Midsummer

This was taken around 9 PM on Midsummer Eve.

Midsummer! It was last weekend. It's an old traditional celebration of the longest day of the year, although nowadays it's not necessarily on the day of summer solstice, it's the nearest Saturday. It was a pagan celebration before Christian times, but nowadays it's called juhannus in Finnish, named after John the Baptist (Finnish: Johannes Kastaja). Midsummer is celebrated at least in Finland, Sweden and the Baltic countries, but here's what it's like in Finland.

The stereotypical way of spending midsummer is to spend it in the countryside, possibly at a summer house/cabin, with family or a group of friends and a lot of mosquitoes. There's beer and a barbecue, and you take a sauna and swim in the lake. You might even go fishing.

Younger people might stay in the city and have a house party with friends. This would also include sauna-ing and loads and loads of beer. (You can see it in the shops from the beginning of June, they order huge loads of beer in preparation...)

I (and my family) did neither of these scenarios. My mum actually went to Ireland to escape Midsummer, and I spent it with my grandmother. She lives in the countryside and we did some other traditional things too.

Juhannuskoivut - Midsummer birch trees on each side of the stairs.

The Finnish flag went up on Midsummer Eve (Friday the 22nd) at 6 PM. It was very calm, no wind at all until the evening of Midsummer Day when it was taken down at 9 PM. That's why it looks so droopy.

We also had some nice flowers:

On Midsummer Day we visited some family, and some visited us. We even had a little barbecue! And sauna of course. So I guess it was kind of a traditional midsummer. Our family isn't big on beer or alcohol in general, so that wasn't part of it for us. We don't live next to a lake either, so we didn't go swimming or fishing.

Which brings me to THE DARK SIDE of midsummer. :o 

Since it's a public holiday and everyone heads to the countryside at the same time, the roads are full of impatient drivers --->  they get into car accidents 

When they reach their destination people start drinking, which makes them come up with brilliant ideas, such as 

- drunk driving ---> more car accidents

- going fishing/swimming/driving a boat --->  they drown

- starting a fight with the family ---> domestic violence

- taking a sauna ---> fires (drunk people are sloppy with matches...)

All of this keeps the police, the fire departments and hospitals busy. This year about 15 people died during Midsummer. Usually if the weather is bad, there are less deaths because people tend to stay calmer and inside, but this year it was sunny. Not particularly warm, only about 17-20 degrees, but still nice.

Anyhoo, there are some other traditional things that people do at Midsummer that we didn't.

Kokko - Bonfire. I have no idea where this tradition came from, but there are bonfires in the evening or at midnight, and usually near a lake. We saw some when we were smaller but I haven't seen one in a while. These are obviously fire hazards as well, so I think they're usually organised by some official authority, like the city or some society... I don't really know.

There are also several "love traditions" related to Midsummer. They say that if you find seven different flowers or herbs and put them under your pillow, you'll dream of your future husband. I've never tried this. I think another one is that if you look down a well during Midsummer night you'll see your future husband's face. Never tried this either :D

That's my little info package about midsummer, hope you enjoyed and learned something you didn't already know :D My blog is so educational...

Bye bye! :P

Weather

I thought I'd write another post about weather (I believe I've talked about weather on here before, if you want you can look that one (or any of my older blog posts) up on the Blog Archive thingy on the right column there --->). Who says weather is boring? I love talking about weather. I even considered (not very seriously though) studying meteorology at some point! :D

It seems like anyone who hasn't been to Finland (in the summer) thinks it's under permafrost and people live in igloos and have polar bears as pets. Well, not quite... but people think it's a cold country. In the summer Finland is actually a lot warmer than Ireland!

So far the summer weather has been varied. We've had "Irish" days - meaning 13 degrees and intermittent rain. But mostly we've had nice sunny days with temperatures from 18 to about 24 degrees!  There was thunder not long ago, but I didn't manage to hear it. We lost electricity for about 10 seconds though. :D

I'm still waiting for the really hot days... The past few summers we've had a long heat wave in July-August. It's not really nice if you have to do something, like work, because +32°C weather tends to make you pretty tired. But why not if you have time to lie on the beach :)

Here are some photos to prove that it actually is summer and I'm not just making it up.

Amala surrounded by some foliage.. (Weird ear)

Rilla and Amala helping at the potato field.

Joensuu Art Museum on a sunny day

I tried to make a dandelion wreath...

Floweries!

Lake! We went fishing one day. Got a few perches and roaches.

Double rainbow oh my god!

Taken at 10.38 PM - the sun is setting.

