Today is the Old New Year's eve. I am back in Waterloo finishing my degree with only 3 and a half months to go. I can't imagine that in a month there will be an iron ring on my right pinkie, I wonder if it will bother the heck out of me. In May, I will return to the Arctic to enjoy the cold, the warm, the mosquitos, the helicopters and most of all the people that gather up North. There will be 6 full months to live such simple and sophisticated life style. It is easy for me to detach myself from the world down south since I am single and free:) Since I do plan to settle down at some point in my life I would like to enjoy such opportunities while I can. The camp will not be the same as when I left it. 200 people is a lot and it might feel like a town where you don't know everybody. Well, ultimately we are there to work, so it won't matter. Upon completion of the year two of the winter in the summer, I will switch it up and live through a summer in the winter by going to the down under. Australia and New Zealand are the destination of choice for an indefinite period of time, probably half a year or so... maybe I will be back for another field season in Canada.
Let's see where everyone else is planning to be in the next year:

Amy will bike across Canada, then come up North to visit me;) and we'll take off for the South Hemisphere
Linda will go on a European cruise with Chris and then who knows, they both applied for the job at Microsoft
Daniela will spend the summer in Italy and hopefully get in to grad school at UBC
Phil will travel Nepal, Tibet, South East Asia and Africa and then settle down in Seattle
Natasha got a job with Telus in Toronto
Jeffrey might move to Texas
Tom will enjoy his summer working for the Department of National Defense and then finally graduate
Scott will work in the North as well and then probably travel South America
Katie has no idea what she wants, but I got a feeling she is itching for some traveling
Anuta and Vitalik will both graduate and get married

Crazy world, i hope we can keep in touch.

My first break from the Arctic marathon is coming up soon. There are a few things that I HAVEN'T done in the last 3 weeks:
- flushed a toilet, slept in the dark, rode in a car, slept alone in the room, put less than 2 sweaters on, saw an ashphalted road, recycled, ate only veggies for dinner, saw more than 40 people at the time, got stuck in traffic, and saw trees and squirels!
It will be weird to put on a regular seatbelt in the front seat of the car instead of a four point belt in the chopper. Haha, I might even bend in half coming up to a car so the blades don't take my head off!

The Arctic is treating me real well and this bare but intricate landscape is securing itself in my heart. I saw a polar bear which made the whole trip worth it too!

My last day in Lund, tomorrow morning is the take-off time. This term has been long and short. After four months I felt the itch to move on, but now it seems like I could have stayed here for a while longer. I've learnt that chocolate balls taste great, Australian accent is very intriguing, biking in the yellow fields feels awesome, travelling for two and a half weeks straight is enchanting, and that the best memories are of small little things:) Thank you Lund!

According to old Canadian tradition, May 2-4 is when you go camping for the first time of the year:) Being in Sweden this year didn't stop me from following this tradition. Even the fact that May 24 was a Thursday didn't stop me. We travelled to a nearby town of Hög where we rented a canoe. To be very appropriate, this canoe was Canadian canoe:
Have you ever seen a Canadian canoe before?... yeah, me neither. Paddling up the stream with me steering at the back was tons of fun. I lost count of how many trees we smashed into:) At our pitstop, we made a random fire and roasted not only sausages, but also bananas with chocolate! yummy!

I posted more pics from random events and my recent trip to see Hamlet´s castle in Denmark. Here they are.

Finally, I made it to a sittning at Lunds nation. Sittning is not just a fancy dinner party at one of the nations. Sittining is dinner party taken to the next level. You book as a group and often come dressed up as for a theme party. So far I've seen pirates and 80's work out group. You sit at the formal table with napkins, two forks and two knives and candles. Three course dinner is served, while the portions weren't big at all, the food tasted real good. Here comes the perk of the whole night: it is a singing competition between the tables! Swedes love to sing, so throughout the dinner people get up and announce a song they are gonna sing. The whole table sings with you as loud as they can. Later, another table responds with their song. In addition all of the signing is accompanied by clapping and banging on the table unil the wine spills:) Swedes know all their songs and call outs by heart; for us foreign students they have little books of songs, almost like in a church only with alcohol!

Oh yeah, crazy exchange students in Lund also celebrate Halloween on May 19 at the mental hospital!

Guys from my swedish class.

