More Norway..

Okay, the next day, Saturday, was the best day of the trip. We went through the snowy mountains and across a fjord on a ferry, eventually our bus arrived somewhere between the mountains, where the vegetation was a lot lighter and richer than elsewhere.

There was a path leading to a glacier, it was a few kilometres to walk.




The road went uphill and there was a rocky river close by so I went off track and went on next to the river. Anyway, at some point the vegetation ceases to exist, instead you get this grey dry rocky land, with a single tone greenish lake. That was one hell of a place, it blew my mind away. Here:


That was the view from the glacier,which I decided to climb:


That was truly the highlight of the trip..

That was the view from the rocks, glacier's on the left:


Well, that place was really amazing. It felt so unlike Europe, so unlike the rest of Norway. That's a place I MUST visit again.
A little town who-knows-where:



Another old Norwegian church:

We spent a second night in the same hostel. During the rainy evening there were dozens of us watching Eurovision, which included so many cheesy tunes (Ireland's song was especially horrific). Well, that's the way Eurovision is, but everybody still watches it....(including me).
After a bad night's sleep we headed back off to Oslo. It was mostly rainy there sadly. Visited some museums, had some free time, went back to the hostel, after which I explored the suburbs alone.
Next morning, we started going back, popped through a cave painting museum in Sweden and arrived in the port of Stockholm in the evening. I visited the buffet on the ship, that was the first proper dinner I had had on the trip. After a sleepless night, we were once again in Turku. No time to look around this time, we continued to Helsinki, a two hour ride which felt like 15 minutes. Ship, arrived back in Tallinn. The first thing I had to do after returning was visit the supermarket, because Estonian prices felt really heavenly compared to Scandinavia's ones.
It was a nice trip, better than the Russian trip back in September (though that was fun too).

Norway

Okay, another science class trip which I decided to join. 1 week, with around 50 people. Ship to Helsinki, the first stop was a limestone mine in Finland.

After that, we headed off to Turku which, along with Tallinn, is the European capital of culture 2011. It seemed like a sleepy little town by nature. We spent the night on the Turku-Stockholm ship, ships are always fun.
We were gonna spend a lot of time in the bus during the trip. Main activities: chat, half-sleep, eat cheap food, watch movies on the TV of the bus (such as Fight Club, Into The Wild, The Hangover, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and Die Hard 4), listen to music and enjoy the scenery. It was around 7 hours to Oslo from Stockholm. We passed Fahlun and its copper mine. Apparently, in the 19. century some guy died somewhere in the mines and his body was found 42 years later, unchanged.
We spent the night in a hostel in the suburbs of Oslo, the whole area was surprisingly pleasant. I think that if I had to move to Scandinavia, I'd move to Oslo.
On Friday we went up North. We visited another mine, this time a silver mine. We had to stuff ourselves into minecarts, which took us into the mountain. We had to wear earplugs, the train was quite noisy. This mine seemed to be built more organized. Fun, like all three, that we visited.
Anyway, we went on with the bus (loads of hours spent there every day, kind of lost track of time there. For example, I fell half-asleep and when I woke up, I felt like two hours had passed, while it was only some fifteen minutes actually. Sometimes my thoughts started acting independantly, I kind of saw some stranger outside and I decided that he was an adventurer and a bird watcher, for no apparent reason. Half-sleeping can be pretty interesting) and soon there were a lot of mountains and waterfalls, as well as several fjords around us. We visited stave churches, nice and mystical, Viking-like, as seen here.
Time passed, the vegetation went darker, and there were now many patches of snow everywhere.
We spent the night in a hostel in a little town (in Norway any settlement with over 200 people is a town) in the mountains. I'll put more photos in another post.

