Finland (...and II)

Some time ago I wrote a post called Finland (I) talking about my trip to visit Seppo in Oulu and Helsinki. If that post was called Finland (I), it is about time to wrap it up with a second and final post ;-)

In the previous post, I mostly talked about tourism and places I visited. This one is more about what I did. The trip to Finland was more about practising some snow sports and other crazy things like swimming in a frozen river when outside it was just 1 degree centigrade.

The first cool thing I did was snowboarding on a frozen lake being pulled by a snowbike. Kind of water skiing but with a snowboard and on ice.

Second cool thing: sliding down mountains or any slope. When we visited the Ice Castle LumiLinna, there were some wheel-type sliders in which you could have a ride down a nice slope with curves and everything. The second time I could feel the nice feeling of sliding down a slope without real control was when we took Seppo's sledges and went to some nice hills to try them. A video showing what that was:

The final and craziest thing I did in Finland was swimming in a frozen river. Finnish like doing it in the winter when the water it is very cold. They claim that is really healthy... What I can tell is that you feel alive when you go out of the water... At that moment, it feels like needles under your skin and you suddenly feel very warm inside... It is a pitty the ice and snow around the river were not recorded in this video, but I can assure to you there were some ice chunks around.

That was cold!!

Finland (I)

Last Easter holidays I went to Finland to visit my friends Seppo and Cynthia. It was only 4 days and 5 nights but it was pretty intense and we could do many many things.


First, I arrived on Thursday night in Helsinki after working all day at ESTEC and went for a rock concert in some underground pub. That was a quite nice kick off for the trip! Next day we were sightseeing in Helsinki and we managed to visit the hottest tourist spots in the city, ahh, and Seppo's lab in Helsinki University of Technology.



Next day we moved to Oulu, very very close to the Artic Polar Circle, and that started being cold... I really enjoyed being there for 3 days. We went walking on the frozen sea, swimming in a frozen river, sliding downhill using a sledge, cross-country skiing, snowboarding on a frozen lake with a snowbike as propulsion... Ahh, and we also visited an ice castle called LumiLunna where everything was made of ice and went to Sweden half an hour. I only missed auroras on the sky... Sauna at night was other of the nice points of finnish way of life ;-)


Some nice shots now:



A lounge in LumiLunna used as a restaurant. Notice that the walls and even the table and stolls are made of ice!




This is the frozen see with an island on the right. If there is something cool in Finland that is landscapes!

More photos in the future ;-)