Part 3 of my travels started at 4 am catching a taxi to the airport in Warsaw. I've arrived to this barn with one room and three doors representing the gates. I was pretty hungry, but the only store in the barn was closed and I had no change for the vending machines. Sitting there I was still thinking in polish-russian-belorussian gibrish to myself, when I heard someone say 'Jätter bra!'. It took me a few seconds to realize that there were other people here heading to Stockholm. Finally we boarded the plane, and considering I was hungry and had money leftover I decided to order something of the menu. I had the menu opened on my lap, my selection was made and the money squeezed in my pocket. The flight attendants were making their way down the aisle. Well, the next thing was me waking up and looking outside. It was all white there from which I concluded that we should be in the clouds. Ten seconds later we touched down. I slept through the whole flight and white stuff turned out to be snow! I picked up my bag and realized that this terminal Skvasta 'in Stockholm' is actually hour and a half away from it. That's what you get for flying cheap airlines! I made my way to Stockholm and wondered around for a few hours.

Later in the day I met up with Peter who was travelling north of Sweden before joining me for the Finland adventure. Somewhere on his travels, Peter met a girl from Stockholm who met us up to show us around. Christina took us up on this Katharina Hiss (Elevator) where we got a nice view of town.

The catch was you had to pay separately for the way up and down in the elevator!
In the evenening Peter and I boarded a ferry heading to Turku in Finland. Back in the day when Finalnd belonged to Sweden, Turku was called Åbo and it was Swedish capital. We had great 4 person cabin just for the two of us. Notice a fake window on this underwater deck!

Sleeping on ferries is so gentle and rocking, puts you out to sleep right away!
In the morning we were in Turku where Peter's friend Markus was supposed to host us for the day. He was a great host showing us around the town and feeding us reindeer meet! We also tried Finnish sausage soup in a student cafeteria.

I was very lazy the first day in Finland, and took almost no pictures. The next day, however, we went to the city called Tampere. The main reason we decided to go there is because they had Moomin Troll museum! You guys in North America probably have no idea what I am talking about. Finnish writer Tuve Jansson wrote and drew series of comics and books about Moomin Troll Family Adventures. There were cartoons made in several countries icnluding England, Japan and USSR. Thanks to the original sketches made by Tuve all the characters looked the same in all the countries!

I even got myself Moomin socks in the gift shop!... couldn't resist. Apart from the Moomin museum, we wondered around the city and went up to the observation tower. From there we could see how much of the water still frozen. We did come to Finland for some winter, though it wasn't as cold as I expected/hoped for.
At the end of the day, we boarded a night train heading north, above Arctic circle. We had to switch trains early in the morning in the town Rovaniemi. Santa Claus Lapland village was only 20 minutes away, but we decided to skip that:) Instead we headed to the town Kemijärvi which was above Arctic circle. Cross-country skiing around/on the frozen lake was quite and experience. It was my first time skiing since back in Minsk around my school. And the view was much better this time.


Ten kilometers later our bodies ached all over. I didn't expect arms to hurt so much, but it was the legs that I felt for the next three days. To end the day we decided to go to the Finnish sauna! It was quite nice to be soooo clean after 4 hours of sweating. Finnish sauna is the one where one keeps pouring water on the rocks. There was also steam room where you couldn't see much at all and you set there in the cloud of warm water vapour:)
After all the cleanliness we wanted to eat. Being up north we wanted to try some reindeer burgers. Poor us didn't know the finnish word for reindeer. We ended up finding a picture of a reindeer on the brochure and pointing at it!!! lol, they didn't have reindeer burgers.
We had to catch another night train on the way down south. This time instead of just seats, we had a cabin. It was all so high tech! The train was two level, with two ppl cabins that each had a toilet AND a shower!!! Check out the album for the pictures of how the toilet/shower transformation worked. I still wonder if they used inbetween wall space for water storage.
Oh yeah and we saw Polar lights on the way back. They weren't very strong so for an hour we wondered if that's what we saw, but when it ended we knew for sure we've seen polar lights!

