Back in Finland!

It took ten hours and three flights to get back to Finland: Dublin to London, London to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Helsinki. I arrived in Helsinki at about 8 PM and the weather was pretty much like Galway; a couple of degrees and raining.

On Sunday I took a train up to Kitee, which is a town near Rääkkylä, where my mom and grandmother live. And Kitee where the nearest train station is.

B = Kitee. (Thank you Google Maps) That's not the exact route the train takes, but it's the general direction anyway :D You see that dot above B that says Joensuu? That's my hometown. Even though I don't really have a home there anymore since my mom moved to Rääkkylä, but my boyfriend lives there and a lot of my friend's are there for Christmas.

So on Monday mommy drove me over to Joensuu, and yesterday and today (Tuesday) I've been seeing some friends and walking around town and stuff and it's been fun! Tomorrow I'm going back to Rääkkylä  and we're going to bake some Karelian pies for Christmas.

It's not very snowy here... There's more snow here than there is in Southern Finland, because they had a colder period up here a couple of weeks ago and it snowed then, but now it's been pretty warm and rainy so a lot of it has melted!

It doesn't look like it's getting a lot colder soon... But I'm still hopeful! It's still four days before Christmas, plenty of time to snow.

I left Galway on Wednesday right after my last exam and took a Citylink to Dublin, and then a dart to Greystones to my grandmother's place. That's when I started my Christmas binge! Tummy full of good food... Yum!

On Thursday we went to Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin to see a Christmas musical! I really enjoyed it! I thought the actors were really good singers, and the whole show was well done.

On Sunday we went to Dublin again with my aunt for some Christmas shopping and spent the whole day there! We also stopped by at Bewley's for lunch... (that's the dessert in the picture!)

So that's how my holidays began! I'll be sharing more soon...

Oh, one more thing. I've been watching a few episodes of "The Joulukalenteri" (The Christmas Calendar) which is a Christmas show that has 24 episodes (one for every day in December before Christmas) about three elves who travel back to Finland from America where they've been living to find a missing key, and because they've been gone so long their Finnish is mixed with English (a.k.a Finglish) - hence the "the" in the title. It's a funny show. It was originally a Danish production in the 90's, then the Norwegians made their own version and the Finnish version followed in 1997.

I'll leave you with a song for you from the Norwegian version!