Jane in Finland: Tuesday October 12 - Re-exploring Jyvaskyla

It 's so great to show a town to a guest because it gives me the opportunity to re-discover my favorite spots as well as find out about new ones.

The first new thing that I found out about today was how early it can snow in Finland. So the date today as you can see is OCTOBER 12. If I was back in Canada, I would be deeply disappointed about the snow as I always hope for no snow before Halloween. Snow makes trick-or-treating more difficult than it should be. Here on the other hand, I embraced the snowy outdoors. It was so warm that the snow was more like slush on the ground but it was so light and fluffy when it was still in the air. The walk to the university was nothing short of magical except for our soaking feet, I should've picked a different day to wear runners.
Since we arrived with time to spare before my history class, I showed Maja around the Mattilianemi campus with a focus on the university library. her university is only one building ! Since both the U of A and U of J have multiple buildings and even multiple campuses, I found this quite odd. Yet, how convenient would that be?
The movie we watched was a Finnish one about Finland in the two World Wars and it was a real tear-jerker. Maybe I'm too emotional but I had to restrain the tears and also my stomach contents at some points in the movie. The movie focused on 3 women of the Lotta organization (a women's auxiliary unit) and their lives during he war and inter-war period. I thought it was a really well-done movie but it set quite the sombre mood for lunch after history class.
We ran into Ezekiel in the music hall again, this was not an uncommon occurrence. His wife, Stella, joined us after a little while and the two of them were really kind in suggesting places to take Maja during her visit. Stella even lent us her bike for the week! The people in Jyvaskyla are so wonderful.
So now with Stella's bike, I felt like a bit of an idiot for leaving my bike at home. We were again stuck with one bike between the two of us. We didn't need to use the bike for the next couple hours as we met up with Noora and the rest of our tutor group of awesomeness so that Maja could get acquainted with all of them. Sadly, Paivi and Kerstin couldn't attend. After having some delicious hot chocolate that resembled diabetes in a cup at the Coffee House, we did a little bit of shopping before the stores closed for the day. I got some wellies (rubber boots), as the British would call them, to keep my feet dry during this slush-like snow weather. To celebrate the dryness of my feet, I wore them for the rest of the day. We decided to visit the local waterfall, one of the spots that Ezekiel and Stella suggested, before all the daylight was gone. I feel that whenever I refer to doing something while I still have daylight makes me sound like I'm part of a survival camp or something.
The waterfall was quite beautiful as you can observe from the pictures but definitely not as big of a body of water as we expected. Waterfall has quite a different definition in Canadian standards. It snowed some more on our walk back to my apartment and it was beautiful against the now black sky (at 7 pm ! ).
It resembled a blitz attack when we rushed into my flat, inhaled some supper and zoomed to Kortepohja for our evening Finnish sauna session.
Sauna is the best remedy for EVERYTHING, it relaxes body and mind. And there's no risk of falling asleep because between sauna sessions, we ran outside and played in the newly fallen snow. It was very fortunate that the sauna was on the top floor of the building so we had access to a balcony that overlooked the city. Not that the view was our #1 priority in this +2 degree weather and our bikinis. Some crazy people rolled around on the roof as well but I valued my health too much to do that. The bike ride home was almost non-existent since it was mostly downhill. My hot shower was the last thing I needed today to put me to sleep like a newborn baby.