Visit to the grandparents

Last weekend my host family took me to visit their grandparents house. The grandparents live near the middle of Finalnd. It was 5 hours drive from Espoo (where I live). We left on friday afternoon and arrived friday night. Their house is in the middle of the country side and is very beautiful! It is also 20 metres from a huge lake. As it is further up north than espoo, autumn had already come and all the leaves on the trees were yellow and red and were starting to fall off onto the ground. It was like I was in a story book as in Australia we dont really have autumn and it was such a new experience. 

As soon as we got there, I was greeted and hugged by the grandparents. They didn't speak any english and were 'traditional' Finns. The grandpa made Akseli translate that they have the worlds best sauna and 2 minutes later the grandma was rushing me and Selma off to the sauna. The number one rule in Finland is you sauna completly naked. Part of being an exchange studnet is to do what your host family does, so following Selmas lead, we stripped off and in we went. Here I met the aunty. To anyone else it would be very weird meeting someone for the first time completly naked, but not to the finns. She smiled shook my hand and Selma and her showed me 'what to do' in the sauna. This involved a bucket of hot water and tipping it all over us. They all laughed at how weird I thought this all was but I do admit I loved it and the experience. After sauna the grandma gave us all rice porriadge. My host family calls it the worlds best rice porriadge. Even though it is the only rice porriadge I have ever tasted I very much agree. It was delicious!

We woke up early Saturday morning and headed off to the markets with the grandpa. We were selling leather glooves and scarfs that were hand made by the aunty. It was a gorgeous sunny day and we stayed there for 5 hours selling our glooves, looking at other stalls and drinking hot chocolate. Selma caught a frog and I found a lot of lady birds. Topi (my host family's dog) even came along to help out. 

When we arrived back at the grandparents house, Selma took me for a tour of their garden. They had every type of fruit growing there and we just picked what we wanted off the tree and ate it! The apples were the best. I ate over 10 while I was there!

Tomatos...

 Strawberries...

Apples...

Selma and I then walked down to the lake. It was very beautiful and we got some great photos. It was quite a hot day and we ended up having a huge water fight and getting soaked. 

We then met up with the family friends we went to linnanmaki with as they were staying at their grandparents just down the road. We rode our bikes to their grandparents house. It was just as pretty as my host family's grandparents house. They also had a lot of fruit trees and were even drying out a whole lot of apples. The grandma was very interested in Australia and made poor selma translate a lot of questions. They then took us out on their boat. It was a lot of fun. 

When we got back they invited us to their sauna. We followed their car with our bikes along a dirt road for about 10 minutes before coming to a gorgeous private lake with a wooden sauna building on the edge. The grandpa dug out the huge lake by himself. This grandma liked the sauna very hot! We would sauna for 10 minutes and then run and jump in the freezing cold lake and then run back to the sauna. It was very fun and very finnish! We stayed here all afternoon.