londontown

hyde park

westminster abbey

covent garden

the view from st. paul's

an old and new city

more and more

the dubliner

a quick trip to dublin--a favorite, i could definitely live there. not to mention it was a nice GREEN, SUNNY break from finland's snow. for more photos, see here and here.

i got to see ben!!

the finnish gang minus angel (photographer)

temple bar

stephen's green

oscar wilde

crazy st. patrick's day parade

christ church

dublin

rauma

during the same trip to pori with my landscapes class, we also visited the unesco world heritage site of rauma. it's an old medieval village with the crooked streets and everything (quite unusual for the young country of finland). i really liked the variety of colors throughout the streets. unfortunately, the church was locked (as seems to the standard here in finland), so i did not get to go inside.

a finnish lesson

because i am eager to find distractions from my paper-writing, i will continue the mini updates. here is a song we listened to in my finnish language class during one of the first lessons...of course, we also sang along with it. a small group of us aspire to learn the words to this legendary finnish song and sing it at the karaoke bar in the city center before our time here is over...

side note: "hän" means "he/she," but is not exclusive to either gender.

kyykkä

since i have a few moments, i'll share a little finnish culture. a few weekends ago, tampere university of technology was host to the 'world championship of kyykkä.' while the object of the game is to knock over the other team's wooden pins, what it really means is drunk finns (equaling talkative finns), naked drunk finns running around the ever-present sauna, tech student overalls (i'll post about those some other time), and other such shenanigans. you can learn a little more here and here.

from sunny tampere

not a total lie--the sun did come out today.



that said, i think i will kiss the ground the day i walk out the door and don't slide 5 feet.

pori

pori provided a nice trip out of tampere for a change of (snowy) scenery. the trip was part of an excursion for my landscapes class. we visited villa mairea (one of aalto's most famous works--photos coming soon), pori for a site visit and urban landscape studies, and rauma for more of the same. unfortunately, this entailed walking around the city for 3 hours in the heavy wet snow.

a snowy pedestrian-only streetthe finns bike in all weather. the main church in town

sculpture on the river

they tell me there's a river under there somewhere

rauma, villa mairea, kykka, etc coming soon-ish.