The Erasmus Experience 122 unforgettable days in Finland

7 Days of Night, and now back to frosty Helsinki

Snowmobiles - the most awesome form of transport

The final day of the Lapland trip (Saturday) was spent at the Saariselka outdoor centre, southwest of Inari, up in the higher hills of lapland. We started off the morning with an hour-long snowmobile safari - it was incredible! There's no feeling better than speeding along at full throttle on a huge snowmobile, high in the arctic, in the middle of december, at 80km/hour. Everyone needs to do it once!

Skiing was after lunch in the fairly small ski resort they have, it's about 15 runs, and only a few of which are relatively easy beginner ones, so having dislocated my shoulder the last time I skied, 6 years ago, I didn't want to push my luck too far! It was great fun, and the view from the top of the lifts was truly spectacular, you can see the northern plains stretching away for a hundred kilometres, with patches of forest and snowfields dispersed evenly all around.

The weather forecast tells me it was -16ºC when I took this

Today has been the coldest day of the year so far in Helsinki, and to celebrate, myself and Olivier were invited in to our friend Mirka's high school to join their english conversation class. We participated in a roleplay scenario, tried to translate some newspaper articles, and talked to the class a little bit about ourselves. Always interesting to meet real Finns in a situation like that, as usual the girls I spoke to were amazed that I liked Finland so much, and were very impressed that we'd been to Lapland, seen the independence day parade, etc etc.

The temperatures now are even colder than any day we were in Inari or Norway last week - but up in Lapland the temperatures dropped in one day from around -6ºC to currently -26ºC, and i'm honestly quite glad we got out of there in time! I'll be back... One day...