I've been published!

In the first week I was in Finland, I got interviewed along with three other American exchange students in for the newspaper of Turku, Turun Sanomat. Now, this last week, I myself had my own article in the newspaper of Tampere, Aamulehti. A journalist and a photographer came to our house to ask me questions on my exchange life and how things were going while living in a foreign country. After that I went outside with the photographer and she took so many pictures. Most of the pictures were of me taking pictures of things, because I had mentioned I like photography, so she told me to bring my camera outside. It was a pretty cool feeling to have somebody write a story about you, and to also have my own little photo shoot. Some of the other students also are having articles written on them in newspapers in other cities. I still have not yet sat down with somebody in my host family to translate the article with yet (they all know English REALLY well). But I can read at least the first sentence: "Here's William Mann, an American teenage boy who has never had a Big-Mac hamburger."

This is the article from Aamulehti.

This is the article from Turun Sanomat.

So now I have been published in three different newspapers about my trip: The Orchard Park Press, Turun Sanomat, and now Aamulehti.

Jäätelöä - Ice Cream

In Finland, ice cream is not merely just a sweet and creamy frozen dairy product; it's a fact of life.

You will basically never be out of sight of an ice cream stand when you're in any city. Such a step up from the occasional clamor of "The Entertainer" coming down my street from the ice cream truck. This is my kind of country, with ice cream everywhere!

There are two companies that have stands: Ingman and Pingviini. If you see the polar bear, it's Ingman. If you see the penguin, it's Pingviini.

Ohhh...competition...

These stands are not stands, actually, they're more like kiosks. At the stands you can get the scooped ice cream mostly. "Yksi pallo" for one scoop, and "kaksi pallo" for two scoops. But some stands sell the pre-packaged cones made by Ingman and Pingviini which are the exact same flavors.

You will even find a kiosk in the middle of the beach selling ice cream!

My favorite ice cream flavors here that I wouldn't find at home are pear and salmiakki. But be careful ordering pear, which sounds similar to potato. I once asked for potato ice cream. Or twice... (pear is päärynä and potato is peruna)

Finns love their ice cream, and all supermarkets have quite the assortment in the frozen section. In smaller convenience stores you will even see small coolers, filled to the top with ice cream.

In the freezer in my house here, the bottom drawer is currently filled with three flavors of the individual cones (don't say I told you where it was...)

Really have to watch myself here!

Camping Trip

This afternoon, we made it back home from our camping trip. It was a busy week! When we got back, I had the strangest feeling though. I just got home (see?) from a week-long trip and I had this weird feeling of finally being home and back to normal life, but then I remember that this isn't normal life, and it's not officially my home, but it's an exchange, and it’s awesome. It was great to have the feeling of home though. It really means that this isn’t just a trip, it’s a homestay.

Since being outside of Turku and near the archipelago, we drove north and camped in both Uusikaupunki (uusi-new + kaupunki-city = New City! Nystad in Swedish) and Pori. Both cities were along the coast of the Baltic Sea, just like Turku was.

On the way to Uusikaupunki, we stopped for lunch at a country restaurant and had a very typical and traditional Finnish meal. Filled with different potato dishes, salads, bread… everything! I also tried the beer made there…and the wine… (AH! Just kidding, they were both non-alcoholic.) The beer was definitely an acquired taste, and the wine was made from blackberry leaves I think… but it tasted like flowers and perfume. Surprisingly (and differently) good!

Next to the restaurant was a museum that we then toured. It was the house built by the richest man in Finland at his time, Fleming of Louhisaari, and there Carl Mannerheim, the Finnish hero and president of Finland during World War Two, was born. So I was in the room he was born and also his office during the war in Mikkeli!

It was pretty cool to see the changes in this house over the centuries. Although the tour we had was all in Finnish, it was still neat to see all the rooms and different places in the manor.   

