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.
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