The next stop was Helsinki, where we stayed in a Stadium hostel. It was located inside the Olympic Stadium. In the hall ways you could smell the sweat so appropriate for a sports residence. Maybe some Olympic champion from 1952 slept in the same room I did that night!!! I found Helsinki to be very homy and cozy town. It wasn't as spectacular as Stockholm, but very welcoming. One of the things I loved the best was this church carved in the rock. It has great acoustics and interesting atmosphere inside. We caught and orchestra practicing there, so we listened to some awesome music too. Later, I saw the conductor's picture on the cover of some magazin, so maybe they were famous!

There is also a video of orchestra playing in the album.
Among other things in Helsinki (Helsingfors in Finnish) we ate Baltic herring on the waterfront and toured the Sveaborg fort. At night we decided to check out the Ice bar, which turned out to be a COLD room where the drinks are super expensive. Haha, but the experience was cool nonetheless. We managed to meet people from Thunder Bay in there, hehe.


Next day we returned to Turku to see Markus again. He was nice to hold on to some of our stuff (i.e. my suitcase) while we were roaming Finland. Since Markus had a conference to attend that day, Peter and I continued our Moomin pilgrimage with a visit to Moomin theme park in a nearby town of Naantalia. There were no rides, almost no visitors (it was out of season), and no open washrooms! Haha. It was tons of fun with great weather!

We also sampled locally started fast food chain HesBurger, which completly excluded MacDonalds from the market in Turku! Not a single MacDonalds in town, it was AWESOME. HesBurger, is quite popular and I even saw one in Latvia later.
Too bad that night we were supposed to be leaving beautiful Suomi land and heading back to our not less beautiful Sverige. Another overnight ferry ride this time with Viking lines wasn't as great. The cabin was pretty shitty, with no bathroom, no phone, and no heating. But hey, it was only one night, we survived. The ferry arrived back in Stockholm at 6 am. Thanks to the great weather we toured the city so early in the morning, enjoying the silence of the town. I even cought a nap on the pierce by the water. Walking through a park full of pink blossoming trees we saw two men playing chess with huge pieces.

When the city woke up, we went to Skansen museum under open sky. It featured farm houses from all over Sweden and some Sami houses from the north. There was also a zoo with Swedish animals. We saw reindeers, moose, wolverines, wolves, bears, and pretty chickens! It was sooo warm that day in Stockholm, we had to undress down to shortsleeves! A short 6 hour train ride to Lund and we were home:)
And this is how my Easter travels ended. It was the longest times I've ever spent on the road. I liked it a lot and at the end felt like I could have kept going to explore more places and meet more people.

From: http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk/article/136#top

Jerk: A unit of acceleration change in engineering. When you sit in a car and it jerks, it is a change in acceleration of one foot per second per second in one second, or 1ft/sec3. This equals about 0.3048 m/s3.

Butt: A unit of volume for wines and other alcoholic drinks. A butt is equal to 2 hogsheads. In the UK, a butt of beer is 108 imperial gallons or 490.98 litres. The word comes from the Roman word buttis, meaning a large cask for wine.

Degree MacMichael (°McM): A unit to measure the viscosity or thickness of chocolate. Values range from about 60 °McM (thin runny chocolate) to about 190 °McM (very thick chocolate for dipping). A MacMichael viscometer is used to make the measurement.

Also Swedish word of the day is:
glasogön, glas is glass, and ogön is eyes. As it turns out glasogön is not glasseyes for ppl with no eyes! it´s eyeglasses!

Last part ended with Wendy and I saying good-bye to Vitek and catching a train towards Poland. This is exactly where this story will pick up. Notice, that I didn't say the train TO Poland, it was the train TOWARDS Poland. The idea was to get off at the last town before crossing the border between Czech and Poland and then catch a taxi to get to the nearest town on the Polish side.
~9pm, we get off the train at the tiniest station, it is pretty much dark and the station hut is closed for the day. We choose to walk to the right but no luck on that side. We turn around and go to the left! I have never been so happy to see a casino as that time. I mean to call a cab we need: phone number+a working phone (our cell phones didn't work there). Casino guy gives us the phone number for the cab but refuses to let us use his phone. ooops. so we continue along the road until we unexpectedly (almost) hit the border. Why not walk through it at 10pm? We almost walked past the guards when they yell at us to come back and show passports. We got some weird looks on both sides of the border and Polish guards were quite interested in Wendy's numerous visas and stamps in her passport. Luckily, they let us through with no problems at all. Once again, I rejoice having a Canadian passport, life is so easy with it. So there we are on the Polish side already, with no taxi in sight. After asking some lady at the exchange office, we find out that the town is 4 km away and the hostel we are aiming at is easy to find. Walking along the road with only a gravel shoulder is tons of fun when you are towing a suitcase! wohoo. Screw the taxi, walking is good for you. Finally, we find the hostel and arrive at its front door. It greets us with a "Construction" sign at 11 pm. Aren't we lucky? There is a guy, however, sitting inside the room, a guy dressed up in a suit and tie looking like he is sleeping. Wendy convinced me he is simply watching tv, so we knock on the window. I'm surprised he stayed calm when he heard the knock on the window at 11 pm, he even opened the window to talk to us. Well, talk to me, I had to practice my polish-russian-belorussian gibrish and it worked just fine! A room for two for the only guests was arranged on the spot and gorgeously delicious breakfast was waiting for us in the morning.

