Nearly holidays

Glorious blue sky, sunshine, +19° and yesterday was my last exam :-) Really great and it sounds like holidays! However, I still have to write laboratory reports (e.g. about solar cells made of natural colours such as blueberries). But now in the end of our Erasmus year there are lots international dinners, parties, nice evenings with Finnish friends from my orchestra and university and I am really enjoying my last weeks here.

A special event was Vappu - the first of May which is here more celebrated as the beginning of spring than the labour day. Picknicks, a ceremony in the centre where a student's cap is put on the head of a statue, parties, waltz and tango dancing events and crazy clothes are quite different from the "Tanz in den Mai" in Germany.

Finally spring :-)

It's half past nine in the evening and we still have light, phantastic! As a comparison, there are 14:14h of daylight in Göttingen at the moment, whereas 15:06h here.

In contrast to the last pictures now the spring has also arrived here. Birds were already singing in February and March, when the days were also getting longer. But with -13°C that could hardly be spring. But since April the snow has melted away. Now only very few remains are left over and lakes and the sea are still covered by thin ice. During the day it is already so warm that we can be outside without a jacket. Yesterday I spotted the first crocus!
But when I went to Jyväskylä (300km north of Helsinki) this weekend, it was snowing again :-( I learned that this phenomenon is called takatalvi - backwinter...

The winter was really beautiful, but now I am happy about the spring!

Helsinki in the snow

This morning on my way to the language course: It was a cold and sunny day. Behind the frozen bay you can already see the tower of the white cathedral. I can also see it from the seminar room.

The Senate Square was designed by C. L. Engel. Typical are yellow and red houses. The orthodox Uspenski cathedral is not far.

Now a huge amount of snow has been collected in the middle of the piazza. Compare the height to a man. The picture shows the senate building, directly opposite of the university main building.

Also on my way back to the physics campus I had to stop in order to take a picture of these icicles!

FAZIT: Helsinki is much more beautiful on a sunny winter day than in the grey November. The days are noticeably getting longer now, too. For example we had 8:48h sunlight today, in Hannover for comparison 9:41h.

Birthday

It was the coldest birthday of my life!! When I was a child, I always wished for a snow on my birthday. This year it came more than true. After a nice dinner with my flatmates - which was at the same time a goodbye dinner for my Italian flatmate Giulia - we went sledding! (see "Winter activities)

At the following weekend we had a big party in our appartment because Anne-Sophie's and Mathilde's birthdays are nearly at the same time and we celebrated together.





We also prepared some snacks for the party of which none was left. Our flat was so full of people!

Not much later it was the birthday of my French neighbour Manu. We invited him to a dinner on the evening before his birthday and made a surprise at midnight.

So, in the last time I did not study all the time. Instead there were so many nice get-togethers, parties, dinners, outdoor winter activities,... But now there are a lot of homework and lab reports...

Cold Winter

"If you want to see snow and a real winter, Helsinki is the wrong city."
This is what I was told by plenty of people "here in the south" when I arrived here in autumn. But this winter seems to be an exception. We have sooo much snow, many really cold days and the baltic sea is frozen.
However, I usually still go by bicycle, but sometimes I have to wheel my bike. Sometimes it is ok to bike on the even snow. But also excavators shovel the snow from streets, pedestrian ways and bike paths onto trucks which carry the snow away. At the roadside the snow piles up to 1.5 or 2m!

This warm winter equipment is necessary because...








... it was -22°C, as this thermometer which I pass on my way into town proves.













Who does not remember where he left his car will have difficulties finding it under the snow...















... or the bikes!

















Marco is standing in the snow up to his knees!

Winter activities

On the evening of my birthday we went sledding on a bob,
that was a lot of fun :-) Of course we had to dress well. Here are my French flatmates Anne-Sophie and Mathilde and I in our winter equipment. My gloves (self-made by Juho) in the Finnish colours and with my initials kept my hands warm!












We went to a nice slope, but already the way was great :-)
Like children we pulled each other on the bob. Of course, we also had a snowball fight!








Fortunately I had taken my ice skates from Germany after the Christmas holidays. In the stadion in our part of town you can now skate where usually people run. A car even removed the snow from the track. This was already a nice place to go ice skating, especially when the sun was shining, but...






... skating 7 km the frozen Baltic sea was even more spectacular! A 7 km long loop on the ice in the western part of Helsinki was cleared from the snow. That was a special experience!











When we were cold after skating, I prepared Bratäpfel (filled apples from the oven) with vanilla sauce, a sweet German winter speciality. In my opinion, Bratäpfel are a good example of typical German food, better than Schnitzel and Würstchen...

LAPPLAND!

