Sooo, I decided that I am too lazy to go back to my old posts and insert the relevant pictures--so here are some random ones! Above is a picture of the sign for the school I am working at. Here are some more from September: 
Yesterday night I went orienteering with the parents of a student in the 2E class, and their 17 year old exchange student from Germany. Orienteering is big in Finland, or at least in Kokkola. I honestly do not know if people do this in the states. What happens is you show up at whatever place has been picked at anytime during say, an 8 hour period. They hand you a map of where you are and you go to a table and mark the spots that you need to find, in order, from 1 to 10. This time the map was a bunch of criss-crossing lines that amounted to 4.4 kilometers in all. Usually the check points are contained in secluded, forested areas but sometimes they can abut neighborhoods. The father, before I agreed to go, said that they don't take it seriously... some people do, but they just do it for fun and take their time. Well, that might be true, but I still got an intense workout jogging over rocks and small creeks and fallen trees. Then we ran into farmland with horses on it; we started climbing through the scant fence. It had a current running through it and shocked me. So now I know what it feels like to be shocked by an electric fence. I said “ow.” But it was actually quite fun and now I wish I knew how to use a compass to read maps. Orienteering is also a mandatory part of primary school education, and all of the primary school classes in Kokkola have been going orienteering in one form or another for the past two weeks.
In other, less awesome, news, flus have been going around and I have fallen prey to a small spell of one. I had a fever for a couple hours at the school as well as a bad headache. I took some medicine, came home, and slept for almost 3 hours. Now I feel better but still 'out of it'. I guess it's just that time of year everywhere above latitude 47 in the world.
Computer problems plague me, still. Highly disappointing. I will never complain about GCI service again. It would be a godly connection in Kokkola, Finland. It's strange because everything else here is so much more modern than in America. Their houses, their lights, their heating systems, the fact that every child has a cell phone... I guess they are just more modern in different ways. Less children here have gaming systems. My host family doesn't even have one. Not even a gameboy. That would be totally unheard of in a household of 3 young boys in America, unless you happen to live in some parts of Pennsylvania.
Today in 2E there was a substitute, so when they were finished with their art project she let them draw. I stood over two little boys who were making quite a lot of noise. One boy was drawing fighter jets, helicopters, parachuters, and tanks. Then, after he had finished drawing these things, he would draw guns or cannons shooting them up and would add explosions to the previously unharmed machines and people. There was obviously one side against another. “Who are these people and those people?” I asked. “This is English,” he says, pointing to the blown up plane, “and this is Finland.” He motions at the cannons and men with big guns. I turn to the other boy, who has drawn a parachuter with a magic gun that can spray hundreds of bullets in many directions, and the fire is landing on a group of people on a cliff. I ask him the same question. “This is American,” he points at the helpless cliff group, “and this is from Finland... no, no, from England.” Oookay, I think. There is nothing you can say to these boys. Not “that's not nice.” They don't care if it's not nice. The interesting thing is that I bet if an American 8 year old boy was drawing something similar and I asked who was who, he would come up with something like “That's James Bond and those are the bad guys” or “that's the vampire army and these are the humans.” Americans are very influenced by the media they watch and stories they hear, and are therefore more likely to imagine wars that are not morally ambiguous or culturally biased, but wars that have very definite sides of good and bad. As an American, I can also say that I believe for lots of us, history is vague and confusing, and wars fought in the past hold little meaning or interest. Except the civil war, but even that escapes the interest of most American 8 year olds. But America is very strange in this way, it seems. People in Europe and Asia know about many wars in their country's past, and they carry them throughout their lives, carry the knowledge and emotion of them. Little Finnish boys think of England when they think of wars because Finland was at war with England, albeit briefly, in the 19 th century. And people still talk about it often, and hold resentment toward Russia for dragging Finland into a war it did not want to fight. I think that maybe another reason, maybe even a deeper and more meaningful reason, that American children only imagine fantastical and unrealistic wars is because of our politically correct culture. No child would dare say they were drawing America slaughter Japan, even though it happened, and even if a child did dare to, they would certainly be given a very serious talk or even punished. Maybe that would have happened if the normal teacher was there today, though. I will have to ask what some of the teachers think of this. But I think it is an important lesson nonetheless, that Americans are in a way not allowed to imagine realistic wars, unless they have already been structured in a board or video game... I don't know why this is. Maybe because in those board and video games, who you end up attacking or defending against is a thing of chance, but coming up with who is on what side for a drawing takes intention.
There are lots of little differences about the food here that combine to make it significantly foreign, but still quite good and not too weird. One thing I miss about America is the cheese, though. The cheese here is all so mild! It tastes kind of like lightly flavored rubber. I even bought gouda cheese at the store and it was extremely mild, though of course not labeled so. That's just what everyone is used to. They also do not sell cheddar cheese. Oh yes, the labels say cheddar, but it all tastes like that gross Kraft American cheese. So to someone who wishes they were a cheese connoisseur, there is a lot lacking over here.
