a sunny fall day

hyvää päivää! (good day)

finally, we see the sun in oulu! after a week of overcast skies i have now seen the sun and blue sky for two days in a row! here fall is in full bloom with all of the trees bursting with orange, yellows and reds. yesterday, i took a relaxing walk with some friends to a lake only a few minutes from where i live.... it was perfectly calm and reflected the changing season in the blue water refreshing my spirit and delighting my senses. i felt like a true finn hiking through the forest. we ended up wandering through the university botanical gardens (very beautifully kept, and they had a whole hill of plants from north america making me feel right at home)...

this week has just flown by and i see now that it has been a whole week since my last update.... i will try to do better!

the highlights of my week this week are many, but the first was a welcome banquet reception on wednesday that the city of oulu held for all the exchange students! held in the city hall, we were greeted by the mayor of oulu and treated to champagne, wine and a full plate of tasty dishes. it was a very generous and friendly way to welcome me to oulu and i got to meet a city businessman who has lived here for the last 25 years but is originally from minnesota! kind of crazy. i will put a picture up of the hall sometime soon...

on thursday afternoon, i got the chance to play some finnish baseball with a whole mess of other exchange students through ESN (erasmus student network, a really sweet program that sponsors events each week and trips around... i am going to russia with them at some point!). as most of you know i do not have a great amount of hand, eye, bat coordination (think p+w softball) so finnish baseball is the perfect solution! instead of having a ball pitched to you the pitcher stands an arm length away and just tosses the ball up into the air for the batter to swing at... you get three chances and you have the choice to run on any of your hits, or just take off running without even hitting (usually what i did) then you run to first which is off to the left, second to the front and right and then third even farther away to the left again.. the bases are kind of in a zigzag and then you have to run back to home. you also can steal bases at any time which makes the running a bit easier. it was really fun to play a new game, and astonishingly enough, i wasn´t even the worst player out there! hahaha.

it was great because after the game we asked a finnish guy to take our picture and being the typical finn he just stood there silently taking our photo without a smile or even a 1, 2, 3! the finns are typically quite reserved and from what i have seen so far it has been true (except when they get some drink in them), at least that is what they keep telling us. they also told us at orientation that it is hard to make friends with a finn, but once you do, you are friends for life!

speaking of friends, i just found out that i am going to have a kummi family, which means that i get a finnish family to be friends with and do typical finnish activities! i get their contact info today and look forward to meeting them soon.

my other exciting event of the week was experiencing the finnish sauna! there is actually a sauna in the building next to my dorm and so a group of friends and i all went together to try it out. it was very hot inside, no surprise, and it hit about 80* C, or 176*F.... we stayed in for about 5-10 min. and then went directly outside the sauna to very cold showers and then back and forth several times... afterwards, i felt like a puddle all relaxed and warm! it was delightful and i know i will be there a lot this winter.

not much else is new, just settling into school and classwork...i have my third finnish lesson today and have much to master... the double consonents and vowels are really difficult to hear but i am working on it. it makes a huge difference, with one missing a word could mean fire or custom´s office...

i have really been enjoying myself so far and one of my favorite things is all of the different languages around me. i am constantly learning words in french, spanish, german and finnish while explain english to everyone. sometimes we are all lost in translation, but luckily usually end up having a good laugh about it. for example, in my studio lecture my professor was explaining that "to really understand the architect, you need to get in his pants" i laughed out loud, but looking around me everyone else kept furiously scribbling down notes... later i explained to my friends that it is a much better idea to just "walk in his shoes."

well, i am off to a lecture on modern nordic architecture! i am so thankful for all of your notes and comments! it is great to hear from so many of you. i will try to put up pictures soon. what is going on back at home? any big news i should be aware of?

peace-

ps: good news with my computer... dell is sending a new motherboard to finland and will contact me when it arrives to fix me up! they said it will take from 2-4 weeks! yay!