The first night in Uusikaupunki (oo-see cow-poon-kee), the main event was going to the sauna. I went from sauna to sea twice before the changes in temperature started making me dizzy (woops!) For the unseasoned American, the Finnish sauna can be pretty tiring (good night of sleep after though!) (word to the wise: DON’T put your head under the water when swimming after the sauna…) 

The next day in Uusikaupunki, we went in to the town and walked along the river for a while just to see what was there. We stopped at a few places but then we went back just to relax. After a while back at the camp grounds, my host dad along with Petri (father from family with us) and I went to the Uusikaupunki car museum. Uusikaupunki has a long history with car production and still has a huge factory where they currently build different car brands. The Valmet Automotive factory has built Saab, Renault, Porsche, Lada, Talbot, Opel, Fisker Karma, Think, Marussia, and Mercedez-Benz cars through the years. In the museum there were at least over 200 cars, probably a lot more. Saab was the car produced the most at this factory, and saabs filled up about half of the museum. It was neat to see how cars changed through the years, even more neat to see all the cars in person! 

heaviest car in the collection

That night in Uusikaupunki, I stayed up until after 1:00 in the morning talking outside with the parents, even though you could still see some light off in the distance.

The next morning, we went to the “Bonk Museum” in Uusikaupunki. The museum was filled with machines from the history of Uusikaupunki that were supposedly designed by a man named Pärre who was a local. We got a personal tour from one of the employees of the museum. The first machine we learned about was a machine that took the oil from the Baltic Anchovy. This fish had no use to any fishermen until the oil that could be produced from the fish was discovered. It could be used for industrial processes and also people drank it, and it gave them a ”floaty” feeling… But the fish was eventually overfished and became extinct. Okay. Sounds like it could be true… I believed that this in fact had been invented for that purpose, but then the tour guide started telling us about how Pärre invented a tree that had a trunk that grew in a square shape, not a circle, so that it would be easier for the lumber yards to cut… and at this point I felt like an idiot. This museum was filled with useless machines that just had silly stories behind them. So we got a tour of the rest of the museum, and it was very funny to hear all the nonsense about the machines. It was well worth the visit. And props to the tour guide who remained completely serious throughout the tour! My favorite machine was “Canned Hate” machine. You put on a head-set and the machine would take all your bad thoughts and turn them into grilling charcoal that was canned and labeled “Canned Hate”. Every family in the US in the 50’s had them! (I remember my grandparents telling me about their machine… hmm…) 

From Uusikaupunki, we drove to Pori to another camp ground next to the Yyteri beach (eu-teh-ree). This beach is one of two popular beaches in Finland that have fine grain sand. (My host brother Eeti (ay-tee) was amazed when I told him that all of the beaches on the East coast at home were like this!) The dunes on the beach here were gimungous (is that a word?) though. When walking there for the first time, I first had to walk along a planked walkway through no-man’s-sand-land and then I had to trudge up the side of a giant sand dune (hard when the sand is loose and deep!) and when I got to the top…BALTIC. Wow. The last two camp grounds were technically on the Baltic, but only on the side of an inlet of the sea. So this was the first time I was seeing the wide-open sea (besides on the plane). Our trailer was at the edge of the park basically as close as you could set-up camp to the sea.

I touched the Baltic!

Pictures don't do the size of the dunes any justice. 

Of course the first night we were there, I went to the beach three different times, but the next day is when we had our beach day. After eating breakfast, we went off to spend some time in the sun. It was pretty windy, but the sun and all-over happiness of everybody on the beach made up for it. I walked down to the water when we got there and yes, you probably think it was really cold because it was the Baltic, and it was, but not too bad compared to the Atlantic. The Gulf Stream weaves its way to the coast of Finland. :)  After taking a quick dip (well, I only went as deep as just above my knees) I took a walk down the beach alone, just happy to be in the Baltic. After a while of walking down the sparse part of the beach, I finally looked up from the water and sand to see how far away I was from where my host family was sitting, and I noticed that everybody was naked. It was a cultural experience. I guess the fact that Finland is open to public nudity (obviously you can’t walk through a town center with no clothes on…keep it to swimming and the sauna) made it not too shocking to me that I had walked into a nude beach, but the fact that I was the only completely clothed person in that spot was really pretty funny… and now we’re moving on…

For the rest of the time on the beach, I was occupied with going back and forth from the water to the sand, burying my legs in the sand like a little kid again (the little girl in the other family with us thought I lost my feet!) and eating ice cream. I don’t want to leave pear ice cream. It’s the greatest invention on the planet. After guacamole. 

Pingviini pear ice cream!

