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.
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 :)
Hope you are doing well on your exams.
ReplyDeleteI can only imagine how bad the reindeer must have smelled