The town was called Kudowa Zdroj and it is famous for being a spa town (santoriums) and for the Table Mountains around. There is also the Church of Skulls there, that unfortunately was closed the day we came to see it, but we saw some skulls through the window. We went hiking in the Table mountains passing on the way a bar called 'Toronto' (the must have known we are coming!).

We also picked up two local friends Fluffy and Stinky.. or wait it was Twinky who helped us along the road. Fluffy was carrying our food supply:

and Twinky was helping Wendy to climb. Yeah, yeah, our local friends were sticks, but they were wonderful. At the end, I parked mine in a bike stall and walked away, it was a sad moment.

We passed some cool view on the way to the top:

We have also came upon a bord sign saying: 'End of the country, Crossing forbidden'. Hehe, look what i did!

The top of the mountain offered a wonderful view on a bunch of little towns probably on the Czech side. I think we spend an hour sitting at the top enjoying the view and inhaling the beauty and tranquility:) Silly us thought that we were finished with the top. That's when we found a sign to the Labyrynth which turned out to be extremely cool maze inbetween limestone rocks. We had to squeeze through these tiny openings to make our way through.
Fluffy turned out to be stone surface feeder as he scraped all the rock surfaces as I made my way along the maze.
After the maze, it took us another few hours to get back to town where we tried to find a place to get massages. It is absolutely impossible to get a massage in the town at 8pm! crazy spa-town. So we had to simply enjoy the shower in our room at the hotel. There, we decided to stay for another night and head out in the morning.
As we arrived at the bus station, we realized that there is no bus station! It was just a bus stop with a few signs informing you of which buses pass through here. Some of the signs looked really old and I doubted their validity. One of the signs like that was a sign announcing a bus to Wroclaw where we wanted to go. So instead we cought a bus to Katowice that was about 200 km away. Six (SIX!) hours later we arrived in Katowice. Fot the first 4 hours of the trip we were enjoying the sightseeing of every little town on the way. However, the last two hours were spent in the urgent wait to get to Katowice. The city name didn't even appear on the road signs until we were really close. We walked around town for a little bit, but it was really dark and polluted city especially in the center. Hence, we decided to move on to Krakow asap. After a very bumpy ride in a tight van, we made it to Krakow allright and found our hostel easily. Hostel was real nice (well the guy at the reception was;). this made our stay in Krakow so much better. The cute guy at the reception suggested to us which places to go to eat polish food and where to go to dance. Best part about going out in Poland is that there are no cover charges in the clubs! so you can surf from one to another as you please. We did exactly that and had a nice night out. The next day, Wendy took care of her taxes and we headed to Weliczka Salt Mine. The tour was totally worth it, we saw underground salt chapels, caves, lakes, tons of carvings out of salt (the latest one added is the statue of JPII). There were displays talking about the history of the mine and also light-music shows at the lakes!

Second part of the tour was optional but I think it was much more interesting. We passed by a lot of old equipment used in the mine. Huge wheels turned around by horses (who never saw the light of day again) were designed to bring stuff up between the levels. The levels had to be only so much distance apart, as they couldn't weave very long ropes of required strength. All of the structures were made out of wood which was super impressive!
That night was my last night in Krakow and me and Wendy went out again. We played some pool with local guys Paul and David and visited a lounge bar where some creepy guys tried hitting on us:) I had to pretend I don't understand Polish. hehe.

