Winter – I’m coming!

Turku is one of the biggest cities in Finland (currently 6th biggest) and used to be the capital until the 19th century. Plus it is only about 2h by train from Tampere. Reason enough to go there on a day trip during our „exam week“. Lucky for me I did not have any exams in this week!

The funny thing was that we started out as a group of four, but we met another group of exchange students on the train! A special highlight for us was the indoor part of the botanical garden a bit outside of the city.

And once again I have a huge backlog of things that happened, so I am continuing to date back my posts to when it actually happened 😉

One of the tasks according to our „Fuksi-Passport“ was cooking a Finnish meal. The Fuksi-Passport contains tasks that new students at TUT should do to get an introduction to Teekkari culture. Completing the tasks earns points and every student needs to have enough points by 1st of May to be baptized in the local river and become a real Teekkari.

We decided to cook lohikeitto, Finnish salmon soup.

This weekend, there has been there 45th Tampere Film Festival. In total I have seen 27 (28 to be correct, I forgot one when writing this for the first time) short movies within the last 30 hours. As an exercise to myself I am going to try to remember all of them with a short summary:

I started yesterday evening with „A Wall is a Screen“. This is a German group which organizes short movie screenings in the form of a city tour. After each movie the projector as well as the speakers and a notebook are carried to the next place. The movies were, in this order (not sure if I remember all of them):

• A documentary about an African guy who organizes movie screenings in Tanzania.
• A discussion between retired cleaning brushes [sic!] about built-in obsolescence (in German).
• An animated movie (cartoon style but a bit surreal) to music.
• A guy trying to surprise his girlfriend wearing a bear costume. She is so frightened that she takes her bike down a cliff. She survives and he is killed by a hunter.
• A movie showing the squeezing of passengers into the Tokyo Metro (shown in the Tampere train station).
• A guy drinking beer very fast, then puking, while another guy records all his sounds to make music out of it.
• Another quite surreal movie with people moving around a shopping mall to music.

Screening of a movie in the Tampere railway station. Picture taken with my mobile phone camera.

Weiterlesen

Since I organized an engineering competition for bonding almost two years ago of course I could not resist to visit the ebec (European BEST engineering competition) by BEST Tampere 😉

I did not have the time to participate, but I took a few pictures and helped the organisers. The task for the teams was to construct a Rube Goldberg machine. That is a machine which achieves a simple task in an extremely complicated and elaborate way. Here are a few impressions.

The fourth day was also quite packed, although not that many opportunities to take pictures. In the morning we went on a husky safari, while in the afternoon we tried the „modern“ version – snow mobiles. For me, the snow mobile safari was the highlight of the trip, although it was not possible for me to take pictures while driving. We went to another reindeer farm on the snow mobiles. On the way back we could admire a beautiful sunset! In the evening we went out to party and to do some karaoke.

On the last day we had to pack our things and clean the cottage. After that we spend the rest of the day in the Levi Spa, until our bus left at 6pm for the journey home. We arrived back in Tampere around 6.30am.

The third day started with visiting a reindeer farm. In the afternoon I went for a walk on my own. In the evening we went to a traditional smoke sauna. After we returned home we were finally able to see some nordic lights!

The first event of the second day was ice karting. This is like normal karting, just that the track is covered with ice. Since the karts are rear-wheel driven it is very easy to drift an slide (and to loose control of your kart)! It was really a lot of fun! This video gives an idea of how it looks like. It shows the group after us.

After ice karting we joined another part of our group to go up the mountain and visit the Sami museum Samiland. In the evening we had reindeer burgers for dinner and went on a snowshoe walk. Still no northern lights, though…

My first bigger trip from Tampere was to Lapland. It took me some time to sort and edit my photos which is why I only write this post now. Nevertheless I am dating it back to retain continuance.

The trip was organized by a company called aikamatkat (timetravels) and by ESN INTO. However, we were only 4 people from INTO because most of us wanted to go on the first trip to Vasatokka.

We were picked up by the bus late at night next to the university. The first destination was the Santa Claus Village in Rovaniemi the next morning. Because our group was very small (17 in total) everyone of us could occupy two seats on the bus which made the nightly bus ride much more comfortable and so I slept surprisingly well!

The second intermediate stop on the way to Levi was the Lainio Snow Village. This is a hotel with a restaurant, cocktail bar and chapel, all made out of ice!

After these two stops our journey continued to Levi where we stayed for the rest of the trip. Levi is the biggest and most popular skiing area in Finland. We stayed in a small cottage which was OK but a bit small considering that we stayed there with 13 people. The kitchen was smaller than the one that I share with my two roommates in Paawola! The other 4 people stayed in another cottage. Directly on the first evening we went out hoping for nordic lights but we were disappointed – for now. More later…

Finally some pictures from the Kyykkä World Championship last weekend. Unfortunately we lost all three of our games, but hey it was our first participation in a world cup!

Just a short update from my trip to Levi, Lapland. During our bus ride we encountered a reindeer on the street. It’s cool that with my new camera I can just send the photo directly to my tablet to upload it to my blog while being on the bus without getting out my laptop!

We just visited Santa Claus Village and are on the way to Lainio Snow Village. Photos from there as well as from the Kyykkä competition last weekend will follow soon…