we decided to do some skating! Being Canadian, you’d expect that it wouldn’t be such a big deal to go skating but other than
the one time I went before I left home, Saturday was the first time I’ve skated in years. Thankfully I haven’t lost all of my skills (i.e. I wasn’t just ‘walking’ on the ice) and so I didn’t embarrass myself in front of the others who were expecting me to show them how it’s done! Even though I didn’t fall once, I was definitely shown up by quite a few kids!
After another relatively late night out, we decided to do some more sightseeing before taking the train back to Jyväskylä. Unfortunately, the weather decided not to cooperate and we were only able to make it to one museum before deciding that we weren’t going to walk in the sleety and windy weather anymore! We were tired of being wet so we visited the Modern Art Museum located two minutes away from the train station. It was a good choice because I loved what I saw there! I’m no art guru but there were some amazing exhibits. One exhibit in particular was a dark room with what can only be described as a “bubble” at the far end of the room. The bubble was made out of some weird
Pond near the hostel
Do ducks migrate? This seemed so weird to me. rubbery material and when you stepped inside of it, you had the weird feeling that this is what a womb might look like… There wasn’t any sort of description as to what the exhibit meant so I’m just interpreting based on what I thought.
It was a very satisfying and fun weekend but it was good to get back to my apartment, which is beginning to feel more like ‘home’. The vacation is over (although, there are quite a few more trips that are being planned) and it’s time to get back into my ‘school mode’!
Hei hei! (Bye!)
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Brian
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wanna trade?
Helsinki looks great. At the moment I would happily trade a week of my Aussie summer for a week of your Finland winter. Keep the blogs and pictures coming, and be sure to kick Miika Kipprusoff in the balls if you see him.