Land of a thousand lakes*

... whose language is 1000x more difficult than any others :P

Skipped Finnish class yesterday, was just too tired after spending 3 evenings out in a row: rehearsals (mon), Meego meetup (tue), dinner & stand-up comedy with friends (wed). Felt a bit bad because it was the last class for this semester. I think I learnt (retained) quite a lot more this semester, but progress is still painfully slow. I can pick out even more words and their conjugations when listening to people speak, but still not enough to understand much details. For e.g. while watching the stand-up, I heard something about vacation, Thailand, wife, 2000 euros, then hahahaha... What was the punchline now? Luckily there were a couple of American comedians who did their acts in English, as well as one English lady whose act was in Finnish but she spoke slow and clear enough that I understood a few jokes from her! Few... but still :D Jos puhut oikein hitaasti, ehkä voin ymmärrä! Ja myös helppo sanoja, olkaa hyvä :)

According to an article on yle.fi, we'll be seeing more record-low temperatures for this time of the year: "The next few days will be unseasonably cold, with temperatures this chilly nationwide seen only about once a decade". Let's see what's in store for Tampere:

Brrr. Staying below -10C for the coming week. At least it's sunny!

And at least we're not at -31C like in Lapland (northern Finland)... although when it gets below a certain point (maybe -15?) I can't tell much difference anymore because I can't feel anything anymore.

Had my weekly sauna just now. ("Sauna" is a Finnish word btw.) Usually I'll start off with about 10 minutes in the sauna, come out and cool off for a few minutes before going in for another round. But today when I stepped out after the first round, I immediately did an about-face and went back in. Wasn't thawed enough from walking home in the cold!

Speaking of freezing lakes and saunas, I wonder if I'll muster up enough courage this winter to attempt avantouinti (ice-hole swimming). I've got to try it at least once, right?

*) Finland is known as The Land of the Thousand Lakes (actually there are 187,888 lakes in Finland, of which 60,000 are large). -Source: wikipedia

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Update 27/11/2010:

Yet another record cold temperature in Lapland (seems like daily news now), this time -34C in Utsjoki, where the long arctic winter nights have also begun (they won't see the sun again until 16/1/2011).