Autumn holiday

Well, this has been a long time coming! Autumn has now been and well and truly gone! We are deep in snow slippery ice here in the north but let me take you back to October/November and fill you in on what has happened in the last couple of months!

It was an exciting morning when the autumn leaves had frozen so beautifully.

It was even more exciting that between dinner time and when I was heading out to play floorball in the evening in that same day it had snowed!

It was then even MORE exciting when I woke up the next morning there was snow covering the whole town! Absolutely beautiful! And still only mid-October!

My school had an interesting way of bringing in the autumn holiday week. Thursday of the week before, we finished classes at 2pm and went to the middle school gym for a floorball tournament. I played on one team with some of my friends. We won one out of the three games that we played so we didn’t make the finals but we had fun which is, of course, the main thing! The tournament finished at around 5pm and then I went out to get dinner with a friend, went home and packed some things and then…. headed back to school at 9pm! Why you ask ? Night school of course!!

We spent the night at Lukio doing all sorts of things! An hour of different not at all serious 10 minute lessons (I led the one on Australian slang), and a night of games and just basically hanging out. We had a boys against girls dodgeball type game throughout the two story building in the dark which was good fun! We had a bit of a pj party too with one guy DJing. Then I spent most of the night just playing card and board games with different people. It was good fun! Exhausting though! Some people were smart and actually slept… I was not one of those people!

I walked home from school at 8am and went to bed for a couple of hours. I had to get up by 12pm though and pack my bag and head off to Ylivieska for my district camp weekend! My district (1400) and one other district (1380) joined together for the camp which was held from the Friday afternoon til the Sunday afternoon of that weekend.

It was a pretty relaxed weekend. By then a lot of snow had fallen and a few spontaneous snowball fights were obviously bound to break out!

The weekend was just hanging out with other exchange students and with a couple Rotex and a Rotarian from each district. 

 

We played some games, went for a light hike in the woods, and went to sauna together (which of course involved running outside and rolling in the snow many many times!)

 

When it all wrapped up on Sunday afternoon, despite living only 30kms from the town we stayed in, I had to wait for a couple hours for a train that would stop there as many don’t because my town is so small. It was no worries though as Alison took a later train too and we hung out together and grabbed lunch!

It was a really lovely weekend!

It didn’t stop there though! Once I got into my town I walked home, unpacked and then repacked and headed back to the train station and off to Oulu! I spent the night there with two friends of mine, Leena and Pauli, before we headed off on Monday for Lapand!

Autumn holiday had started and I spent it up north in the Arctic Circle! Woohoo!

On the drive up we stopped in Tornio and walked over the bridge into the town of Haaparanta (Sweden!) We visited the big Ikea there and did a bit of shopping around the place but mainly it was the novelty of crossing into Sweden that got me! There was no border control or anything like that, you could cross freely. It was just a small bridge over a river that divided the two countries! Awesome!

We eventually made it all the way up to Kolari where we spent the first two nights with Leena’s grandparents. We crossed the Finnish-Swedish boarder multiple times up there too as, once again only a river separated the two countries!

We visited up in Ylläs and went to the ski slopes and we randomly found an exhibition on Lapland and its people at a place off of one of the roads we drove along.

We spent a couple days in another part of Kolari with Leena’s other grandmother. There wasn’t anything there but we took some nice walks and just relaxed, it was a holiday after all!

Whilst reindeer are wild animals they are actually owned by people. At this time of the year all of the reindeer are rounded up and they work out which babies belong to who and they divide up which are going to be taken to the slaughter house. We didn’t see many but there were a couple that were still loose! Real live reindeer!

 

A week of eating reindeer and moose… yum!

On Friday we headed to Rovaniemi where we spent the last night with Pauli’s oldest brother and his family. 

We walked around the city a little on Friday night and then on Saturday Leena and I did a little shopping. Saturday afternoon we headed back home to Oulainen.

It was a lovely holiday and despite it being the 'Autumn' break, we were knee deep in snow the whole time!