8 weeks and I wish I was counting up

 Yesterday May 1st was Vappu, the Finnish work holiday, but also marked the eight week countdown until my return home. I'm going to release some cliches here, but it feels like yesterday when I came to Finland, and yet it feels as though I have lived here forever. I'm not sure when it happened, but at one point I just started to feel like this was normal, this is home, instead of the beginning when it was all just a vacation for me.

Vanhojen Tanssi

So, if anyone reads this blog anymore, even though I pathologically lie about my intentions to update it, and you want to see some Finnish Culture in action, read on! Tomorrow at 7:00p.m. Finnish time ( or 11:00 a.m. Minnesota time) I will be dancing in the Finnish old time dance. You can watch it online if you would like to at this link mms://video1.edu.kuopio.fi:8080/iisalmi_live/iisalmi_live
If that is something you would be interested in doing, and you have no life enabling you to sit around and watch finns dance to strange music, you are welcome to it. I am also singing with a group of girls in the beginning, luckily my singing is better than my dancing. Hopefully that is true, otherwise invest in earplugs.

Presidents

Today is the first election for the next Finnish President. Now for all of my American readers, you are thinking "First?". Yes, first. The way that Finland narrows down their presidential candidates is far less confusing than the ever baffling caucus system. Here is how it works. The eight political parties, yes eight, choose their candidates. Then today the Finnish people vote for their favorite. Now if one of the candidates gets more than half of the votes today, he/she is the next president of Finland. However, because this hardly ever happens, the candidates with the top two percentages of votes run against each other in a second election which is two weeks from now.

The Finnish Presidential Candidates

Now as you notice with every country, most of them are old men. Now this is true, but what makes it cool is that there is actually women, and one of the old men is gay. I think the level of acceptance in Finland is what puts it ahead of so many other countries. Now the favorite seems to be Sauli Niinistö, but Pekka Haavisto is also suprisingly popular, considering his sexual orientation would turn a whole party of Americans against him. I am waiting now with my host parents to find out who wins, as they shut down the polling stations in 10 minutes. I will post more about the second rounds later, but I am super excited to watch this.

Stockholm and Helsinki

So over fall break, only about three months ago, I went to Stockholm and Helsinki with my first Host family. It is a very common thing for Finns to take a cruise ship to Sweden or Estonia for a day and then come back. It was my first experience on a cruise ship, and also a good way to know I really don't ever care to travel that way again. I didn't get sea sick, but my host father and sister did. Stockholm was a really pretty city, and the old part was what I think of when I think Europe. It was a really long time ago now so I don't really have any sly comments about anything. Instead I am just going to post some of the pictures I took of the trip.

Apology for 3 months

I'm sorry to all the people who want to know what is going on with my life. I'd like to say that I've just been so busy in the last three months that I haven't had time to blog, but that would be an obvious lie. I guess part of me just wanted to ignore the outside world in hopes that if I didn't tell others about my experience in Finland it would last forever. Now I am near the halfway point and am trying to accept that this won't last forever. In the next couple of days/ weeks I'm going to try to post some information about different experiences I have been having and things that I have been doing. I'll end this short post with a bit of what I have been doing. I made this movie in my art class with my best German friend Lena. In case you haven't seen the original this is based off of go to http://www.youtube.com/ and search for the one semester of spanish love song. I'm sorry this is in Finnish, but I can give you a translation if you would like.