Finland does Winter awfully well

Good (insert appropriate greeting here),

Well, it was so bright and sunny today that I assumed it was above zero on my ride in. There was a time when -5 equated to "dangerously cold" in my little head (now it equates to (2.23606798 i)^2 - this is what they do to you in JF engineering). The weather is exactly the kind you don't get in Ireland: blue skies, dazzling sunshine, bright white snow everywhere (pleasingly crunchy under wheels), it's quite uplifting. I took the long route to work, just to provide myself with a little more vitamin D, and a couple more kilometres on my speedy aluminium steed. I have to say, if you want to buy a bike in Helsinki, go to Velosport - that last service was worth every cent. It's so gratifying when your mode of transport makes you smile.

Collectively, people started going out on the lakes in large numbers over the weekend - there seems to be some kind of Finnish sixth sense for knowing when it is ok to walk on a frozen lake. The unbroken sub zero temperatures seem to have frozen most water sources sufficiently solid for most icy-lake pursuits, such as skating on prepared tracks and through ice-sculptures (actually, I'm not sure how usual that is), and it's not uncommon to bump into someone coming out of a metro car carrying one of these:
My standing-around-in-the-cold experiences leave me in no hurry to grab join them in the sitting-around-in-the-cold-holding-a-pole excitment just yet. Now that I consider it, there's a good chance that that "sixth sense" is in fact an announcement on TV.

I should be regailing you with tales of a seriously good time had at the water-park meets rave event held in Espoo this weekend but, unfortunately, I was feeling quite unwell and didn't go (cursed microscopic bastards, RELEASE THE T-CELLS!), so you'll have to learn Russian and hope that Alex has posted about it instead. This was probably the wisest thing I've done all year, but wisdom does not a fun time make.

On Saturday I did make it out of the appartment briefly, and met Joonas at ESO (a student union building) where he'd overnighted after a party. They take their partying pretty seriously at ESO, as you can see:


There I spied a noble conservation park, dedicated to the endangered and ellusive "Champagne Creature"

This guy looks happy...


In an entirely unrelated note, in Finland the government pays you to study...