Hyvää Thanksgiving!

Moika Kaikki (Hello all),
I hope everyone has\had a wonderful Thanksgiving, or if you're not American, I hope you had a good day:) I spent this Thanksgiving making cookies, and I stayed home watching movies and knitting because I didn't have class. Nothing too exciting to report, just have some regular goings on here in Suomi. Next week is test week, so it is basically a week off for me! I have a russian test tomorow, and I am taking the english and history exams next week.
The weather here is...annoying to say the least. For a few days it snowed a little bit, but now it's just back to rain and sleet. DX Hopefully within the next week it will start to snow more.
Next week I move to a new host family! It is exciting because I get to move and meet new people, but also kind of sad because I have to leave my awesome family I have now. But it's all good. I'm really excited because my next family has a really big dog! I miss dogs. But it will be weird to have to speak Finnish to him...
Also next week I am going to LAPLAND!! For those of you who don't know, Lapland is an area in Northern Finland above the Arctic Circle. It also extends into Norway and Sweden. I will be leaving on Saturday and coming back the next Thursday. This trip is a Rotary sponsored trip for all Finland exchange students. We are staying in a hotel in the town of Muonio, and will be doing all sorts of cool stuff like skiing and reindeer spotting. I will be learning how to snowboard!

In January I will be going to Poland with some students from our school. I guess this is something they do every year with this one school in Poland. They are sister schools, so when we go there, Polish students will come to Kouvola. We will be staying for four days, but at this point I don't know much about it. There is a meeting tomorow, so then I will find out more. I am also making my new schedule tomorow.

Syysloma (Fall Holiday)

So two weeks ago I had my fall break so I didn't have school for a week. It was pretty awesome. I made apple crisp with a friend, and for the first five days I layed around and did absolutely nothing. Then on Wednesday, my host family and I went to the Sokos resort in Juankoski. It is home to the largest underground nordic skiing track! It was really cool, but unfortunately artificial snow has the consistency of fresh powder...Not fun. And I guess it's this major training facility for professional nordic skiiers during the offseason so there were TONS of old skiiers that were better then everybody. And future olympians that were about 9 and kicked everybody's butts.
     The course itself didn't seem that big, but in reality it was about the size of a track, so four times around was a mile. And you didn't just keep going in circles. Everytime you finished a lap, you had to double back onto a different lane. It was good, because it kept it from getting too monotonous.

So, some more information on my current classes. I'm taking 7 classes, but the schedule is different every day so I'm pretty dependent on my written schedule.

                Monday              Tuesday                 Wednesday             Thursday                    Friday


8-9         IC                       German 1                  Math                      German 1               Russian 1
9-10       IC                       German 1                  Math                       German 1              Russian 1
10-11      German 1            AH                           English 8                 Music                    English 8
11-12      Russian 1            AH                           Russian 1                Music                    English 8
12-13     AH                       Math                       Music                      AH                         IC
13-14     Music                  English 8                  IC                            Math                    Math
14-15     Music                  Russian 1                 IC                            English                    AH

Key: IC=International Communications; AH= Ancient History
  And then I have Finnish class on Wednesday.
    My favorite class is Russian. I love the Russian language, and I'm actually able to read it now. Before, I would just stare at the paper thinking " I don't think this is actually a language", Math is as always a struggle. Probably more so just because it's in another language.... English is rather boring, because I'm in the highest class, and it's mostly just nitpicky rules that nobody cares about and don't really matter. International communications is a neat class. But mostly the teacher just talks to me about the way the things are in America. But I don't mind. I actually enjoy telling people about America, because I want to convince people against this negative image they see in the media. The most common thing I say to people is "We're not all like that"! Damn you Jersey Shore....
    Europeans have a hard time comprehending just how massive America is. That's another thing I have to stress alot. America is as big as Europe. The individual countries in Europe are as big as states.
    Everything is still going good. Planning on moving to my second host family in a few weeks. Weather is SUPER foggy. I feel like zombies are going to burst out of the shrubbery at any moment and start attacking people. That or a serial killer. But I've always like this weather....