Yep, it doesn't really get very dark anymore. Well, today is actually the longest day of the year! Summer solstice. Where I live this means that the sun rose at 3:06 this morning and will set at 23:01. The meantime isn't dark either, it sort of feels like a cloudy day when you walk outside after sunset. Above the arctic circle (depends how far north) the sun has been up since mid-May and won't go down until July. :D (That'd be interesting. I've never been to Lapland.) After today the night will start getting longer until around Christmas time when the day is the shortest!

But for now that is all... Bye!

Summer

Hello my blog and its 0 readers ;) Long time, no write.

I have long since returned to Finland. Well, about a month ago. I've been extremely lazy with my blog, much lazier than I intended to... It's partially because I was quite busy during springtime, I had exams in Galway and when I came back home I had my entrance exam to a Finnish medical school. I got the results already, I didn't get in. Which didn't surprise me at all! And I wasn't very disappointed either because it means I get to go back to Galway in September! That is IF I passed my NUIG exams. Which I will find out today, almost exactly five hours from now. Yikes!

Another reason why I haven't been active with my blog is because Blogger notified me that I don't have any space left for uploading pictures... And I haven't wanted to think about what to do about it. But now I deleted some old posts which had too many photos, so it should be ok. I'll try and upload something in this post to test if it works!

I want to post at least once a week during the summer, because I'm sure everyone is dying to know what's going on in my exciting life! I'm spending a lot of time in the countryside at my grandmother's house with my gran, mum and four cats. So I should have something to tell you. At least some pictures (although I left my good camera behind when I left Ireland :( I wish I had taken it with me!) if nothing else! And I have some other topics in mind as well.

Here's a pic of our cat Pamela on the roof.

I'll be back soon! :P

Something new

I thought I'd write something since my last post was in February, almost three months ago! I don't update this blog mainly because I have my Finnish blog, and I write about stuff that I do here in Ireland on that blog, and it feels kind of stupid writing the same things all over again in English here, especially because the people who would read it in English are the people who I did that stuff with.

But I'm not going to delete this blog or anything, because soon, in two weeks in fact, I'll be going back to Finland for the summer. And then I think I'll mostly just update this blog to keep my friends and family (and anyone else who's interested) up to date on my fascinating life, and leave the Finnish one alone for a while!

Sounds like a plan doesn't it? :)

Oh, and I also changed the appearance of the blog... I like the colour pink, ok?

So I'll probably be back in a couple of weeks, until then... Bye! :)

Knittinggg

I wanted to share a few photos of stuff I've knitted. These are things I've made after Christmas!

Socks

Socks

Hmm. I don't know what this is called in English. Google Translate said "boa" :D I don't know whether to trust that... Anyway, it's a thing you wear around your neck and this one I made for myself :P

Finally, a hat!

I want to start a new project now but I don't know what to do... :o Out of ideas for now!

Languages...

I'm going to answer another frequently asked question: "Is Finnish closely related to Swedish?"

No. Finnish does have lots of loanwords from Swedish, and that’s because the area was under Swedish rule for centuries and there’s still a Swedish-speaking minority living in Finland. But really Finnish is part of a completely different language family called Uralic languages. Swedish (along with English) is a Germanic language, part of the family called Indo-European languages.

Culturally Finland is quite similar to the other Northern Countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) so that’s one reason why it confuses people when I say that Finnish is not related to languages spoken in those countries. The next question usually is ”well, what is it related to then?”. There are in fact a lot of related languages, it’s just that most of them are such "small" languages (meaning they only have a small amount of speakers), that no-one’s ever heard of them!

(Picture is from here.)

This map shows how the Uralic languages are spread!  A lot of them are tiny minority languages in Russia, probably nearly extinct. A lot of people regocnise Estonian and Hungarian, when I say Finnish is related to them, but probably have never heard of Sami, Komi or Moksha. (By the way, Russian belongs to the same family as Swedish and English (Indo-European) but it’s part of a sub-branch called Slavic languages. So again, not related to Finnish.) 

These languages had a common ancestor (in the same way as humans and chimpanzees) which I think is nowadays called Proto-Uralic. The people(s) who spoke this language originated from the Ural mountains area (which is located in Russia). You can sort of see from the map how some of the peoples migrated west from the Ural mountains. One part of the people settled in the area currently known as Finland and their language developed into Finnish, another part settled in Estonia, and another migrated all the way to the area known as Hungary.

