New Info!

On Friday night after dinner, everyone came back to our flat until we had to take Charlotte to the bus station. We called the taxi just before 1:00am and her bus was at 1:45am. The taxis are unpredictable and can show up within 3 mins after calling or you can wait for 45 mins, since it was a Friday night, we thought it might take a while. It ended up coming right away which ment we were at the bus station at 1:00 and had to wait outside in just above freezing weather for 45 minutes. We got back to our flat at 2:30 but didn't fall asleep for a while cause we were too cold!
On Saturday Jackie and I walked into the city for lunch and coffee. That night we went out to Kharma night club with Deirdre, Anastasia, Zdenek, Jonas, Nickos, Daniel, Shane and Lisa(Deirdre's friend from Ireland). Although, the music wasn't too great and everyone was really rude. Sunday was a lazy day, we watched Ice Age.
Today, I went into school for lunch and a meeting to plan the Stammtisch for English speaking countries, which is on Thursday! Somehow we ended up with the theme, Wild Wild West, which was decided a while ago. No one is too happy about it because it doesn't have too much to do with the English countries (US, Canada, England, Wales and Ireland), except a few states in the US. We tried for a graffitti party where everyone wears white shirts and brings a marker and you can draw or write on everyone elses shirt but the bar our party is at was worried people would graffitti the walls, too. We also tried to change it to Reality TV. But they made us stick with Wild West. So, we decided to have a piñata (which Jackie, Kyle and I have to make), pin the tail on the donkey and potato sack races. Our "special drink" for the night will be whiskey.
Last night I tried to locate some family that may be in Finland, I didn't have any luck but I did find:
Keranen= Finnish (Keränen): possibly from Keräpää, a nickname for a bald person or someone with a round head and/or with closely cropped hair, + the common surname suffix -nen. In eastern Finland the name dates back to the 16th century.
Neimi= Finnish: from niemi ‘peninsula’, ‘headland’, originally a habitational name from a farm so named for its situation. In the late 19th century it was a popular ornamental adoption, so much so that people then began to change it for a less common name. It occurs chiefly in western Finland. In America, it is also found as an abbreviation of other surnames containing this element, such as Rajaniemi, Sotaniemi, and Syrj(a:)niemi.
- From the information I have it looks like Neimi was Great Grandpa's father's birth father's (Charles Niemi) last name and his father' step father's (Herman Keranen) last name was Keranen. It is a little confusing, and I'm not sure if that is accurate.
Pekkala= no records, Great Grandpa's mother's maiden name
Saarinen= Finnish: variant of Saari + the common surname suffix -nen. Found chiefly in western Finland. Mostly, this is an ornamental name adopted during the name conversion movement at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
- Great Grandma's father's last name was Saarinen; he was born in Rauma in Western Finland.
Hopponen= no records, Great Grandma's mother's maiden name
I also located a family tree that would appear to have Great Grandpa Keranen, his father and Great Grandma's father all on it. Although, I am not 100% sure. When I get more information, I'll let everyone know.

More Pictures

At about 1am in our flat before taking Charlotte to the train station. Charlotte(UK), Lotte, Merel, Barbra (Netherlands), Lisa (Ireland), Johannes (Germany) Jackie, me and Christoph (Germany)

Cor helped my get rid of the reindeer skin

Charlotte, Me, Jackie and Merel in H&M

Cor, Merel and Jackie at the African Stammtisch

African Stammtisch: Jungle theme. Pekka (Finland), Anastasia (Russia), Daniel (Switzerland), Dalma (Hungary) and Zdenek (Czech Republic)

Fergie, Stefan and Gunter at the Stammtisch

Me, Charlotte and Merel at Merel's flat

Everyone in Pekka's flat before Stammtisch. Charlotte, Me, Lotte, Meagan, Maiju, Dalma, Merel, Jonas, Daniel, Pekka, Zkenek and Lucien

After a long week..

