Just a few assorted photos of my room whilst living with my amazing 3rd host family, the Sunila family.
Decorated with assorted things from throughout my year, from postcards, to Rotary banners, flags, a map of Finland, school and Rotary photos and my works from art class.
So I am now back in Australia, in fact I have been for 6 months now, but I will talk about that at a later point. Unfortunately at the end of my exchange things were so hectic with Christmas, my birthday, getting ready to leave and cramming as much as I could into the last weeks that I barely had time to take a breath let alone write my blog.
I am going to change this.
Those of you that know me have already heard so many of my stories (and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you were sick of them); however, I am going to continue my entries for myself and those of you whom I don't know personally or haven't had the chance to catch up with yet. There may be a few changes to how things have gone before, such as a few less specific memories and the added bonus of hindsight. In some ways it is a fresh start and put a new life into this blog. I am hoping to get a post up in the next few days about the arrival of the Christmas season, followed by the trip I took to Lapland and then we will see where we go from there. I hope you guys enjoy reading what is to come as much as I will enjoy writing it.
As an extra curricular activity I attended a play with my Rotary club at the theatre in Kotka city centre.
On the walk to the theatre from the bus I notice that they have reinstalled the lighting in the trees either side of the path to help deal with the darker and earlier nights and bring some beauty to the grey surroundings.
When we arrived we got a backstage tour which I found extremely interesting and we met some of the actors that would be in the show.
I also really enjoyed the play and was excited when I understood a lot more than I did at the last performance I went to (2 months before)... well except for when you were no longer suppposed to understand what was going on when the play had reached a stage of anarchy!
I went with my host mum and host sister to a town 45 minutes drive north from Kotka for my host sister's basketball tournament. It was an over night tournament with many games so we stayed the night in a school with all the other teams, in the morning we woke up to see it had snowed during the night, how exciting!!
Unfortunately the snow didnt follow quickly to Kotka however the weather was certainly colder and there were some quite interesting frozen puddles on the walk to the bus stop...
I took part in a drum cirle program which was abrach off program for my school, some of the art students took photos all containing different moods and emotions and subject matter. Then as a combination of arts music was added in the form of drums (played my myself and other exchange students) and guitars - the goal being to see how the photos could be enhanced by the music, we practiced the drumming for 4 weeks, once a week for 2-3 hours and then then the 5th week everything was combined to make the final performance.
About 1 week after changing family the gradual change from Summer to Autumn began - at first it was just a few trees but by the end it was quite beautiful. However apparently it wasn't as grand as some years becasue this year was warmer than average.
and as a p.s. I love the word 'ruska' as it does mean autumn colours but also translates to 'forest glowing with autumn tints' <-- amazing how all that can be said in 1 word.
After settling into the pattern of life in my new host family I had a holiday from school because I had done all my exams and had none left for the exam week.
I decided to make a meat pie for dinner as something to do and to introduce my host family to something Australian.
my masterpiece
I also added 2 teaspoons of vegemite to the meat as a bit of an extra Australian twist and
I must say it was quite amazing!
Also as a random side note:
I was playing the Hard Rock Cafe version of monopoly and was quite offended to realise that Australia was the cheapest lots you could buy... not happy Jan! ahahaha (Australian pop culture reference)
I have quickly decided to do some educating of non-Australians reading this blog with said Australian pop culture I talked about above:
