2nd Monday

Another Monday that I anticipated to be crazy, but actually turned out pretty chill (as is the Finnish way). I had class from "ten until two" (in actually, 10:15-12:00). At 12:15 we had to attend an informational meeting about the Atlantis program. We just had to talk a little bit to prospective students from Helsinki who might be interested in enrolling in the program. We gave our contact information in case they wanted to ask us any questions about our experiences, etc. Apparently I was a little overzealous about having people contact me, and came across as being needy. I just wanted to meet some Finns!

After our 1.5 hour lunch (when really we shouldn't have had time for lunch at all. Ah, I love Finland) we had our "silviculture influences on greenhouse gas and biogeochemical cycles or whatever the finnish translation is" class. This was the one where we were supposed to join in with the Finnish groups last week, but no one wanted us. The professor started class by saying, "I believe last time I asked for the foreign students to be in groups with Finnish students, but it seems they weren't able to join any groups. So what we are going to do is have them just join in with an existing group. Where are the foreign students?" We raise our hands. "Okay, who can take these people into their groups?" No one says anything. We look around and kind of wave. After a long time the professor says, "Okay, lets do this differently. Let's just go through one at a time. Let's start with you. What's your name?" He points to Mark. Mark kind of stands up and says "Hi everyone, my name is Mark." "Okay, who wants Mark in their group?" Dead, awkward silence. "No one is leaving this room until everyone has a group." We said afterwards that it's a good thing none of us have self-esteem issues. This could have been quite a blow. Instead it was just ridiculous and funny. Finally he had to just put us into groups. Now all I have to do is track down my group and get them to talk to me...

The last time I went grocery shopping (which I'm a pro at now, btw) I saw they had really, really cheap, home brewing kits. And since beer is SO expensive here I realized this would be the way to go. So that evening we attempted to make a batch of beer. All the directions for the kit were in Finnish. And after a painstakingly long time trying to type it all into Google Translate (which doesn't handle Finnish very well, plus we didn't have any of the å, ä, ü keys we needed) we decided to just wing it. We figured we were all science majors, plus Jaime (Mark's girlfriend who had arrived the day before) had a mycology textbook, and we read all the sections about yeast. A few hours later it started bubbling, so I would say we are pretty good Instinctual Beer Brewers.