When I tell people that Finnish is related to for example Estonian and Hungarian, they often ask me if I could understand those languages. No. Definitely not. Estonian sounds very much like Finnish, and there are some words that are very similar, but I wouldn’t straight away be able to understand it. I’d say it would be a lot easier for me to learn Estonian than, say, Japanese! Hungarian, on the other hand, separated from the other languages so long ago that it sounds completely different and there aren't really any visible similarities between the languages either.

By the way, people are often really surprised when I mention that Swedish is really close to English! I mean, of course they don’t sound alike (anymore), but they have loads of really similar words and structures too. If you’ve ever heard or read Old English, it really sounds and looks like Swedish! Here's a little table which tries to prove that Swedish and English are closer to each other than Swedish and Finnish:

I hope I didn't make any mistakes there...

One interesting example (that I often like to share) is the word ”house”. In Swedish it’s ”hus” and that’s what it used to be in Old English, too! The current spelling is due to French influence (I guess they invaded England at some point). They spell the u-sound in hus with ”ou”. And you know how they like to add random ”e’s” at the ends of words ---> house. (I learned this from a book when I was studying for my entrance exam for English. I hope I remember it correctly)

I happen to be interested in languages and their history, I even studied languages in university for a while. But I decided I didn’t want it as a career after all, so I’m obviously not an expert. A lot of the stuff I wrote is just based on what I remember learning in school and university, and just things I found online! And the point of this is just to shortly explain what Finnish is, where it’s from and ”who” are its relatives!

Presidential Election!

As I mentioned, I voted in the Finnish presidential election a week ago on Friday. You can vote in advance if you're abroad, so that's why I did it so early although the actual election day wasn't until today, Januray 22nd 2012. (You can vote in advance in the homeland too, but abroad that's the only option.)

Despite today being the election we don't yet have a new president. In the Finnish election system one of the candidates has to get more than 50 % of the votes, and if that doesn't happen on the first election day, there will be another round in two weeks, and that will be between the two most popular candidates. So the second election will be on February 5! And again, I have to vote in advance, so I'll be heading to the embassy in Dublin next Friday.

There were eight candidates, one from each of the parliament parties. As expected, the candidate who got the most votes was Sauli Niinistö from the National Coalition party (centre-right, liberal conservative). His percentage of the votes was 37,0 %.

The battle for the second place was tight between Paavo Väyrynen from the Centre Party and Pekka Haavisto from the Green League. In the end, Haavisto got 18,8 % of the votes and Väyrynen lost with 17,5 %!

For thirty years in a row Finland has had a president with a social-democrat background. The current president, Tarja Halonen, was Finland's first female president and has been in office for the past 12 years. If Niinistö wins the election, he will be the first Coalition-president since 1956. If Haavisto wins, not only will he be the first Green president, but also the first openly homosexual president. He is in a registered relationship/civil union with an ecuadorian hair-dresser!

So it's a historical election in that sense.

The president doesn't really have much power, though. The real leader of the country is the Prime Minister (at the moment: Jyrki Katainen, National Coalition Party) and the president doesn't have any say in legislation or any of that. The president represents Finland abroad in different summits and meeting etc. The president is also nominally the supreme commander of the Finnish army! :D But luckily we're not in war. And if we were, I'd say the president wouldn't be the one making the strategical moves...

By the way, if you weren't able to tell by the names, all of the above-mentioned people are men, except Tarja Halonen. There were two female candidates in this election, one from the Christian Democrats and one from the Swedish People's Party of Finland, but they got the least amount of votes out of the bunch.

What else should I mention? Oh, the president's term is six years long. That's one reason why I go through the trouble of going all the way to Dublin to vote, because this is my first presidential election I can vote in, and there won't be another one in six years! The parliament election is every four years, the last one was last spring and that was my first one too! The previous one was in 2007, but it was a few months before I turned 18. Yeah, I guess another thing to mention is that the voting age in Finland is 18, but that is not very surprising in any way!

Random facts:

• It took about 2 hours to count the votes after the ballot boxes closed
• 72,7 % of the citizens with a right to vote, voted in this election; that means 3 059 850 people out of a possible 4 407 185
• In every election Donald Duck and his Disney friends receive a small percentage of votes
• There are only about 80 foreign reporters in Finland following the election, which indicates that the interest abroad isn't very great. The reporters say that the strange language also makes it a little bit hard to follow!

So that's my little news flash on the elections, just to keep all my readers (all three of them) up to date on Finnish current events. Other than that, I don't really have a lot of news. Tomorrow starts the third week of the semester and I'm not completely burnt-out yet, which is nice! Anyway, I will write more soon. Bye!