Next day was the beginning of a relaxing break in Warsaw where I met up with my grandma, my sister and her friend from Minsk. We had some nice walks around Warsaw and a top notch view on all the Easter celebrations as we lived across the street from a church:)

To be continued with Finland travels!

Last time I was in Prague was about 10 years ago. I dreamt of going back to sample culture and beer for a while now. Finally, a 16 hour bus ride brought me and Wendy (a girl from Waterloo on exchange in Lund as well) down to Praha. After circling one intersection for half an hour, we found the street hiding behind a little red kiosk selling crepes. Our hostel was just at the end of the hidden street. It was great to see that most people in our room were students travelling around Europe for the Easter break. While hostels are cheap and nice, it still strikes me odd when I see old people or families in there. Hostels are for students and travellers!

We had no map of Prague, but Wendy remembered where to go to get to the center:) The main town square was overflowing with tourists and Easter decorations and celebrations.

Sunny weather and cheerful brass orchestra music prettied up the city even more. We walked all around the old town and to the Charles bridge paying visits to most staple tourist attractions.

Eventually we made our way to the castle. Since it was after 5 we didn't have to pay to enter (which is always nice). I just had to take the picture with the guards!

I have seen the Royal Palace guards in Prague, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm. I must tell you that Prague guards are the most serious, straight faced guys ever! They won't even look at you, they pretend you don't exist!!! All the other ones (in Scandinavia) are so much more relaxed, they even allow themeselves to talk to each other. So Prague guards are the toughest.

Wendy and I were determined to try Czech food. We were reluctant to pay high prcies of restaurants around in the tourist area, so we ventured off into the regular parts of the town. What do you think? There were italian places, indian, chinese, thai, american stake houses... but no czech restaurants!!! Two of the places we tried didn't have room for us, but we lucked out in the third one. I am still not sure if the food we ate was Czech, but it was really good. The beer was alright too:)

At night, we went out to check out the night life. Following the directions of the guide book borrowed in the hostel, we headed to a cellar bar where young czech listen to czech pop. LOL. We ran from that place before we entered. Plan B was to hit the 5 level club which turned out to be right on the water. Wendy and I were joined by Arden from California who we met at the hostel. The club turned out to be extremely awesome. 4 levels played really different music, so the there actually WAS choice of music. 5th level was occupied by not lame chill lounge. Except for the abundance of broken glass on the floor, this club fit my teenage idea of a club. Arden was like a big brother to us, protecting from weird guys! wohoo. There was a bunch of guys in the club all dressed in the inmates striped uniform. We first saw them on the street walking down like real inmates being herded! I wonder what was the occasion:) It was a really great night of dancing!

The next day we wondered to the jewish quarters. Too bad it was a Saturday and everything was closed. Wendy had enough of tourist Prague and we took of for little, old and pretty Hradec Kralove. A short bus ride later we were greeted by our CouchSurfing host Vitek. It was Wendy's idea to try to find someone from couchsurfing there and it worked out amazing. Vitek had a bed for us in his office right in the middle of old town on a triangular square (yes.)

Vitek walked us through the town, telling about the stuff around, we even climbed into unlocked church tower to see if it was Vitek's friend signing during the mass (hehe). Since we had real Czech guy to show us around, we ended up in a proper czech restaurant in the cellar. It was really authentic, with awesome food (Svichkova i think the dish was called) and czech beer. Great food was followed by a relaxing sauna and a night out in a local pub in the old post office. All the locals knew each other, so the atmosphere was totally different from one you could expect in a large town. Breaking stereotypes, we drank late harves wine at the bar instead of beer! We also dropped by another cell bar with really cool dj and some drink that involved seeting on fire a slice of orange.

The next day, Vitek showed us sweet sugar shop right across the street for breakfast. Honey cake (medovik) and chocolate balls (po4ti kartoshka) were amazing and cheap! While Vitek was busy with taxes, Wendy and I went sight seeing and shopping to a local mall. Upon return we hit local aqua center for some swimming and sauning. They had an area outdoors to relax after the sauna, which was extremely relaxing. Hehe, Hradec Kralove was the cleanest city on our jouney (two saunas in two days).

The afternoon came which meant that it was time for us girls to move on to Poland. We were sad to leave wonderful Hradec Kralove and Vitek, but great adventures laid ahead:) Here is the only picture we took with Vitek just before the train took off.