Lost in Europe

The random writings of a Canadian exchange student living in Estonia for a year.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Okay, so this has not been done in a very long long long time, so I will start from October in Finland. We went to Finland for the district camp, with all the exchange students in our district, which consists of southern central Finland and Estonia. We stayed in Helsinki on the Friday night, (Oct 12 or something like that) and that was really fun. Eddie, Mexican, Beatriz, Brazilian and Victoria, American, met us at the ferry terminal with McDonalds balloons, and wandered around with us. we took some pictures at a big church and then went over to Suomalinna, which in finnish means finnish castle, which is an island that is in Helsinki, but is sorta like a cute, quaint little town in itself. There was the hostel that we were to stay in that night, and it was really nice, although for you hostelers, the kitchen was decidedly lacking. We then went back on the ferry, which is about a 20 minute ride, to where Katie was waiting, cause she didnt want to come over the first time, and we wandered around downtown Helsinki. We met up with some more exchange students, and in general we just walked and talked. By the end of our rather early night, we had taken to singing chunks of songs while wandering around the streets (well lit, dont worry). This may be seen as a little weird to people at home, but you couldnt possibly imagine what kind of looks the Finns were giving us, those quiet reserved bunch.
The next morning we got on the bus with the other exchange students, drove to Tamaasaare (spelling?) and after lunch and formalities, started to play leadership, working together games. Though the other groups worked together quite well, our group either had too many leaders, or not enough followers, which is a kind way of saying that we were all about as stubborn as donkeys and wouldnt listen to eachother. It took us about 8 minutes to move skis 30 feet, but our real downfall was trying to turn over a rug whilst everyone was still standing on it, which ended up being us standing mostly around the rug and then lots of falling over. Saturday night we sauna´ed and hung out with all the exchange students. we had no will to sleep, so at about 4 in the morning, a group of us decided we were going to put on a play centred around blankets that were being worn as scarves. there were very few people who were interested in this and we stopped and reverted to telling jokes, which, because of pure exhaustion, were quite interesting, my favourite being : why did the boy fall off the swing? because he had no arms.
Sunday came, and because we are in Europe, we had to see a castle, so we walked about 2 km down the road, which gave us plenty of time to catch up on what everyone had been doing, and the beautiful country side gave us something to look at, as well as the forest gave something for the canadian boys to run through as though the were auditioning for the next version of Lost.
The castle was quite pretty, very old, and falling down, but we had fun, working on our picture taking skills as well as catwalks, and posing with excessive amounts of warm clothing.
The sad part, as always, was leaving, and we all had to leave at 1, as us Estonians had a ferry to catch. We drove back, parted ways at the ferry terminal and boarded the boat to go home, and that was our weekend in finland.
I will write more about Essie coming and visiting, and of course about Laplands, but i will post this before it gets deleted for about the millionth time.
The weekend after that I went to a friend house who lives outside of Tallinn, and we celebrated our friend Annika´s birthday, which was a lot of fun.
Love you all, and I am so sorry (especially to you, Brian, Essya has been telling me since October to write) that it has taken this long to post this, my work ethic is sadly lacking, but I will try to be more consistent.

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