Off To Finland: May

The first of May is Vappu, May day and its a really big event in Finland but mostly for University Students. I got to eat Vappu doughnuts and special drink that people drink at Vappu time.

With May comes mothers day! Liisa made an amazing cake.

Here it is all finished.

The spring time is the busiest time for farm work because all the snow has melted and the fields have to be made ready for either grazing or planting. The soil is pretty rocky in Finland so every spring the family goes out and collects all the rocks from the many many fields. Off course I joined in and I actually kind of enjoyed it. It was good honest work and everyone needs a bit of that every once in a while. It was also pretty damn exhausting though, I counted up the hours we spent collecting rocks and it was roughly 18 hours all together!

The biggest event in May would have to be the Ice Hockey World Championships! The match was Finland vs Sweden, Finland's natural enemy. The only time Finland had won the World Cup was in 1995 and it was against Sweden. We'd won 4 silvers since then and one of those to Sweden so to be honest people were not that hopeful for the game. I was though, I was so sure that this would be Finland's year because how awesome would that be, my year would also Finalnd's year of triumph! I watched the game with Antti and Ville and everyone else was asleep so when anything bad/exciting happened we just had to use our hands to show our dissapointment/excitement. First there was dissapointment, Sweden got a goal. I was gutted, I knew that Ice Hockey was like Soccer the final score can be very small at times. But then Finland got a goal, and then another and another and another and before we knew it it was 5-1 and less than a minute on the clock! Oh but whats that FINLAND SCORED AGAIN! 6-1 SUOMI!!! The crowd went wild and the news reporters are zooming in on the sad Swedish people. It was incredible! There was a big party in Helsinki the next day and its all anybody talked about for the next week at school, our English teacher actually got really mad at us for talking and lectured us about coming to school to learn and not "gossip" :P You should all watch this video of Mikael Granlund's amazing goal in the game against Russia which made the guy a legend!
Also watch this video, it pretty much sums up how freaking excited the Finns were (well still are!)