Finnish Adventure: Rovaniemi Part One

I am currently sitting an a coffee house in the center of Rovaneimi enjoying a chair latte and a few minutes of internet. My fellow classmates are hopefully enjoying the ski slopes here. I was really tempted to join them, but decided instead to roam around the city a little bit, shop, and take pictures because there would only be a few hours of sunlight and we've kept so busy there hasn't been much wandering time. While skiing would've been beautiful, I am glad for the choice I made because I found a couple places selling products for Design Week (which you'll hear about later in this post or another one soon to follow) and bought two pairs of earrings made by designers in Lapland! It also turned out to be a good decision because the grocery store closes at 6pm and I wanted to buy a few snacks for the train....speaking of the train I'm going to go back to Thursday night when our "Finland North" Adventure began.

After seeing the solar decathlon house at Aalto University, we took the bus back to the Kampii station. Sally, Matt, Todd and I went to some pub that had very good wings (according to the three of them...I had a small quesadilla and a mozzarella stick). Then we went into Forum (basically the local shopping mall with some things on sale that actually seem like sales instead of "on sale for 40 euros+") and I found a pair of warmer gloves than the ones I had brought.

Then we went to Stockmans to the basement. I have never seen a more lovely grocery store. That may sound melodramatic, but the breads were amazing, the meat selection (oh my goodness the fish) was astounding, everything was nicely organized and there was a wide selection. Sally and I both got a sandwich their for dinner on the train and some snacky foods and then returned to our apartment to finnish packing and get ready to go on our adventure.

Unfortunately, I did not bring a carry-on bag to Finland so I looked rather foolish with my school bag, camera bag, toiletry bag, and two shopping bags full of clothes as I headed out of the apartment around 20 to 7pm. As I started awkwardly down the street I decided that this was an opportunity where not taking the tram would be foolish, so I waited a couple minutes and got to sit as the tram took me straight to the train station. Everyone assembled around 7:10 and we found our track and waited outside for about 5 minutes until our train rolled in. None of us knew how to read the tickets, but after a mistake and help from some Finns found our assorted train car and room numbers. Now for some pictures of where Sally and I slept on Thursday night!

Our room has two beds, just enough room for two people to stand and a cute little chair that Sally is modeling here!

She was soooo excited to have the top bunk!

The Finns (and Italians b/c it's actually an Italian made train) are so clever. We had a little sink and vanity in our teeny-tiny room!

They even provided us with a towel, shampoo, and toothpaste!

This was my attempt to photograph Finland passing by outside the window

Despite the fact that at first I marveled at the notion of two people fitting in this space without being in each others bubble, everyone came to our room and chatted for a bit while we made plans to relocate...so seven people fit surprisingly well!

Less blurry, but less exciting looking:

The overnight train is one of those things I would tell everyone they should do once. I don't know that I need to do many more over night trains in my life, but it was a lot of fun. Sally actually wants to move our train cabin to our apartment in Helsinki because she liked her bed better plus we had our own climate control!! Each bed even had a reading light and built in alarm clock - fancy I tell you! We all moved to the dining car to eat, drink, and chat. I took knitting with me and made a fair amount of progress on a wrister I'm making out of Icelandic yarn while in Finland from a Norwegian pattern. Sleeping on the train was a piece of cake - oddly, though I found I was only comfortable facing the direction the train was moving. It was somehow disconcerting when going backwards. At times, the train was going 140 km/hour!!

We arrived in the Rovaniemi station at 7:55am and found our way out of the train. One of our studio professors, Matti, was waiting for us with an eight passenger van and a red reindeer lined hat. He was clearly concerned that we were all going to freeze and commented on nearly everyones attire. It was -35 degrees Celsius (that's -31 Fahrenheit)...it make you cough a little the first time you breathe in. I was soo glad to have my cowl done when I arrived - it truly helps to have a warm environment for most of my face!

We all piled into the van shivering and whining a little and Matti drove us to our hostel. Everyone grabbed their stuff and we discovered all of the doors are locked. Thank goodness we have a guide who is from the area (Matti's father lives here and Matti was raised here from the age of six) so he could call, speak the language, and find out that we needed to check in at another building. Our hostel (Hostel Rudolf) is owned by Santa's Hotel company....seriously, I'm not making this up...our train had "The Santa Claus Express" written on the side. We went to the correct place and then came to learn that we couldn't check in until 2pm but thankfully they would let us store our things at the hotel so it didn't freeze in the car during the rest of the activities for the day.

The first stop on the activities for the day was at the City Hall for part of Design Week (http://www.rovaniemidesignweek.fi/?deptid=23281). Three teams of people had worked on developing a more noticeable entrance to the city of Rovaniemi for only 24 hours and were presenting their proposals. Unfortunately, almost everything that was said was in Finnish so we didn't understand a lick of it. This really emphasized how important graphics can be to a presentation because if they would've had longer to develop their work we should've been able to understand what was going on. Despite our slightly lost nature, we were part of the voting body that selected the winning team. After the votes were totaled, two hours were scheduled for people to discuss ideas for improvements on the selection. After about a half hour Matti could tell that we were about to fall asleep primarily because none of us understood the discussion so he suggested we walk to tour a church nearby.