The celebration begins on the Esplanade at 6pm on the last day of April. Students wash the Havis Amanda statue, place a few sashes on her, give her a graduation cap, and start drinking champagne. Sally and I walked down to see this take place. That huge inflatable champagne bottle had students hanging from it, dangling near the statue.
See - here we are! (Unfortunately, Sally's eyes are closed)
When the cap was placed on the statue's head, confetti was released in celebration.
Shortly after that, it started to rain a little. Thankfully, Sally was smart enough to bring her umbrella and the rain did not last too long.
See those interesting teal pants? They are a Vappu tradition - jumpsuits. The students started wearing them in the beginning of April in preparation for Vappu. Many colors are available and indicate which college (major) the student is studying. A few secret organizations apparently wear pants with patterns and it is socially incorrect to ask them what group they are representing...this notion seemed almost more odd to me than the notion of Mormon's being a secret society with publicly known meeting places.
The trams were rerouted in the city because of the number of people on the streets. These guys took that opportunity to climb up on the bus stop.
Yoko is a foreign exchange student from Japan (in the orange) and Saori (in the hat...we don't know whose hat it was) is one of our group. Both darling and fun girls.
We ran into a bunch of kids from the wood studio who work near us at school. After having a group photo taken they broke out into song. I don't think spanish songs are often heard at Vappu.
This guy decided it would be fun to wade through the water and climb up on the Havis Amanda statue.
Although pretty much anything goes on Vappu, I think taking off her sash was a bit far. Thankfully, he did return them before climbing down the statue.
Saori and I at the Senate Square.
Philip opening a bottle of sparkling wine. We ended up passing this to some of the foreign exchange students that work in the same studio space as us. I never thought sweet was a bad word, but I took one sip of this and did not have an interest in any more - it was so bad we poured out our glasses (or plastic cups for half of us)
It was so interesting just to watch the different people and their different outfits on Vappu - fantastic sombrero, right?
Artturi had described Vappu to us in part as a party where people "hook up at the slightest of pretext". Thanks to their shared bottle of wine...it seems this couple adhered to that concept as seen below.
Saori looks like she's telling half of the couple off, but I think they were actually having a pleasant conversation where her hands just happened to be on her hips.
As the evening wore on, the sun just became more and more beautiful. The sun doesn't set until around 21:30 now which means it's still glowing even longer into the night. Sally is desperately trying to find a way to stay in Finland, because it is clear the summer months are why people chose to be here!
I'm not very good yet at getting my head and another object in the same picture when photographing myself, yet.
At this point in the evening is where my Vappu almost ended, but instead I got a nice little walking workout. We do not have cell phone plans in Helsinki, but instead purchase minutes on a SIM card. This works particularly well for me because of how rarely I communicate on my phone here, but one problem is it is impossible to know how many minutes you have left. Naturally, the minutes ran out on my phone when Saori and I were left alone. I used her phone to keep in contact with the other kids and try to arrange a meeting place, but when she decided it was time to head home (around 7:30pm) I was in Senate Square with a useless phone and no means of finding my friends. I first went to an R-Kioski (basically a 7-11) to try and get minutes added to my SIM card but did not realize that in removing the card from my phone I would loose my contact information unless I had a PIN number. The PIN number is 1234 but I did not know that and had the information in my apartment. I quickly walked back to my apartment, returned to the R-Kioski, and tried to get more minutes. The girl working could not add minutes to my account because apparently if you do not "recharge" the minutes the SIM card stops working. I bought a new SIM card because I was going to want a phone for my last 3 weeks in Finland and finally got ahold of Sally. She told me everyone was hanging out at Todd's apartment so I should head over.
This is not a special Vappu occurrence, but I wanted to make sure I took a picture before I left Finland. I really like these hanging colored lights on the pedestrian street between Stockman and the Academic Bookstore.
Philip and Sally matched!
Sunday morning our landlady showed up with new pillows for me and Sally. She was clearly drunk (as she kept repeating) and seemed strangely upset that Sally and I were here instead of at the city wide party at the park. She dug two mini bottles of champagne out of her purse to give to me and Sally. She didn't notice that the one she gave to Sally was empty. We gathered all the snacks we'd bought about an hour later and headed to the park.
The park was full of tons and tons of people
Many of them were in those crazy suits
Silly Sally and Saori
These kids were sitting behind us and working on making a bucket of mojitos. Vappu = people going crazy + observing the appeal and dangers of drinking
When the sun was out it was glorious (this is Michael and Saori)
Sally and Matt's friend from high school (Daniel) who came to visit him...he lives in London now
As the afternoon wore on it got quite a bit colder. We even had a very little bit of snow fall, so all gathered our stuff and walked a couple blocks back to Sally and my apartment. Next we traipsed to Hotel Torni. After awhile I was really tired so got some Thai food to go and fell asleep. Vappu was over.
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