For the rest of the day we just hung around the campsite. But that night, Petri had something planned for us. CRAYFISH. The fish were caught by his father the day before and were boiled and ready to eat when we got them. So, here we were sitting around the table, everybody was cracking into the crayfish, and I had never eaten one before so Petri was my crayfish-opening coach. It took a while for me to get through the first one. They hurt your fingers! So after taking the meat from two fish, I piled it onto some already buttered bread and then put some dill on top (dill is definitely a popular herb here and is used in a lot of foods).

My sister would be screaming.

That night was our last night camping, and it was nice to reflect on the full week of adventures that I’d had. It was also my last night of sleeping on a kitchen table. My bed in the trailer was the kitchen table bench seat, and when it came to night-time, the table lowered to fill in the space in the middle of the seats. Any mom would be so proud at how many times I had to make and unmake my bed!

The morning we left, I woke up and went to the sauna with my host dad for a quick sauna lasting about ten minutes (I'm an amateur in Finnish standards…). We went back to the trailers and had breakfast and soon after, we were packing up, hitching the trailer to the car, and heading back to Nokia.

It was my first time camping, and I’m glad to have done it for the first time in Finland. Another amazing memory to have!

The Archipelago

Yesterday afternoon we made it to the camp grounds with a trailer in tow. My host family’s friends are with us on this trip so now there are ten people all together. We’re just outside Turku in one of the Swedish speaking towns and about 100 feet from the trailer I can see an inlet of water from the Baltic Sea! It’s pretty cool actually seeing another sea/ocean other than the Atlantic. It’s really been the last week where I keep getting the thought “Oh m’lord, I’m actually in Europe!” You would think it would be in the first few days (which it was, but not as shocking as it seems now) but it is finally making me so excited and unstable when I think about it! But then a second later, I remember that everything feels so normal to me here now. 

the camp grounds (that's our trailer)

This morning after we woke up, we went outside to have breakfast and then we left to drive out to the archipelago. We drove for a while through the countryside and over a few islands before we came to the ferry. We took one ferry, drove across that island, and then took another to the island we ate lunch on. In Scandinavia there are HUGE ferries (more like ocean liners) that cross the Baltic all around, but the ferries I went on today were small, only having room for about 20-30 cars each. It was really cool to ride a ferry and be on the water, even though each ride was around or under ten minutes. The islands we were on were mostly all Swedish speaking, and if you told me that we were in Sweden, I would’ve believed you. When you think about the Scandinavian islands with their small towns and colorful houses along with a shoreline everywhere, this was it. The fact that the weather was perfect also added to the greatness of the Finnish summer out there. 

hey.

We had lunch on the island where we would eventually turn around to go back. We ate at the Buffalo Restaurant……………………………yeah, I know what you’re saying. I came all the way to Finland to go to a restaurant with the same name as the city I left. And no, I didn’t order the “Buffalo Wings” (not used to saying “Buffalo” before it!) But it was really good. I got the lunch special which was pork with mushroom sauce and ranskalaiset (French fries – when talking about French people you would also say ranskalaiset – the food and the people are the same word!) So from there we turned to head back from the way we came. We took both ferries again and after a few detours came back to the camp grounds. It took up a large part of the late morning and early afternoon. 

We cooked dinner in the camp grounds’ kitchen and it was a pretty Finnish meal. Salad, potatoes, and the dense bread that’s made in this region with smoked fish on top. You will always find some sort of salad and potatoes in just about every meal here. 

After dinner time I headed out with my host parents Anne and Matti along with the father in the other family, Petri, to medieval castle ruins on the island of Kuusisto. It was a really awesome place. At first when you drive up to it, it doesn’t look too big, but once you walk through the main archway in the front of it, it’s amazing. The walls were intact enough that you could see where the different rooms were and where the courtyard was. So we were all just walking around and then it started raining really hard. I ran to find cover so my camera wouldn’t get wet (I still ended up taking pictures…) and I found it in one of the arch ways in the front. The pour died down a bit (not totally) and I attempted to go find everybody else, but I couldn’t find them. So I was wandering around medieval ruins alone in a strange mix of sunshine and pouring rain. Creepy…but soooo awesome to be there. 

Oh Google... thank you. 

Between all this touring around, we’ve just been at the camp grounds hanging out. Today has just been a great day of seeing the island life of the archipelago and medieval Finland. What a brilliant day! 

And here are just a few more pictures I took in the last two days...