Moi everyone!

Well, I've have officially been here in Finland for seven weeks and two days.  The town I live in is very small.  There are only 8.000 people here which means I see someone I know everywhere I go.  The people are pretty friendly, but they are very shy.  They don't just come up and talk to you.  You have to make the first move.  But it's been pretty easy for me to make friends here.  I go to school with my 16- and 18-year-old host sisters from my second family.  They introduced me to all their friends, and now I'm friends with half the school.  The school system here is pretty crazy.  We pick new classes every 6 weeks(every 6 weeks is called a period) and at the end of each of each period we have exams.  Today is the first day of exams and they'll carry all the way into next tuesday.  Last period my classes were music, physics, math, french, finnish, photography, and english, and italian.  Next period I'm taking english, finnish, math, creative writing, psychology, a dance class for the 'Old Dance' in February, and italian.  I have a different schedule everyday which tends to get very confusing at times.  The breaks between classes are 15-30 minutes long and can even be 3-4 hours long if you have less classes.  And to make the school totally different from my school in Florida,  there are only 170 students.

     Other than school, Finland has been ok.  It's a lot different living in a small town.  There is much less to do and I find myself making my own entertainment sometimes.  There is only one high school, one middle school, one elementary school, and one kindergarten in my town.  There is one pizzeria, one photo store, two markets, one gas station, one bookshop, one or two restaurants, a few clothing stores, one wallmart-type store, one second hand shop, one small hotel, a bank, and a post office.  That's about it.  There is one really amazing thing about my town:  It used to be a mining town.  The whole town is built on mines.  My host sister Laura from my second family gave us a tour of the inside of the mine and then we climbed the few hundred steep steps to get to the top of the tower.  The view was incredible.  It was such a nice day that my sister and I could see for miles.

     The weather in Finland is getting to be quite cold.  In the morning the temperature is about 40-45 degrees and at night it's even colder.  The Finnish autumn is absolutley beautiful.  I was surprised how quickly it came.  All the leaves are changing colors and some of the trees are starting to lose their leaves.  The current weather is perfect.  The sun in Finland is very hot.  During the middle of the day, it is directly overhead and heats up the air to a really nice temperature.  As the sun begins to set,  the rays stream through the trees creating amazing shadows in the forest and on the lakes.  That's about all there is in Finland-forest and lakes.  Everywhere I go, there are more trees and more lakes.  Whenever we go somewhere far away, we drive most of the way literally through the forest.  Much of the time we're driving on dirt roads as well.

     A few weeks ago we took a trip to the family summer cottage.  When I say 'family summer cottage', I don't only mean my host family, I mean the entire blood line.  The cottage belongs to the entire family.  So, about 50 people pitched in to buy the cottage.  You would a cottage in Finland would be a small house somewhere near a lake in the woods.  Well, this cottage was right on a lake, in the woods, but it was anything but small.  The cottage was massive.  It used to be a school, then it was turned into three apartments, and then a cottage.  it has over 14 bedrooms, 5 floors if you include the attic and basement, a gymnasium, 3 saunas, a giant private lake, about 4 kitchens, too many bathrooms, and looks just like the house in the Amityville Horror.  It even has those scary little Amityville windows.  The cottage has officially been dubbed 'The Creepy Summer Cottage.'  That place was really spooky, especially the attic.  The cellar/basement was so scary that the dogs wouldn't even go into it.  That plac had to have been haunted.  We went mushroom picking and fishing and to the sauna while we were there.  The trip home was...interesting.  We were travelling with two dogs and two cats, so you could just imagine what that ride was like.  Everytime we stopped at a gas station, my host mom would unload the dogs and put them in a little fenced in area, just for a few minutes, and then load them back into the car after we got gas.  The whole process of stopping for gas took about a half hour.  And when we stopped to visit more family, we had to unload and load the animals in the car once again.  On our trip home, we did see an elk crossing the road.  That was pretty awesome.  It's very rare that anyone ever sees an elk cross and if they do, it's usually too late and they've already crashed into it.

     I think the really bad thing about being on exchange in Finland is that everyone speaks english.  Students are forced to take english in school and to get a job, you must know how to speak english, therefore everybody speaks english.  But, my finnish skills are improving.  It's such a crazy language, though.  Nothing about it is similar to english.  Even prepostions are different.  In finnish, they put them at the end of the word.  I think that is the most confusing thing about the language.  But, I am trying my best.  I will know this language by the end of the year.

Hei, hei!

Jillian Flon