The event had a final point in the evening and every sculpture was decorated with light. Lights were changing their colours from different shades. It was a great idea to use them because it brought shapes of sculptures better noticeable. As an entertainment, there was a salsa dancing group performing and fireworks show in the end.

It´s hard work to make such beautiful and detailed artwork from just a brick of ice. Their lifetime is depending on the temperature of the weather. Luckily we have a cold and frosty winter at the moment in Mikkeli. 

I wanted to share the winning sculpture with you. It´s impressive and memorable for its detailed looks and both sides of the piece are different artworks. Below the photo shows the behind side and the top show front side.

2. Shabab Oman II: This vessel was from Oman and owned by the king himself. It was built in 2014 and was one of newest sailboats performing in Tall Ship Race. It was memorable of its materials and details they used to decorate their sailboat. Some of the parts shine so brightly you could see yourself as from the mirror.

3. Sedov: from Russia, Murmansk. It was a very massive sailboat and because it was parked next to our balcony, I could see their daily routines. Their sails were huge, the same size as 21 tennis courts. In history, this vessel was used to transport carbon from Wales, woods from Finland and flour from Australia.

 

 

I knew that Finns are drinking a lot of coffee, but it was surprising to know they are leaders of the world with that habit. Actually, I need to confess that I have also learnt to drink much more coffee, after I moved to Finland.

It was surprising to know that Swedish-speaking Finns are drinking schnapps and sing songs with their meal. It looks like very ethnical and historical tradition to me. 

The third surprising fact for me was that Finnish women want to pay their share of the bill in a restaurant while on a date with a man. It seems very unusual to me, but it´s their way to show financial independence.

 

2.       What didn´t you know before?

 

I didn´t know that Finns are one of the leaders in reading books and newspapers. One fact that I have noticed though, is that our university´s library has a very good selection of books and I have found every textbook I needed so far from there.

I had never heard of Failure Day. I found one article from Yle News related to this subject because I was very interested to know what´s the date of Failure Day? Actually, it is called International Failure Day and it´s 13th of October. Yeah, lucky number 13! The idea is to encourage people to cast off their inhibitions and lose their fear of messing up.

When I asked my friends, they all know what this is, but had difficulties to explain me, how it emerges. It can be seen/touched in Northern Finland areas from Kainuu to all around the Lapland. In English, this type of snow is called “crown snow-load”.

So, when we started to drive to Ruka to our skiing trip, I was excited to see and touch something new to me. When I visit and travel to new places, I always want to have an adventure with new twists. To eat some new flavour, learn some new tricks and so on. This time I wanted to feel this hard snow. 

Let me explain how “crown snow-load” appears: The structure of this snow is very hard because that accumulates on trees in a cold climate time while subcooled droplets of fog or low-level clouds are freezing. Air temperature between -2 to -8 degrees and wind velocity of 3 to 6 m/s are perfect conditions for tykkylumi. I keep repeating this unique word! :D Unbelievable is the fact that one spruce can collect 3-4 tonnes of snow. That´s a massive carriage!

When we arrived at our destination point, it was already night, so I needed to wait until the next morning. Next day was a bit windy, but it felt like real winter to enjoy. I made an amazing video of landscape and crown snow-load trees.

In Lapland, I noticed that even a city girl as I can enjoy the adventure. Every day I went to mountains to fulfil my dream and have a lot of fun. While being a student, homework can´t be forgotten, so I filmed some videos in my holiday time.

My main subject was management and leadership. So my exercise was to answer questions like how to lead a company, what are the skills for good leader, what workers expect from the good leader and so on.

This vlog shows the fun time, things what went wrong while filming :D

This unique animal is living in Northern Scandinavian areas. Reindeers are very big tourist´s attraction in Lapland, there are many farms, which offer you different kind of service. You can touch them, you can feed them, you can go sledge-riding, take photos and so on.

In my vlog, I want to introduce you reindeer called TAIKA. Taika in Finnish means MAGIC and this is a perfect name for him. Why so? Because he has a magic secret, which will be released in my video. 