One highlight of my time in Finnland has been a trip to Lappland with Juho, Jukka and Joel whom I know from my physics courses. 1000 km from Helsinki via Oulu to Savukoski at 67° north Latitude, where we left the car at an "old lady's" house in the early morning. Expecting darkness except few twilight around noon, we were really surprised when the sky became a bit blue at 8 and quite bright at 9. That was good since we had to find the mökki (little wooden cottage without electricity, heating or running water, but with a fireplace). We travelled the last kilometres on skis carrying all we needed on our backs.

After skiing on a frozen river, a lot of work around the mökki kept us warm: shoveling the snow from the roof and to the sauna, shed and outhouse, warming up the mökki,... Joel even skied back to fetch the gas cartridge. In order to get drinking water, we drilled a hole in the frozen river and used a mechanical pump.











The light was very beautiful!










Amazing that the sun even came a bit over the horizon although we were north of the polar circle and it was just 2 weeks after midwinter. On the first day we had -15°C - not so cold considering that it had been below -30°C there some days before our arrival. Nevertheless, in the beginning in the mökki it was as cold as outside so that my frozen hair didn't melt immediately ;-)













The sauna had already served as a dining room because there it was significantly warmer. Finally in the evening it was hot enough for a real sauna :-) At night we could see incredibly many stars because no light of human civilisation desturbed the surrounding darkness. Furthermore, it was completely quiet, not even sounds from animals could be heard.

The first trip took us far off roads and paths into the wild forests, plains and along rivers, thanks to Juho's ability to orientate surely with a compass in the darkness. We even saw reindeers (poro) :-) At certain places we spotted many of their tracks. Apparently they have their favourite places to hang around together - kind of social life.

The river close to the mökki was 30-40cm tick frozen, whereas a smaller, faster streaming one obviously wasn't. Juho broke into the ice! Fortunately, his rubber boots were higher than the river deep. See the proof... (good that parents and friends read this story only after our safe return...)

On the opposite side of the river we dicovered a sheltered fireplace where we wished to cook something warm so that we dared to cross the river:

Our bravery was rewarded with a fire on which we could melt snow in order to cook noodles and hot chocolate :-)

We came back only at midnight - exhausted and happy. It had been a gorgeous day full of adventures. When we woke up on the next morning and looked out of the window, the sun had already risen. Thus we had missed valuable hours of sunlight. But our eyes were getting used to the darkness so that we could see until approximately 4-5pm, later we used a headlamp.

Somebody is looking forward to the second tour :-)

We went skiing through the untouched snow, but we heard dogs barking, probably from sledges.

Plan for the day: climb on that mountain and visit the old lady who had invited us for a coffee.

We had eräsukset, extra wide and long cross-country skis. Nevertheless it was not too easy to arrive on top of the hill.

Then it was already getting dark so that I couldn't take good pictures. But we saved the view over the river, plains and even to human settlements with our inner eye.

When we reached the old lady's house, we found a broom in the entrance door, a sign in Lappland that somebody is not at home.

So we went home, cooked and had another sauna. Between the sauna times I rolled in the snow - even twice! However, Juho rolled 4 times. So if I had wanted to top him, I would have had to roll 5 times. But instead I ceded the heroism to him ...

The following morning was unfortunately already the last :-( We cleaned the mökki and skied back to the old lady's house, where we got a coffee and electricity to heat the car. The man told us that bears are luckily in wintersleep during this period. Yet, in summer he saw one behind his house! Damit hat er uns wohl keinen Bären aufgebunden...

The drive back was pretty long. Even I drove a bit. Driving on lonely streets in Finland with speed limits of 60km/h - 100km/h is much more relaxed than on German autobahnen! Despite that, I was not able to speak Finnish while driving because I had to concentrate so much...

We left Jukka at his parents' place in Oulu, where we were kindly welcomed and had dinner. Finally we arrived in Helsinki at 5am.

Some practical aspects:

• Food: Since we had to carry everything, we hardly took any food containing water. Instead we had e.g. mashed potato powder, powdered soup, dried soya, oat flakes with instant blueberry soup, cocoa with milk powder,... Apples and oranges were frozen so that we grilled them - a bit like Bratäpfel :-) We had bought cheese in individually wrapped slices which could still be separated. Our favourite snack was clearly peanuts with raisins, but we also consumed a large amount of chocolate.
• Clothes: Many layers were advisable, preferably without cotton. Our skis had such a binding that we could fix our own shoes in them. Lined rubber boots served well.
• Language: In the beginning we mostly spoke English, but later only Finnish or German. We just agreed that English would be allowed in danger of life, for example when I was driving (I have to add that I hadn't driven a car for one year)...

It was such a great trip: nature, snow, adventure, silence, light, skiing, reindeers and a very nice travelling group :-) Thank you for this unforgettable journey!