From Jyväskylä to Rovaniemi...

So it's been a few days since the last update... things seem to pile up in terms of travel and availability of internet. At any rate, Laura and I moved to stay with her grandparents, both very kind people. I stayed only about a day or so, long enough to check out the Panda candy factory and the water tower Vesilinna which her grandfather helped build. The view from the tower was fantastic!

Later that same evening we went to a midnight hot air balloon race - the idea being that one balloon leads, lands, and the others push out the sandbag ballast and try and land it as close as possible to the landing site. Either way, it was definitely neat to watch the balloons inflate, and there were a few fun ones... Like the sauna balloon! They rigged up a sauna in it - so Finnish. You can see the guy standing right next to it is holding a vihta, the bundle of birch branches used in sauna.

You can of course imagine the jokes resulting from this one...


Keep in mind this was all around 11 or so at night... the near-constant lightness here is so awesome.

Next morning (today) I caught a train from Jyväskylä to Rovaniemi. Actually, to be more accurate, it was a little more like 3 trains and a bus. But my trip to Pori will be easier since I remembered to ask for the least number of changeovers...
At any rate, I got here with little difficulty (granted I was nervous about figuring out the Finnish travel system because seriously - being lost in a foreign country where there's a mild language barrier because of your lack of fluency? Not fun. But I found the city just fine, met a girl from Ohio and a couple from Australia on my last train, which was neat. And so, here I am at Guesthouse Borealis. I went out to explore a little of Rovaniemi tonight, ending up at Restaurant Nili where I tried reindeer.


It was all rustic and fun inside! And the reindeer itself was wonderful, although really not unlike beef. I had two different types in the same meal - grilled silverside and braised foreloin. I wasn't sure which was which, really, but one tasted rather like beef tips in stew, and the other tasted like a gamey steak. Pretty good stuff!

I'll upload more tomorrow perhaps, as I'll be going to the Arctic Circle line and Lordi's Rocktaurant, the main reasons I came here!

Until then,

Tavataan taas!