Ya, so 5 days in Finnish means 16 days in English.  Didn't you know that was customary to increase the time you write an entry by 320%?  Well, now you know.  Anyways, here it is after much delay!! 

Food    of    Finland!!!

I love making menial things dramatic. 

We'll divide the categores into two.  One being cafeteria food and two being food at the household (only two pictures for that one, I can't give away all my secrets).

Cafeteria Food

These are all meals you'll find in the cafeteria for the low cost of 2.35 euros or about $3.20.  So not that bad at all.  I must add that the bread you see with it is normally fresh, so that's also a plus.

Ooo what's this naughty looking dish?  Why it's chicken and herbs over rice!  What herbs you ask?  I don't know! I eat it anyways!  That particular salad seems to have mushrooms and beets and some random dressing that I think looks good that day.  You also get an unlimited amount of bread which I capitalize on.  You can also get one glass of milk and as much water as you like.

This is a hamburger patty with onions atop and mashed potatoes.  The quality of the meat is generally the type where you don't know exactly where it came from.  It still tastes pretty dag on good.  The salad has some tangerines, pickled onions, green beans, and mystery dressing.

As might be inferred from the picture, the meat is indeed a mystery one.  It tasted fine but its apperance was--at the very least--disturbing.  The salad has some pickled vegetables with some carrots, cucumbers, etc. 

This is one of my favorites.  It's ham with cream and potatoes.  Mmm mm.  The salad is cabbage, tomatoes, and mushrooms. 

This was a pleasantly surprising dish that I hadn't seen before.  It had an oriental flare to it.  That's supposedly chicken (though I'd swear some of the pieces looked like unmentionables).  The salad has a sort of dry cottage cheese on it which I've actually become quite fond of--it's a common accompiant with salads.

This dish is similar to the cream/ham one except that's salami *shivers*, carrots, and a bunch of random stuff that must've been going bad so they decided to throw it the heck in there.  The salad is green olives and cucumbers.

This is a meal when I'm feeling particularly naughty.  Costing about 4.38 euros, or about 6 dollars, it provides one of the best cheeseburgers in Oulu for the lowest price.  That orange stuff oozing out is supposed American sauce.  I'd really like to see what place in America serves the visual atrocity, but you get used to it surprisingly fast.  I would best compare it to a heavily bastardized thousand island.  Yes, it's more like a 100,000 island--having 100,000 flavors that you just can't pinpoint where they're coming from.  It's good though, you'll like it.

Food at Home

Here's a couple of things I might commonly eat at home.

The Dagwood.  A personal favorite.  Quick, easy, filling, and has all of the food groups.  A wonderful creation.

Baked salmon with lemon, butter, garlic powder, well...there's more but I can't tell you the family secret.  This is a pretty healthy dish (aside from the butter) and salmon is relatively cheap here in Finland.  Put it this way, you better love fish and potatoes if you want to survive in Finland.  If not, you'll be a hungry person.

That wraps up this little entry on the food of Finland.  If you have any curiosity questions, just ask in comments.  All in all, the food isn't that bad.  When you come to Finland, you can give it a try and agree with me.

It's been a while, hasn't it?  Yaa, I've been around.  Went home for the holidays and it was very relaxing.  Kissed the parents goodbye and now I'm back in Finland.  Did I miss it?  Somewhat...it was harder going back after being home than it was the first time coming here.  Quick update on what I've done since I've been here.  I've recently ice skated for the first time in my life.  That was definitely a lot of fun.  Also, today I went running in sub-zero temperatures.  That...was wow.  My eyelids kept freezing together and I was covered with ice when I was done.  It was a terrible, terrible experience.  I need to get some googles for sure.  That's basically all that's particularly noteworthy.  So, I suppose I'll give some random pretty photos of Finland that have no real meaning at all.  Enjoy!

Day 3-5 of the Lapland Trip

That's right, I'm going for the whole shebang.  In all honesty, the fifth day didn't have any action (it was mostly driving).

So, the second day ended with a decent sleep.  We woke up the next day and had a delicious complimentary breakfast and made our way to the Norwegian Sami Parliament.

The architecture was made to represent a kota, which I explained earlier. 

