Dis-orientated

One of the many rosebush hedges that line the streets of Joensuu

I'm a little surprised.  I have traveled several thousand kilometres across the planet to Finland, and appearance-wise, I fit in better here than anywhere I've traveled before.  I cannot count the number of times in a day Finns look totally shocked when I respond in English as opposed to Finnish.  It's kind of entertaining.

Fall is coming!

Much of the past week has gone by without incident.  I've had international student orientation, forestry orientation, Finland orientation....I'm just about done with the whole orientation thing. However, orientations seem to continue trickling into classrooms and activities out of classrooms.  Fortunately, next week we get to start actual orientation-free classes.  I hope.  Most of the others in our classes are either from an Erasmus program or a European Forestry masters program.

Joensuu Market square and Kauppakatu ("Store Street")

On the home front...

I'm still looking around to try to find a bicycle, but until then, I spend a couple of hours walking every day.  It's only 25 minutes to class, but it always seems there is somewhere else to go...
Our rooms are somewhat cavernous, so to make them a little homier, April and I created paintings for each other.  Here are the results of our "painting date:"

notice the penny for an eye... ;-)

The sailboat was necessary

Having been in Finland for a couple of weeks now,  I am accumulating a list of interesting differences between here and BC/Canada.  There would be no fun in posting a big list in one go, so instead, I will have 1 item per week in each post.  I'll start with a slightly more interesting one this week: bomb shelters.

Most buildings have them in some way, shape, or form.  Usually in the basement or ground floor, these sealed, double-doored, concrete and steel bunkers have brilliant orange signs leading the way down the hall to the door.  In most buildings I have been in, these shelters are maintained.  In others, they have been converted to storage rooms.  You'll be relieved to know that both my apartment building and the forestry building at the university have maintained bomb shelters.  These dark, creepy holes in the wall seem to be commonplace enough that no-one around here really mentions them or notices them, and it's just another door on the way to the laundry room.  Has anyone EVER heard of a building with a maintained bomb shelter (other than by someone with paranoia) in Canada? Granted, our national neighbours (historically) have been slightly less inclined to invade and try to blow our cities up, but you never know what they may try in the future...right?

Take care everyone! I love hearing from you!