Akseli's birthday and a finnish wedding

Saturday was a huge day! It started off at 8am with chocolate and cake. My host family is on a 'candy diet' and haven't eaten candies for over a year! On saturday it was Akseli's 10th birthday and the 'candy diet' was put on pause. We had candies galore!

The birthday boy... As you can see the table was full of cake, croissants, a whole plate with 5 different types of chocolate and tea :)

The cake Selma made for Akseli :)

After breakfast we all quickly got dressed and hurried off to a finnish wedding in Tampere. Tampere is a 2 hour drive north from our house. Everyone there was ice hockey crazy and I quickly learnt Tampere is home to two major ice hockey teams. 

In the car...

The church the wedding was in, was amazing! It was built in 1880 and was huge! It had a massive organ and beautiful lights hanging from the celling. 

They even sung finnish hymns... I took this just for you grandpa ;)

The couple getting married. I found it quite weird and funny meeting them for the first time at their wedding. 

When the newly weds were walking out of the church they gave us horns to blow at them. Of course being Finland they even had angry bird horns! Akseli and I had a horn blowing competition all the way to the reception.

The newly weds driving off to the reception... start saving dad, I found a car I like ;)

At the reception there was many wedding speeches. It was really awkward when everyone was crying and i'm just nodding and smiling thinking I have no idea what you are saying as they were all in finnish. It was also very exhausting trying to interperet what the older finnish people were saying when they talked to me as they didnt speak very good english. 

Gorgeous table decorations...

For those of you who know me, I always make serviette flowers. So I taught my whole table how to make serviette flowers. To all the finnish people at the wedding I was known as 'the Australian girl who makes pretty serviette flowers'. 

On the way home my host dad stopped at a castle! It was huge and really unique as we have no castles in Australia. There is only about 4 castles left in Finland as most of them are made of wood and burnt down in WWII. 

Meeting the Honkanens!

On Friday I finally met Elli's family! For those of you who don't know, Elli is our exchange student living in Australia with my family and I met up with her finnish family as I am now in FInland! Both Elli's family and I were very excited to meet each other! They picked me up from school friday afternoon and we caught the train into Helsinki. Although we only just met I felt like I had known them for ages as Elli has been my sister for 6 months so they felt like family too! It was quite funny as Tiina (Elli's mum), Olli (Elli's brother) and I went and saw a movie which was the same movie Elli, my mum and my brother went and saw in Australia just a week before! It was a very lovely afternoon. 

Walking around Helsinki...

A statue of a famous poet...

Tiina and Olli <3

Getting lollies for the movies! It was really interesting comparing Aussie lollies to Finnish candy! Theres so much licorice in FInland...

Olli and I at an Italian restaurant for pizza after the movies...

The tram tracks around Helsinki...

A beautiful waterfountain statue. Evidently when winter finishes all the students dress the statue in hats to represent spring coming...

Another famous statue on the main shopping street...

Inside Kamppi shopping mall...

Olli and I on the parliment house steps...

Parliment house...

A fish statue?..

Bike ride to the 'beach'

On wednesday after school, my friend Fiona came over and we met up with Maija and Elsa (girls in our neighbourhood the same age as me who I have become good friends with). We then went on a bike ride to the 'beach'. The ride there was beautiful! We rode past huge green padocks and fields filled with flowers. 

When we got there I discovered the word beach has a totally different meaning for Finns. A beach here has very little sand which is brown, muddy water and is very very small. But it was still very beautiful! The sun was also out which made it a very warm afternoon and I even got down to wearing a t-shirt! We sat on a huge rock overlooking the 'beach' and watched the sun go down. 

On the way back Maija and Elsa took Fiona and I to the forest to go berry picking! By the end our hands and mouths were blue from eating so many berries! On the way we also learnt lots of new finnish words including the word for blueberry, "Mustikka". 

Espoo day and everything angry birds

This saturday was Espoo day at Selma's and Akseli's primary school. This meant they had to go to school and I went with them. The day was all outside (although the weather wasn't very nice) and we moved to different areas to do different activities. The first activity we did was to re-design the school playground with snow castles and igloos. I spend most of the time being interogated by Selma's class mates about Australia and I got asked to say one direction over and over as my Australian accent evidently made it sound 'cool'. It was very fun being back in primary school for a day. 

In the picture on the right below you can see the neighbourhood in which I live in. It is surrounded by parks, forest and even a pond. It is very pretty. 

The second activity I did with Akseli's class and we used nets to catch bugs and small fish from the pond. We then put them into tanks to identify them and look at them under microscopes.

Finally we went on a walk up a hill and then came across dozens of tractors. I really don't know why they were there or why we were looking at them and no one could explain it to me in english so I just went with the flow. 

After lunch there was waffles with homemade strawberry jam and cream. They were the best waffles I have ever tasted! 

These are some of the friends I met. On the left is my host sister, Selma and in the middle and on the right are her friends Maija and Anni-marie. They loved selfies. 

After lunch I left school with Akseli, my host mum and host dad to go to an angry birds park opening. For those of you who don't know angry birds comes from Finland and they are very proud of it, having angry birds everything! Akseli's team for soccer is sponsered by angry birds so Akseli was playing at the opening. 

They had angry birds balloons...

Angry birds soft drink and angry birds notebooks...

Angry birds play equipment...

People dressed up like angry birds...

They had angry birds soccer and basketballs...

They even had a band playing angry birds theme song music!