So from May 5-11th, I was traveling the western parts of the US. The following weekend, I drove to LR to see V graduate from pharmacy school. I had ordered her flowers, but by 6pm that night, I realized they weren't coming. I spent over an hour on the phone with the florists, but no luck. I ended up having some time after the Friday ceremony to swing out and grab some flowers and, essentially, make a bouqet for her. On Friday, she got her Pharmacy hood. The place was packed, but kinda brought back good memories from graduation. We went to eat out with her family and some family friends and had a great dinner.
Saturday morning, we went to a breakfast in DT LR where she met with some friends and just kinda sat around. I used some points from my 60 days in a hotel to get us a nice room on the river and we (her, her family and myself) hung out until it was time for the real graduation ceremony. It was held at Verizon arena and it was stupid crowded getting there. Once inside, we moved up to the top deck and had a great view of her walking across the stage. After that, her family left and we down to the river to walk around downtown. I left on Sunday and headed back to DFW, where my week was just waiting to be rocked.
Monday morning, May 21, I got a phone call asking me if I had an active passport. I did, so the next question was if I would be willing to go to Finland for six weeks. Of course, I said yes and that leads me to today, where I am packing my bags to head back to the USA. I have been here for almost six weeks (over forty days) and I will spend a few days in Dublin with my little brother.
The town I am living in is called Jyvaskyla and it's a university town. Many places know English and I've talked to several people at great length. It's a gorgous little town. I started my first two weeks in an apartment uptown (one week with Dennis and one with Tommy). Our apartment had a nice sauna and two bedrooms. Now I am living in a sweeeet studio that overlooks the bay and is downtown. I can see several bars from my patio on the 10th floor and it's probably the tallest building downtown. It's AWESOME!
The second weekend I was here (June 9th) we drove eight hours to the arctic circle. It was myself, Tommy and Robert. Dennis had just arrived after being in the states for a week and didn't feel up to a long trip. Boy was it long! It was really cool seeing about half of the country. On the way there, we stopped at an IKEA in Sweden and I got a geocache. Once we got to the arctic circle, we were starving and wanted McDonalds (it's the further north in the world) and decided it was probably at the Santa Claus Village. We were wrong. However, we did see a bunch of cool shops, got a webcam cache and found a real cache in a little native Finnish village. It was cool stuff. On the way there, we saw a moose and on the way back, we saw several reindeer. Apparently people own reindeer here like cows. Every year they gather up the heard and split up the new calves and such. Since it was warming up, the reindeer were shedding and ugly.
The show was going to cost 35 euros, so Robert bailed out. Tommy didn't want to go, so I headed off into Finland to find this show. Turns out that the show ENDED at 11. I got about 30 minutes down the road when I got a call from Dennis and I decided to turn around. I could get to town by 10:30, but I didn't want to pay full price for a third of a show. Instead, I decided to geocache nearby. It was a nice nature trail and the cache was on a gorgeous still lake.
Speaking of gorgeous, the weather here is great! I think it's been in the 70s maybe three times so far. Most of the time it's cooler and it rains a lot. I like the weather, although the mosquitos do too.
Wednesday, the 27th, we went out with the plant manager, an engineer Marko and Tommi, the program manager for drinks and dinner. We had one or two and headed to a place called Harolds. It was a viking themed place two floors underground and it was gooooood. I had reindeer steak, boar sausage and pheasant breast. We also took shots of "tar" and had "tar" ice cream. It tasted a lot like liquid smoke and I suspect that is the main ingredient. It was good, but not great.
Last weekend, June 29th-July 1st, we managed to get a cruise to St. Petersburg. I did lots of research and found out you can enter Russia for 72 hours if you enter via cruise. The ship was really cool. There were several restaraunts and bars and the bottled drinks and food was a little cheaper than here in Jyvaskyla. It took forever to get through passport control in Russia and we all ended up carrying our bags around town because we booked two one way trips and couldn't keep our room. We stepped out of the station at 11am without any Rubles. We grabbed a tour bus (you have to take a tour bus to town) and stopped at the first place we could. We walked into a hotel and exchanged our Euros for Rubles (I now had three currencies in my pocket). We started at St Isaacs cathedral and the map I had was completely useless (I ended up buying one at a store later). I was completely disoriented, so we wandered around for a bit before we finally made it to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. Of course, we took lots of pictures and then visited the market. After that, we went for food and decided to catch the metro to the Harley shop in St. Petersburg. After getting off way out of town, we walked to the Harley shop. It wasn't there!!! So we kept walking and visted Peter and Paul Fortress. I went after my first cache there, with no luck. We then decided to walk the rest of the way around the island and go by the Military Museum. I visited there with Megan and Chris and Titus when we were in town in 2006 and it looks like it has expanded some. We then went by the Naval Columns (I got a cache finally) and on to the main square. From there, we went back to the market and I got two Razorback nesting dolls and a sweet beer glass. Overall, I spent around 100 Euro on the excursion and then we took the metro as close to the ship as possible and walked...and walked...and walked...until our feet hurt and finally, 15 minutes before closing, we made it. It was only six or so hours in town and we saw a lot, but there was plenty we didn't see. On the way out of port, there was a nice Soviet era Leningrad sign. A great way to end the day!
Now it's almost time to go and I'm a bit sad. I bought an ammo can and a dummy bullet at an army navy store and I took them to work. One guy offered to repaint the can and did and another guy got me a brand new, legitimate dummy bullet. It's so cool! I took them apart and really, really hope they don't get stuck in security.
