Lapland Activities

So uni has started, which means I have a pile of textbooks to read at my leisure! After three months of not studing I was worried it'd be difficult to get back into the swing of things, but my brain still works. So life is basically everything I hate; reading, freedom and not having to go anywhere I don't want. Whee!

We had a very interesting trip to Ranua zoo yesterday, for many reasons. The zoo was really nice, very pretty and green with cute little buildings such as this one! I don't know what it was for, but I want one.

Of course, the animals were fun too. It was raining on and off, but they still came out to say hello, which was very considerate of them.

Hedwig!

This polar bear was so cute, he was frolicking around...

pretending he was going to jump in the water...

but really he was just messing with us and had a lie down instead.

They had brown bears too!

And wolverines. Now that I know what a wolverine is, the X-men character seems inappropriately named. This one was taking his chicken for a walk around.

There was also this funny lookin' creature.

Bambi!

Up close and personal with a moose.

Angry ox! If he didn't like the way you looked at him, he'd charge at you behind the fence.

Unfortunately, because this is in the next town, after we finished at the zoo we had about 5 hours to kill before the next bus home. He had a deliriously funny afternoon trekking into town, and finding the only signs of life at a dodgy pizza place. The pizza lady only spoke Finnish, so I took what I thought was the safe option and clarified my order by pointing at the picture of the pizza I wanted, to avoid any surprises. Unfortunately she felt like surprising me anyway and when my pizza arrived, instead of pepperoni and mushroom, it was pepperoni, ham and tuna.

Yum! It wasn't even that they had run out of mushrooms, Edda managed to get them on her pizza. I just got lucky. I ate a lot of it because I was hungry, but it was a very bad choice. We had a look at the local newspaper too, I especially appreciated the highly exciting front page article on some rocks and autumn colours.

Feeling quite ick after our interesting meal and hours of waiting around and searching for the exact bus stop (we even went to the supermarket just for something to do), we eventually made it home and I snuggled up in my new reindeer blanket and fell asleep. It was a very long and silly day, but good company made it a fun and memorable one!

This afternoon, very spontaneously, Paul suggested we go for a boat ride on the river. DAS (the uni accomodation company) hires one out for free, which is nice of them. After figuring out which boat we were supposed to be taking, we had a really fun row along the river, looking at all the beautiful riverside houses and trying not to turn the boat in circles. It was very classy, we dropped anchor in the middle of the river for a while and had a picnic snack of beer, crackers with brie, and dried apricots.

Giorgia and Paul in our little rowboat.

This cottage is on its own little island, they even have sheep! We were trying to suss out whether anyone was there and whether they'd mind if we dropped in to say hi.

The sky was really pretty!

Giorgia and I chillaxing.

And that's all I have to report for now! Evelyn arrives on Thursday, and leaves on the day dad gets here, so the rest of the month is going to be very busy! I've signed up to take a Finnish for Foreigners course at uni, even though I'm probably going to fail due to not being able to attend 80% of classes when I'm travelling with papa. Oh well! Really looking forward to it anyway.