Hello everyone!
On Monday I began to study for my Strategic Managment exam I just took this morning. Jackie came back from Germany too; so Charlotte and I picked her up from the train station and we went for pizza.
On Tuesday Jackie and I went to Lozzi (our favorite cafeteria on campus) for lunch with Daniel, Fergie, Els and Lucien. After lunch, I went to the library with Fergie to study StratMan. That night was more studying and I also helped Charlotte pack some, she will leave today to go back to England. On Wednesday I woke up at 8 and went straight into the library to study StratMan and at noon I took my Survival Finnish exam, which went well. I met with Jackie at Lozzi and we had lunch with Anaita and Mickael (France), Stefan and Gunter (Austria) Anastasia (Russia) and Dalma (Hungary). After lunch it was back to the library for a few more hours of studying! I went back to my apartment for about an hour before meeting Rebeca (Mexico) Charlotte, and Collette to walk to a dinner that was put on for the International students. At the dinner, we had a speaker then performances by a signing and a dancing group on campus. Not going to lie, the singing was a little scary to watch and no one could help but laugh, even the Finnish students (all Finnish kids who work with international students were invited, too). After, we had dinner, which was spicy meatballs, lemon zucchini, greek salad, rice bread and wine. I hung around with my neighbor, Pekka, who is Finnish for a lot of the night.
On Thursday I has class from 8-4 with an hour lunch break. I met Jackie and Daniel at Lozzi to find that our lunch was leftovers from the night before. Although, the meatballs did have a sweet sauce on them. I studied a lot after class then went to Rentukka for another Stammtisch party. This one was put on my the Russian students and was themed Circus. Since my exam was at 8 this morning, I only stayed for a little while. But I had to go because it was Anastasia's 21st birthday and Pekka's going away party since he left today to go to Germany on a student exchange.
I was up early again today for my exam, which was a little more difficult than anyone thought, but it still went okay. Tonight I will be going to Anastasia's flat for a while then to dinner with Charlotte, Jackie, Deirdre, Merel, Christoph and Johannes before we take Charlotte to the bus station at 1am for her bus to Helsinki.
As you can see this week was not exciting and consisted of a lot of studying! However, it has been sunny all week and the sun is coming up around 5am and going down around 7pm. Although, it is extremely cold still! I do not have class for a week and a half, so I am planning to go to Helsinki and Joensuu this week or next!

Since I've been back...

I got back to Finland on Wendesday around 6:00pm. After I unpacked, I went to the City Bar just behind my apartment for pizza with Deirdre, Anastasia, Shane and Merel. I was updated on all of the gossip...everytime I leave I feel like I have missed an episode of an MTV reality show or something.
On Thursday, I studied in the morning and met with my Finnish Family in the afternoon. Before I went to France, our little group of families told me and the other American girls they wanted us to cook them dinner. However, they wanted us to do it right before their Finnish-American Society meeting, so it had to be quick. Jaime and Elizabeth decided they wanted to do grilled cheese and tomato soup with sundaes. We made enough grilled cheese for everyone to have 2 sandwiches. About half way through dinner, we remembered that in Finland, dinner is the small meal...everyone (except Jamie, Elizabeth and I) only ate half of a sandwich. We had a TON of grilled cheese left! After dinner, we went to the society meeting and brought the stuff for the sundaes with us for everyone at the meeting. We had coffee or tea with sundaes, pulla bread and cookies in the meeting while Alex, a 19 year old who was born in Finland but grew up in Washington state, was talking about living in America. He has been in Finland staying with his grandma(who is in the society) for 3 months and is trying to decide if he will stay in Finland or go back to Washington. That night I watched Madagascar 2 with Charlotte, Meagen, Merel, Lotte, Barbra, Johannes, and Christoph; for a kids movie, it is pretty depressing at times, but definitely a spin off of the Lion King. I studied for the rest of the night.
On Friday I had my exam for Life Course and Old Age. Testing is done very different here. Instead of taking an exam with your class, everyone in the entire department takes exams together on a predetermined day each month and you have to register for the exam a week prior. So all 200 of us, taking around 10 different exams, had to stand outside while the examiners called or names to give us our test envelops with our exam in it. Since directions were given in English, I had to ask one of the examiners to translate. She looked at me then looked at my test envelope then pointed to my last name and said "you Finnish, you should speak Finnish" then walked away. So I sat there clueless. After my exam, which went well, I hope. I went to the library to work on some essays for a class I missed while I was in France. On Friday night, I went to city bar with a bunch of people for karaoke. I sang a few songs with my friends before the live band came in. The band was pretty funny but they sang all of their songs in Finnish, I only recognized one, Like A Virgin. We left around 11 and I went to bed.
On Saturday I went into the center with Merel, Cor and Charlotte. We had lunch walked around a few stores and had sundaes. We came back and disposed of the untreated reindeer fur my roommate had been hiding in the closet for over a month and that I only found because our apartment smelled horrible when I came back from France. I hung out with Cor for a little bit then began to study for my Strategic Management exam I have on friday. At around 10:00 I went to a Dutch Party in my friends flat, then we all went to meet up with some other friends at the night club Kharma. Night clubs play the strangest music sometimes, last night we heard: Mombo Number 5, 2 Backstreet Boys songs, Bad Boys(the theme song to COPS) and 5 Spice Girls songs..in a row! But everyone seems to enjoy it. I hung out with Pekka, my finnish friend, for a while after and went to sleep.
I have been back for 4 days and it has been sunny for 3 of them, now we are up to around 8 days of sun since I've been here!
I am currently trying to look up some relatives that are still in Finland, although it is a bit difficult. Within the next 3 weeks I plan to travel to Joensuu and hopefully, Rauma(the 2 main places the family is from). I have been told that Rauma is an extremely small town and a little difficult to get to. Also, they speak a very different dialect of Finnish and most Finns who aren't from that area cannot understand them; and their English is limited also.
Now, it is Sunday morning and I will study all day...horray!

