Thursday 15 September 2011
Friday 9 September 2011
Life in Finland
I have been in Finland for just over two weeks now and I am starting to feel quite settled. I hadn't anticipated how difficult moving country was, even if it is only for four months. I arrived in Hameenlinna at about eight o'clock on Thursday evening, the 25th August and it was shockingly quiet. The hustle and bustle of London seemed a million miles away and for a few days the quietness made me question why i had decided to come.
The apartment which I was staying in with another girl from my course in London and four other fashion students from Glynemorgan is homely, very old fashioned and filled with everything you would need from a home. It has the comfort of a Grandparent's house, cluttered with the accumulation of a lifetime's worth of things. It has given us an insight into life in Finland; there is an electric sauna in the bathroom, skies on the balcony, plants all around the house, a coffee machine and many more things. The landlady was very warm and kind to us when we arrived and took us to her summer cottage a few miles from the apartment. It was very hot weather so swimming in the lake was quite appealing! We also experienced a traditional Finnish sauna which we would take a break from with a dip in the lake. Dinner was a Finnish fair of sausages with mustard, Finnish bread and juice pressed from the berries that Mary(our landlady) had picked. The cottage was passed down from her grandparents who had built it and it hadn't changed that much since then. It was humbling to think that this is how their family lived during the summer months a hundred years ago. Like them, Mary and her husband lived their during the summer and we soon saw why it was such a popular thing to do in Finland. The location on the lake was idyllic with simple amenities and no distractions from modern life. The lakes are clean and clear to swim in as well as not being too cold. Mary told us a lot about Finnish life and answered our questions the best she could. We couldn't have asked for someone as nice as Mary to help us settle when we had just moved away from home. My anxieties of being here were soon fading.
We didn't have internet for the first two weeks in the apartment so we really were being cleansed of technology along with breathing the fresh Finnish air, running round the lake in the evenings and cycling our bikes wherever we needed to go!
The apartment which I was staying in with another girl from my course in London and four other fashion students from Glynemorgan is homely, very old fashioned and filled with everything you would need from a home. It has the comfort of a Grandparent's house, cluttered with the accumulation of a lifetime's worth of things. It has given us an insight into life in Finland; there is an electric sauna in the bathroom, skies on the balcony, plants all around the house, a coffee machine and many more things. The landlady was very warm and kind to us when we arrived and took us to her summer cottage a few miles from the apartment. It was very hot weather so swimming in the lake was quite appealing! We also experienced a traditional Finnish sauna which we would take a break from with a dip in the lake. Dinner was a Finnish fair of sausages with mustard, Finnish bread and juice pressed from the berries that Mary(our landlady) had picked. The cottage was passed down from her grandparents who had built it and it hadn't changed that much since then. It was humbling to think that this is how their family lived during the summer months a hundred years ago. Like them, Mary and her husband lived their during the summer and we soon saw why it was such a popular thing to do in Finland. The location on the lake was idyllic with simple amenities and no distractions from modern life. The lakes are clean and clear to swim in as well as not being too cold. Mary told us a lot about Finnish life and answered our questions the best she could. We couldn't have asked for someone as nice as Mary to help us settle when we had just moved away from home. My anxieties of being here were soon fading.
We didn't have internet for the first two weeks in the apartment so we really were being cleansed of technology along with breathing the fresh Finnish air, running round the lake in the evenings and cycling our bikes wherever we needed to go!
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