This has been the most amazing week. At first I was scared that it wouldn't be worth it for the price that I paid, but it was, and I would 100% do it again if I could. We did so much and I finally got to experience the Finland that I always dreamed it would be. When you look up pictures of Finland, you see trees covered in frost and snow, reindeer, and frozen lakes. While it is very pretty and there is lots of snow in southern Finland, the real beauty can be found in Lapland.
In my next couple of posts I am going to describe the adventures that I went on this past week and the incredible people that I met. We traveled from Helsinki (Way way down in southern Finland) to near a city called Rovaniemi (in northern Finland) We went mostly by train, and it took 3 different trains, 9 hours, and then another hour and a half on a bus to get to our final destination. I traveled with my friend Alya, a 17 year old exchange student from Indonesia.
We began our journey at 4 in the morning on the first of February. On our second train we started to see some other exchange students. By the time we had reached Rovaniemi there was around 40 of us on the train, who then met another 40. In total there were around 80 of us. It was extremely hard to remember everyone's name, and their nationality, so we had to each ask each other a million times throughout the week. Despite this, we all quickly became friends. It was an extremely good group of people and there were no problems during the whole trip.
We were staying in a little bed and breakfast type ski lodge. We had rented it out so we were the only ones staying in there. The rooms were sweet and small. Alya and I were together, and the two of us plus two other girls were staying downstairs. We had the entire downstairs to ourselves. 40 people were staying was two floors above us. Luckily we weren't alone for long, because the other exchange students soon discovered the couches, piano, games and ping pong table that were downstairs so there were always tons of people. Though ours was the main one, there were also two other buildings that had exchange students in them. One of them, for some reason, had a lot of asian people in it, so they (the asian people) called it the "asian building" and that place was always fun and full of delicious food.
