Lapland Part I

At the beginning of this month a group of 10 of us went to Lapland for a 3-night stay in a cottage. I have always wanted to visit Lapland, so this was like a dream coming true.

Our fellow passengers were not amused at the level of noise we made all night

The overnight train journey took 12 hours (!), with us leaving Helsinki around 2230 and arriving in Rovaniemi the next morning. The journey was actually quite fun, with us exploring the train, meeting fellow travelling students in the restaurant car and playing cards. I found it very difficult to sleep though, the train was extremely uncomfortable and very strangely designed. I started to have flashbacks to the trip to Russia!

The snow was a bit thicker than I expected

We arrived in Rovaniemi, on the edge of the Arctic Circle to discover, to our horror, that there was no snow. Anywhere. It was freezing cold but there was no white stuff...and we were in Lapland in December! It seemed that our dream trip was going to be ruined - we had been talking for weeks about skiing and building an igloo and snowmen. Luckily we had further to travel and got the bus two hours further north to Levi. I was so tired after the train journey that I fell asleep almost immediately, waking up when the bus stopped very suddenly - there was a reindeer in the road, straight in front of us! Then I looked around and saw that there was heavy snow everywhere! It was amazing.

The landscape was completely blanketed in white

The first thing I did when I got off the bus was sink up to my knees in snow, which was a great feeling (until my legs got cold). We headed to the nearest service station where we ate in the smallest, emptiest Hesburger I've ever seen (we were the only customers) and bought enough food and drink to last the weekend, then called for taxis to take the 10 of us, with our bags and supplies to the cottage.

Our cottage

The cottage was much closer than we expected, but it was still nice not to need to carry all our things through the snow. We did have to wait outside for a short time while we waited for the owner to bring the keys, but we entertained ourselves with our first snowball fight.

The weekend beer supply

Inside, the cottage was great - very modern, clean, with a nice big kitchen, huge fridge, its own sauna and multiple rooms. It even had a TV, which I hadn't since leaving home four months ago! This was my third cottage weekend in Finland, and this was definitely the nicest 'mokki' I've been to.

Putting up the Christmas decorations

It was already very dark, despite being about 2 o'clock in the afternoon (it was practically night time by 3pm!), so we spent the afternoon relaxing, talking and drinking, as well as decorating the cottage for Christmas with some decorations we found in a cupboard.

Relaxing in the afternoon

It was quite disorientating that it was so dark but still relatively early - in Lapland the sun doesn't rise at all for several weeks over winter, and vice-versa in the summer, so it's quite a confusing place. We were already relaxing as if it were night time, so we made an effort to go outside and actually appreciate what Lapland could offer....snow!

Me sledding down the hill...shortly before a big crash no doubt

There was a lengthy slope next to our cottage and we found a couple of sleds in the shed, so we took them out on a test run. It was great fun and by the end of the day I felt quite a professional at it, although stopping was still a bit of a problem.

Our unhappy snowman

We ended up playing a drinking game that involved making challenges, and silly me came up with the idea that the next person to drink had to run outside and build a snowman. And what do you know...the next person to drink was 'the boys'. There were only 3 of us, so we had 7 girls pointing and laughing as we struggled to build a snowman but I think the results were quite impressive, as you can see above.

Building our igloo

Later on me, Rachel, Andrew and Florian embarked on our quest to build an igloo, as we had always wanted to do so. It wasn't quite the traditional kind...it had snow walls and a flat wooden roof covered in snow, but it turned out really nice. You can see what the final version looked like in my next update.

The cottage group (minus the camera lady) surrounds our snowman

We spent the rest of the night in the cottage chatting away, playing games and planning what to do over our next three days in Lapland. Stay tuned to find our what we got up to!