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Published: November 12th 2008
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Sorry for the delay in blogging, still not quite used to it but there needs to be an update or two.
I guess it was about a month and a half ago now 31 of my exchange student friends and I spent two nights at cabins in Northern Sweden. The drive north was a little over an hour. We were greeted by a beautiful lake surrounded by trees. The eight cabins we stayed in were the only buildings around the lake besides a few wood storage huts. We had to keep them heated with wood burning stoves. There was no running water or electricity besides from the overhead lights which were powered by a solar panel on the side of each cabin. It was a very serene location that included two large saunas and a half dozen rowboats to pass the time with. During the days we spent time rowing and conversing. At night we took full advantage of the sauna next to the cold lake and partied. It is a rush jumping in the October lake the first time. Once you get in once you have to keep going though. It was a lot of fun and we plan
on going again in the winter to do some cross country skiing. It looked a lot like the great outdoors of Minnesota, eerily so. There are very few people who live this far north in Sweden so it was nice to get away from our computers and civilization for a few nights.
Two weekends ago my a few of my roommates and friends took a road trip from Luleå to Tampere, Finland. The drive took us to the Sweden-Finland boarder above the Baltic Sea and directly south through Finland. The drive to Tampere was about 9 hours. My roommate Markus' friend Nicholas (Niky) is on exchange studies there so we were able to celebrate halloween with him while he showed us the town. The first day we were there a Young Finn cut us off and put a nice dent in the side of our rental car. Because his story and our driver's weren't the same, we had to go to the police station. The whole ordeal took about two hours and it was not a pleasant start (update:our rental car company did not charge us for the accident because it wasn't our fault). Tampere is a bustling town
of around 200,000..but not as fun as Luleå.
We took off to Helsinki (a two hour drive south) the night after halloween to catch a ferry to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Our ferry ended up being delayed for six hours so we spent the day checking out Helsinki (and had the worst chinese buffet I've ever had) but because it was "all saints day" all of the stores were closed. We ended up catching the ferry to Tallinn later that day. Granted I only spent a day in Helsinki it is
nothing compared to Stockholm. All of the architecture is really similar (except for the orthodox pillars and statues from the Russian rule) and it is much smaller and lacking compared to Stockholm.
It was an hour and a half ferry ride. We took a small catamaran style ferry because it was the fastest and cheapest. It was a bit rocky because of high seas and a few of my traveling mates got a little queasy. Once we arrived in Tallinn it took us about an hour to find our hostel (it was hidden by construction on its facade). Old Tallinn is a beautiful city. Many of
the buildings are very old, there are castle remains in the center of the city in a hill. The streets are all cobblestone (many shoddily made) and it feels like a Europe of old. Our favorite part about Tallinn was that everything was half the price of sweden. This enticed us to empty our pocket books a little more than any of us had planned. They had many pubs that we are not accustomed to in Luleå, so my scottish buddies and I were happy to go on a pub crawl for the first time this year. We spent a day walking around 'new' Tallinn. It wasn't very enjoyable and some of the tentements were definitely from the communist rule of the USSR. There was a building in old town that had a shrine dedicating it to those Estonians who shed their blood during this time. The building marked the execution basement of the KGB. This history can be felt from the sad faces of the elderly. On a good note the Economy in Estonia is flourishing. According to one source we met there beer from the pub is twice as expensive as it was 3 years ago. Not to
good for us but we're from Sweden so we can't complain much. I recommend to everybody to spend a night and day in Tallinn if you are in that area of the world it was by far the best part of this trip.
I was able to spend the day with Emily while in Tallinn on her birthday! She was there on a cruise ship from Stockholm with her school and we worked it out so we would be there at the same time. It was a really great day and since I had been there for two days before I was a pretty good tour guide.
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