P.S..I will keep the white, I recieved a ton of messges from people saying they liked it better :)

France and Germany!

I was informed that the red writing on the blue background is hard to read, so I changed it; let me know if this is still difficult to read! J

We left Kortepohja (my apartment complex) around 5:30pm on Friday March 13th. Greg had bought our train tickets and was waiting at the train station. Some how we missed the train but seconds, we were reaching to push the button that opens the door when the train took off…talk about frustrating. So we had to change our tickets and wait for the 7:22pm train. So in the meantime we had dinner at Hesburger (Finnish McDonalds).
Our train ride to Tampere was about an hour and a half then we took a bus to the airport. I was warned to “not get scared” when walking into the Tampere airport and I understood as soon as I stepped inside, it looked like a garage! We flew out of Tampere at 10:55pm and landed in London about 3 hours later. We were lucky enough to have to sleep in the airport since our flight from London to Marseille wasn’t until 8:55am. Surprisingly, there were so many people sleeping in the airport, we had a hard time finding a place to crash. The three of us ended up cuddling on the tile floor because it was so cold! We woke up 2 hours later to a lady who works at the airport kicking us to get up.
We landed in Marseille around 10:30am and took a bus into town. Marseille from a distance looks really nice, but once you are inside the city, it doesn’t look so nice and there is a ton of graffiti. We got lunch of a small café then got on a boat that took us out onto the Mediterranean Sea and to a small island about 30 minutes off the coast of Marseille. The island was really cute. We walked around a bit and Jackie and I got some ice cream. We took the boat back into Marseille about an hour later to take the train up to Avignon. We got lost trying to find the train station for about an hour but stumbled across a really cool monument we were hoping to see. No one spoke English so it was really hard to get directions from anyone and I am useless with a map. We managed to find our way to the train station about 10 minutes before the last train was leaving to Avignon! The ride was about an hour and 45 minutes. We were meeting up with Greg’s mom in Avignon, she is a high school teacher and was chaperoning a school trip through France and Spain, so she let us stay at their hotel. After we got off the train, no one could tell us how to get to the hotel, so we found a taxi driver who said he knew where it was. After getting lost, for a while, the taxi driver found the hotel and only charged us 10euros when the fare was about 30euros but it was his fault. The hotel looked like something straight out of the Caribbean. The rooms were two floors with bedrooms, a living area and a kitchen. We stayed in a room with five high school girls who had a lot of gossip all the time. We went to sleep just shortly after getting to the hotel.
The next day we wandered around the city for a while. We went to a church and a garden where you could see out above the entire city. From there we went to another church and to le Palis des Papes, the Popes house. And then we had lunch; we went to a fancy outdoor restaurant. I got beef tartar, Jackie got duck and Greg got lamb. We also got desert, I got a scoop of chocolate ice cream and a chocolate fountain cake and Jackie got a scoop of raspberry sherbet and a raspberry and whipped cream kind of thing. One of the options for desert was goat cheese, and for some reason Greg did order it for desert. After lunch we went to Pont D’Avignon, a bridge that was built years and years ago. The story is, a man was told by God that he needed to build a bridge across the river to connect two cities that were not getting along at the time. He told some people in the city and they build it. However, today only about half of the bridge is still there. We walked out on it and it was so windy! Avignon is known as the city of violent winds. Then, we went to a small coffee shop and I got a coffee au lait, coffee with milk. We tried to find a shop that was still selling crepes since I have never had one, but everyone was out. So for dinner we got hotdogs from a small shop. These hot dogs were 2 dogs on a grilled baguette with ketchup, spicy sauce and French fries on it. However, it was probably one of the spiciest things I have ever eaten. We walked back to the hotel and talked with Greg’s mom and her friend, Sue, for a while and went to bed.
On Monday morning we left early to go to the train station to take the train to Nimes. The school trip left shortly after us and actually drove by us as we were walking and picked us up and drove us to the train station. We had to wait an hour or so for the train, so we got some bread, nutella and fruit and ate breakfast in the park. Greg’s watch was wrong so we had to run to the train station and barely made it; I was stepping onto the train as the door was closing! When we got to Nimes, we went straight to the coliseum. We listened to the video recording and walked all the way to the top. We stayed there for nearly 2 hours. Then we went to the Maison Carrée and watch a 3D movie about the history of Nimes inside. Then we went to a tower that looks out over the city. It was a hike to the top of the hill and once we were inside, we had to climb some rickity spiral staircase. Now, I’m not a fan of heights and everything we had done on the trip involved being wayy up high. It took me forever to get down and by the time I reached the bottom, I was shaking and not breathing well. On the bright side, the view was really nice! I finally got a crepe on the way back to the train station. I got one with nutella on it! We took the train into Montpellier and got there around 6. We had dinner and walked around the city. We found some parks and cool buildings. We stayed there until all of the creepers started coming out and then took a taxi to the airport. We had to stay the night in the airport once again because of our early flight to Frankfurt. This time we were able to sleep on some nice metal benches and had a cold breeze from somewhere blowing on us all night, but we did sleep for about 7 hours.
We flew into Frankfurt, Germany in the morning and then had a 2 hour bus ride to Mannheim where Greg’s friend lives. His friend, Milos, picked us up from the bus station and we went to his apartment and showered then went to get some weiner schnitzel. That night we went to a national German play-off hockey game between Mannheim and Strassburg. We hung out with some of Milos and Greg’s friends that night.
The next morning I had to be back at the bus station at 5:30am for my 10am flight back to Jyvaskyla. Greg and Jackie are still in Germany but I had to come back for an exam that was today.