He is one of the most famous reindeer in Finland because he was an actor in Santa Claus Story movie.

This was a big challenge for many people to overcome the fears of eating the insect. Grasshoppers were in two different sizes but in this video, I want to show you how I tasted the biggest ones. The main question after eating this insect was: how it tasted? Yes, it was a bit strange for me, because this flavour is new for me. The taste reminded me of grass and some parts felt too sharp and stiff in the mouth. 

But in the end: it was surprisingly good (Y)

To get a piece of history of Finland, I recommend watching the movie called “The Unknown Soldier” (Tuntematon sotilas). This movie was an amazing piece of art, which shows the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union during 1941-1944 from the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers. 

I didn´t know that Finnish women were the first in Europe to gain the right to vote in parliamentary elections. Neither I didn´t know about Finnish Expatriate Parliament. It has so many members all around the world and how abroad living Finns want to participate in the work of the parliament. Outside of Finland are living approximately 300000 Finnish citizens and they want to influence what happens in the home country.

Finland's population at the end of 2017 was 5,513,130. Finland is one of the least populated countries in Europe. The population is geographically very unevenly distributed - most Finns live near the coast, south and south of the country. More than one million live in the metropolitan area. There are only two people living in Lapland per square kilometer. In 2015, there were 229,765 people living in Finland who had the citizenship of some other country than Finland. More than one-fifth of them were Estonians and 13% Russians.

In Estonia, we don´t have such law. You need to be observed to be sure, that you allowed going certain places. While living in Finland, I have been feeling free when I go to cycling or picking blueberries in autumn from forests. Also, the law of EMR gives you secure feeling to search new places while travelling in Finland.

Photo: from Repovesi National Park

Mostly our classes had 20-30 students, we all had the same timetable with different lessons. Schooldays started at 8 o´clock and were 6-8 hours long. It was very surprising fact to hear, that Finnish children don´t have homework nowadays. We had always homework, in many different lessons. Also, teachers randomly checked them and gave grades about that. 

To check our knowledge about homework and what we have learned at lessons, sometimes teachers had a surprise examination. It was always scary because you didn't know when to expect that. To get the confidence and to avoid bad grades: always listen and learn with care at lessons and study homework.

When I came to study in Finland, the first thing I noticed how friendly and helpful are teachers. The hardest thing for me was to approach teachers with their first names. I like how large selection of courses we have in Finland and how teachers use different styles in teaching. 

Tourism is my main major and we have so many opportunities to cooperate with different companies while performing our tasks. For example, I have visited numerous hotels, paddled with canoe, rafted by bout, been rock climbing, been several times hiking in forests, been in fairs and so on. It´s not only reading the books and writing different reports, we have an opportunity to try in practice also. For me, studies in Finland have been very interesting and exciting times.

This year it was held Helsinki. Every team had four persons and there were 12 different schools represented. The main idea of this event is to promote our studying field and to network with each other and with presented companies.

We had five different exercises and competition lasted two days. Some of the exercises were easy and some more difficult. The main was to be calm, communicate as a group, search as much information as you can get in limited time and to create a good result. 

The event was finished with formal Gaala-night. The video will show you, how beautiful and glamorous it was this year.

To separate people of same groups, we had games in several teams. It was a very good idea because this way you meet and communicate with more different people. 

The video shows you one of our game. The idea was as Tv-show “Amazing race”, but ours was called “Urban Race”. Each group got an envelope with directions and with the task. We travel through Helsinki city with the bus, local train and metro. 

I apologize that video is in Finnish, but you´ll see the feeling, how much fun we had.

This day we had so many positive comments about our salads from customers. It makes us smile more and assures us that we are doing our work well and with passion. 

The cheese in last salad is called LEIPÄJUUSTO in Finnish or BREAD CHEESE in English. It´s from Northern Finland areas and Lapland, made by cream cheese, which is fried. Most famous dessert dish is served with cloudberries.