Part 2 of the update!! :)

Hej Everyone,
This is just a continuation of my other update! So.. yeah that's about it : D !

This is just Michael, my second host dad on our boat! Like I said in my other post (if you don't know what I'm talking about, go check it out), we have a summer house in Sarfsalö so we obviously have a boat and skiing and wakeboarding stuff!! : D i haven't actually done any skiing or wakeboarding yet because it was TOOOO cold!! But we have gone boating, in fact we've boated from Sarfsalö to Borgå and if we wanted we could boat to Estonia!! How cool is that?!

Just some pictures from when we were on the water :)

Okay, so these fish (not sure what type they are) swim all around and they are about 3-4 inches long. You can eat them, I have. You just take the scales and bones out and then you eat them! They haven't been my favorite things to eat.. but it was definitely something new.. even if it wasn't that tasty. :)

CRAYFISH PARTY!! Or kräftskiva in Swedish! This is a very popular Finnish tradition where people come together and eat crayfish, drink, dance and well.. just have a lot of fun! They usually only have them during the summer and maybe in September. I've been to 2 so far, one in Sarfsalö and one at home! In Sarfsalö, we had about 70 people in this hall and we had a live band play, The Motions and we had crayfish, sausages, salad, and bread to eat! It was delicious!!! While we ate, we would stop and sing these "snaps" songs, they basically are silly songs that people will sing then take shots! Of course I didn't drink, I didn't want to break any Rotary rules. Then after we ate the band started playing and everyone (pretty intoxicated by now) would start dancing on the dance floor! By midnight, they had pulled out some more sausages and these things called "Chocolate Kisses" for a midnight snack! Also very good! We also had this competition where there was a bottle of wine and a bottle of whiskey put on the ground and then about 10 m away was a line and you had to slide/toss a euro and whomever was closest won the bottle. I think that, that competition lasted an hour! In the end, there were 2 men who had their euro touching the bottle! It was so intense!!!!!!

This is just a picture of what the table looked like while we were eating! It's a messy meal!! The other picture is just where on the crayfish we had to get the meat off of!

This is what the crayfish looked like.. before we started eating them :) !

Swedish Snaps Songs (Good luck trying to understand them!)

Host Mom and Host Dad burning up the dance floor! (Catherine and Michael)

EVERONE'S DANCING NOW!!!!

This is the "Chocolate Kiss" I was talking about, It's a thin shell of chocolate then the inside is full of this flavored sweet mousse and on the bottom in a layer of wafer. SOOOOOO GOOOOOD!!!! this one was strawberry flavored but there is a lemon, banana, mocha, mint, vanilla, blueberry, and umm.. I can't remember anymore :) .

See? A good ole fun timee all around : D!

I have made quite a few friends and I have been hanging out with some. There is this girl, her name is Sophie Bannatyne, and she lives just a 5 minute bike ride away from me! We've become quite close and have spent a lot of time together, we also have a lot of the same classes together : D: D! But to be honest, in the beginning of school it was really hard to even have a conversation in school. Rotary told me "The Finns are shy, remember that." and I was like "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. We'll see about that!" ...OH MAN, are they ever shy!! I didn't even realize it! For the first couple of weeks I didn't say ANYTHING to anybody. I just didn't know what to say and I was too scared to go up and ask something becasue I thought that I would probably embarrass myself! But now, I have come to realize how dumb I was to think that and I now know how great my classmates are! Just a tip for any future exchange students, BE OUT-GOING AS HELL, you definitely won't regret it! Because if you won't, it's just going to make your exchange that much harder! And the truth is that the other classmates in your class are probably just as eager to talk to you as you are of them!

This is Muriel Unden, she's the other exchange student in my school. She actually isn't on excchange with Rotary, she's with some other program. But we spend every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 10-11:30 am because of our extra Swedish lessons! We also have lunch together and we have become good friends :). She's 18, so she's a bit older than I am and she's also from Belgium and speks French as her mothertongue! That's another great aspect of this exchange, I've met so many people from all over the world, you wouldn't even be able to imagine! It is so great to have met them because they are going through the exact same things that you are and you can always talk to them! They also effect your opinions and thoughts so much, just because they bring many things you've never even thought about before AND the similarities just makes you realize how small the world really is at the same time! It's undescribable.

This is actually just a regular parking sign in Borgå, there was just something small I wanted to point out was that the sign is written in BOTH Finnish and Swedish. It's the same with all of the products too. The thing is that Finnish is almost always written first because Swedish is a minority. Sort of like English and French in Canada. Minus the signs part.

There will be a Part 3 of the update!! : D Just wait, thanks for reading!!