One thing that surprised me the first day I came was when my host mother pulled out a jar of peanut butter. I thought Europeans hated peanut butter! But she had been to the states before, and she was prepared for me. Though the peanut butter sold here is all less oily and sugary. I miss the oil. The Finns also like to point out that they do not like spicy foods or adding spices very much, although earlier today my host father made one of the spiciest pasta sauces I have ever eaten (one of the boys was sure it was really chili). And there seems to have been a national memo sent out that everyone should stop eating real butter. I don't think I've even seen it sold in the stores... or if it is, it is hidden. It is all margarine and vegetable fat here, with a dozen different brands to choose from. I don't mind it much but it is less salty than margarine in the US. Everything is less salty. Even their salt. I'm not kidding! Their salt is less salty... its flakes are less heavy and less uniformly shaped. Somehow this leads to a teaspoon of salt in your soup tasting like 5 flecks of normal USA salt. I don't know why I notice this stuff. It is also amusing to watch the Finns put pineapple in everything that is foreign. Something called “American Pizza”? It is lathered with a bunch of different meats and cheese and pineapple. A burrito in a “Mexican” restaurant? The three staple ingredients are beans, cheese, and pineapple. Not to mention this “Mexican” restaurant has pictures of Native Americans like Sitting Bull and Native American headresses all over the place, mingling with the pinatas and cacti. And yes, this was supposed to be a purely Mexican restaurant. Quite amusing.
As for their overall diet, I've never seen anyone drinking milk higher in fat than 1%, and they eat way less processed foods than Americans do. They also are obsessed with the fat content of cheese and butter, and it is usually advertised in big numbers on the front. I don't miss the fat, but I also don't think it is so important to be obsessed with counting calories in foods that are naturally high in fat. In that way, I guess a lot of their food IS processed... just processed to remove things rather than add them.
There is this one yogurt dish called melja made by danone that is sooo good, it is better than ice cream to me. But then there is this other kind of yogurt dish called viili that is like stringy sour yogurt and I did not like it. They also like to eat this kind of super dark licorice that I did not enjoy the taste of one bit. And they have more boring ice cream flavors. Well, I think that is enough espousing about food for one night. I didn't realize I had accumulated so many opinions on foods here already!
Today we were called in to the teacher's room right after lunch. At that moment, about 200 kilometers to the south, a gunman was shooting up his school, a vocational school. I cannot get much more information, 9 people have been confirmed dead now and possibly the gunman, too, who shot himself. I have no access to the internet and my host father isn't watching the news on tv. I believe this is only the second time ever something like this has happened in Finland, the first time it was at a secondary school about a year ago, I have been told. It is not all over the television. After we were told about it a teacher turned to me and started asking about lesson plans for next week. My thesis about most Finns being unwilling to talk about bad things is hard to determine through personal relationships, but it seems to have some truth to it on a national scale. In the least there is certainly a difference between American and Finnish reactions to tragedies... Americans would have the news of it all over every basic channel and radio station, and everyone would be talking about it a lot. Especially if it was happening less than 200 kilometers away. Now the television has turned to a press conference about the shooting—although it is being reported on now, it still is markedly different than how American television would report it. It is a paneled press conference, with specific people reading prepared remarks. And this is happening about 3 hours after the shooting took place. In America, there would probably be journalists interviewing shocked and horrified witnesses and anyone else who so much as had an opinion about it, there would be video footage rolling nonstop of fellow students screaming and crying, terrified and angry. Both ways of handling the tragedy seem strange to me—one too business-like, the other too sensational. But I don't know how I would direct media to deal with it. How does one deal with something so horrible and senseless?
A teacher also said that it was 'big news' last year when the first shooting happened, because no one expected it to occur in Finland. “We have no locks on our classroom doors, no sealed gates, nothing by the way of security,” she said, “there wasn't need for it. Maybe that's changing.” It might be that I have come to admire the trust and respect for students in one of the last and dying systems where teachers trust to leave their students unsupervised... it may be that some of what I want to bring back to America are values that it cannot afford to employ, values that are going to start being swept away in Finland because the world is afraid of youth with guns for good reason. But why are there so many murderers among us? Why so many murder-suicides at places of education??!
Today when I was working with the 1st graders, they were acting up and would not cease until I said “Remember one of the rules is being polite, and what you are doing is not polite, you are not following the rules.” I don't know if that would work with 7 year old Americans. It would be interesting to find out more about the disciplinary system in the higher grades here... there doesn't seem to be one in the elementary aside from contacting parents and having meetings with them, and that I think is not so different from American elementary schools, at least in Alaska.
*It was.
