Entry #3

Ok, so this will be my last entry from Finland everyone! I am leaving tonight all the way back to Uruguay. It sure will be nice to see you all again but I think I'll miss Finland and my friends here. However i promised I would come back someday and hopefully we'll meet again. It wasn't always easy and it sure has been a long year with a lot of work to do. Making reports, meeting people, going to conferences, classifying data, making excel tables, sending stuff to places and so on. Some days would never end! I did get a bunch of awesome memories tough. And I think all the work I did helped some people in the end.

Entry#2

Hello you all! I just came back from a 3 day journey inside Finland for the association. It turned out to be more a sightseeing expedition than work since we had a lot of traveling around to do. We were 4 in a car and we were supposed to go to the 3 smaller offices in Tampere, Pori and Turku in order to “co-ordinate the different bases and make a general report on the state of our social aid network”. Aka, have a great road trip in the beautiful sceneries of Finland :D. It was really great, mostly because Audrey, Aleksi and Sakke are great guys. Luckily enough, they speak English perfectly. I tried to learn finish but it’s just impossible… They have incredibly long words since you are supposed to add suffixes and prefixes to a word until it means what you want it to means and that can create ridiculously long words that would be a full sentence in English. I’m trying to learn to speak Finnish anyway but I’m not expecting great results… More news soon!

Here's a map of the journey we made inside Finland. You have to picture this all white instead of green but I couldn't find any satellite map in winter on the internet.

A view of Tampere. The city is surrounded by a lot of lakes, and there's this half-frozen river that cuts the town in two, it's quite a magnificent sight.

This beautiful mausoleum was built just over a century ago and its one of Pori's most beautiful construction.

There was a heavy snowfall just before we got to Turku. I took this picture in a semi-abandoned zone of the city. It's amazing how everywhere you go in Finland there's always a river or a lake nearby.

Entry #1

Hey everybody! I just got here in Helsinki. And it was snowing! I have a feelling I'm not done with seeing snow in this country hahah. More seriously, I'm amazed that our plane's pilot could still land
without accident. I'm pleased to say that the trip from Uruguay went quite well apart from the scary landing, and, after the usual formalities I got to my 4 stars hotel (paid by the organization!) without any sort of trouble. I got to try a sauna here; did you know that there are more than 2 million saunas in the whole country? That’s more than one for 3 inhabitants! It’s quite relaxing although a bit surprising, principally when you have to take a cold shower at the end, but it’s really hygienic since bacterias and other micro-organisms dry and die in a few minutes.Also, it has a lot of hidden virtues according to fenlands. I'm not sure what that really means but it definitely got me feeling a lot better after the fatigue of the trip.
I'm going to start working next week. I wonder what they are expecting me to do but well... I'll settle down and visit Helsinki in the meanwhile.
More news soon!