France Pictures and Videos

Marseille from the fort

Marseille Harbor

Marseille Harbor

On the island

The island off the coast of Marseille

Marseille from the boat on the Mediterannean Sea

Avignon

Inside le Palis des Papes

The bridge


Candy!

le Colisuem

Sitting on the top of the Colisuem, Nimes behind me

Colisuem video!

Maison Carrée

Video from the tower in Nimes

Montpellier

Mannheim hockey game

I'm back!

I got back into Jyvaskyla on March 2nd, after 24 hours of planes, a train, a taxi and a bus.
Last week was school work on top of school work. I started my Health Psychology class, and my professor, Ms. Wacker, is from Virginia.
Last weekend, I went to see "Confessions of a Shopaholic" with some friends. I'm not usually into the girly movies, but it was funny, I'd recommend it :) The movie, which is an American movie, ironically happens to have a lot of jokes about Finland which made it funnier for us to watch. There were also a few lines of Finnish in the movie, which I understood! The movie was in English and subtitled in Finnish and Swedish. However, when there were Finnish lines, the subtitles swtiched to English and Swedish. On Sunday night, I went to dinner with 14 of my friends from the Netherlands, Hungary, China, France, and Czech Republic. The waitress had the hardest time understanding me when I ordered, but not anyone else; I was the only native English speaker at the table. I am also starting to spend more time with the students from the Asian countries; it is interesting how interested they are in the US, sometimes a little uncomfortable though, when I don't know the answers to some of their questions.
I start a new class this week, Assessing Functional Capacity. For the first time in my life, there is a girl in my class with the same last name as me...of course, she does spell it with the dots, though.
For everyone who enjoyed my awkward experiences with all of the naked people, I have to say I have actually started to feel extremely uncomfortable being the only person with a bathing suit in the sauna...this is when I knew I have been in Europe too long! haha I guess now we are getting to the "complete emersion into the culture" phase. However, I have begun going to sauna almost every other day.
Some fun facts I have learned from textbooks:
1. Wal-Mart earns more revenue in 1 day than 36 other independent countries do and Wal-Mart has more people employed than are in the US army (from my roommates textbook)
2. Instead of the term "over the hill" to describe an old person my textbook uses "past his/her sell-by-date"
My roommate says that her International Human Resource Management textbook does nothing but insult the US and the US culture left and right. On the back of the book in big red letters it says "not sold in America"...I wonder why.
I will be going to the Southern part of France on Friday thru Wednesday. I'm not sure if I will have time to post anything before I leave, but I will have pictures of France next week!