The main purpose of the parliament is to kept the interests of the Sami people in check.  You can think of Lapland (the northernmost of Finland/Sweden/Norway) as a sort of autonomous territory under the rule of each's respected country.  This autonomous territory can decide what it wants to do with its taxes and what-not and this is where the decisions are made.  Here's a picture of the library that I thought was interesting.

The lighting was made to simulate stars.  It gave off a cool presentation as a consequence.

While we were leaving, I also managed to take this photo of the town of Karasjok where the parliament was located.

It looks all nice and cozy.

After that, we drove about 4 km to the Knifesmith Stromeng.  Here they create knives for the Sami.  The smith has a 300 year history, so--as you can guess--it has been of some importance to the Sami people.  Knives are used from a multitude of things from cleaving to fine carving.  They normally do this with one knife that is rather large (About a foot).  Various parts of the blade are of different thicknesses and sharpness and you use those places for a specific action. 

Still keeping up the handmade tradition.

After that, it was a long drive to Alta.  Alta is located at the Arctic Ocean in Norway.  The scenery towards there was amazing.  Sadly, majority of my pictures were blurred from very fine snow, but here's one of the mountains.

You can see them in the background.  It was really some amazin' scenery.

After this, a long drive to Alta.  When we finally reached there, we spent some time in the city and eventually socialized in a kota that was located by our accomodations.  The kota was nice: reindeer fur lined the walls and seats and a nice birch wood fire was roaring.  We cooked some sausages, exchanged some stories, and went to sleep.

The next morning we went to the Alta Museum where they had rock paintings from over 3,500 years ago.  Some of them were surprisingly intricate and huge.  No...I didn't get any pictures *cries*.  Most of the rock paintings were still in there original state just 100 meters from the museum but snow covered it.  The paintings that they did have was sensitive to light, so they wouldn't let us take pictures--even if we didn't use flash (they just want money...capitalists).  I did manage to get some cool scenery pictures from the back of the museum.  You can see the bay located by Alta and part of the coast community.

Part of the coast community.

The bay.

Haha, very good descriptions if I don't say so myself.   

Due to being so north, sunrises were sunsets.  That was both frustrating and cool at once.

After this, they gave a few people the crazy chance of swimming in the Arctic Ocean.  Would I do something as dumb as that?  Hell yes. 

Let's just say the picture of me coming out is just a blur.  That was some friggin' cold water but very clear water!

We soon got back into the bus and I regained feeling in my appendages.  Our next stop was Juhl's silversmith.  After about 3 hours of driving, we finally reached our destination.

What can I say about it?  It was amazing.  The owners of the silversmith were actually artists from Germany.  They came to Lapland to get away from city life when the Sami people were looking for a silversmith to repair some of their jewelry (they don't really have any silversmiths since most of their time was spent reindeer herding and moving about).  So, the wife went and learned silversmithing and came back to become the official Sami silversmith of the area.  Not only do they have silversmith work, but they also have a wide array of other memorabilia such as rugs from Afghanistan to local crafts of Sami people.  It was really quite an interesting place. 

Ok, I know what all you women are thinking.  What did the jewelry look like?  Here you go.

It's all hand done.  Before I show a picture of them crafting the jewelry, let me explain something about the archetypes of the jewelry first.  What do you think it's meant to represent?  If you guessed sun, you're absolutely right.  As is the case with a lot of indigenous people, the sun had a great importance in the Sami culture as both a bearer of light and life.  During weddings, women will slap on about ten of these bad boys to show off their wealth; the weddings are absolutely dazzling as a consequence.

There's some people doing fine tuning on the work.  Juhl's hires people from all over the world.  Like I said, it's a really interesting place.

After that, we visited the Sami University.  Basically their mission is to keep the Sami tradition strong.  All classes are in Sami and they have majors ranging from education to crafts.  I tried to take a couple of pictures, but it was 3 in the afternoon and dark.  So, the pictures didn't come out. 

To wrap up this story, we went to sleep that night after a bus drive.  The next day we went from a brief stint to a nature reserve.  Sadly, most of it was being redone so we missed a lot of the exhibits.  Then it was a long trip back.  That wraps up the journey in a nutshell!  Was it worth it?  Oh ya, definitely.  I'll never forgot this day as long as I don't get Alzheimers.  As a sort of farewell for this trip, I'll post one last picture so you can contemplate the beauty....that is Lapland.

Another sunrise/sunset.