Russia (Cont.) & Belgium

I kind of left that Russian trip unfinished and dangling around, so here's a brief and happy ending: We visited the Solovetski islands during the next day and came all the way back to Helsinki by bus, we had to spend the night there, so I went walking around (for a while) with some friends. I remember that I fell asleep in one of the bars of the ship, after some Finnish guy came, somehow pinched me behind my ear and said that I'm not allowed to use that area as my sleeping space. That's that.
I should say a few words about visiting my dad in Brussels too. In fact, scratch "Les Contamines, France" which I had already put as the title of this post. This deserves to be a separate post, so I'm gonna call it "Russia (Cont.) & Belgium". I prefer neutral names here to make it easier to navigate.
Anyway, it was in the end of October, one week. Whole family. My dad lives there because of his work (Galileo project). Nice humble place, Brussels is. We took a car and saw the countryside and villages of Southern Belgium too. Quiet and really relaxing area. Belgium seemed somewhat lazy.. We popped through Luxembourg also, where I hadn't ever been to before. While walking around in the downtown, I happened to see one of my schoolmates, it felt pretty weird seeing his face there..
The nature was great, sadly I didn't have much time to experience and explore it (which I love doing) because of my parents.. Well, I'm going back tomorrow.

Back

I haven't written anything here in ages, been abroad twice since September. Actually I don't know why I decided to write this blog in English.. But, well, I'm not gonna change anything now. I haven't written anything in a while because sometimes I don't feel like it, sometimes I forget, sometimes I don't have time etc. Raw ending.

Finland (for the 3rd proper time this year) & Russia (for the first time ever)

I haven't posted anything in a while, even though I've been abroad twice this Autumn. I guess I don't have that much time right now, with all these different school things and my days often ending around 17:30-19:00. Well, I'll try to give a short description of the first trip right now..
I had a school trip to Northern Russia 16.-20. September this year, now that I'm in high school. It's the first time I was in Russia, and I've never been outside of Helsinki in Finland before.
We got to Helsinki by ship (there were around 50 of us) and went off to Askola to see some typical (and beautiful, I like how rocky it is there) Finnish nature. The next stop was the Loviisa nuclear power plant and the one after that was Kotka Maretarium. After a few more stops (in Langinkoski and Imatra) we went to our shelter for the night, a hostel in Nurmes. Played cards for some time....
In the morning we started heading towards the Russian border. We spent 2 hours at the border, our passports and visas were checked three times, and our bus was searched through by a very cheerful dog. Basically Russia was very different from Finland, it looked cheap in several ways. We visited a school in some town (I only remember that it had a long name) and started heading off North. We had a long drive through the countryside, that was really pleasant. A road (sometimes it resembled a highway, sometimes it was very bumpy and didn't have any asphalt at all), in the middle of nowhere (under nowhere I mean trees, sand and dirt, not a single building in the 300 kilometres we passed). We only saw a handful of cars on the road. Kem (our destination) is about 300 km away from the border, but it took us some 9-10 hours to get there. Some of the road conditions were really bad, in these cases the bus had to move really slowly. Everyone was happy when the teacher announced that we had only 2 hours left to ride. However, I really enjoyed the bus ride, having so much time. It was relaxing, reading "2001: A Space Oddity", watching some movies like "Gran Torino" and "Invictus", talking to people I wouldn't maybe otherwise talk to and attempting to sleep, which wasn't easy.
Our double-decker.
A typical area on our route.
Kem was a surprise. We slept in a local school, it felt really strange, yet somehow so typically Russian. For example, the bland food was served on plates and bowls of different shapes and sizes. Nearly every knife and fork differed from each other, and some were completely bent. The toilets were shocking, as shown below (luckily we had an alternative). There was one room which seemed out of context was the computer room, where they had brand new computers with Windows 7. But overall, I really prefered this school to any comfortable hotel (not that there were any in Kem anyway).
Awful
The school corridor
The bedroom
I'm sleepy, I'll continue later..

Finland & U2

Of course, this one-day trip to Finland was nothing compared to Canada, but I'll mention it anyway.
Me, my parents and a few family friends went to Helsinki to see U2 live, at the Olympic Stadium, as part of their 360° tour. U2 is among my favorite bands, so it was exciting to see them live.
We left with the ferry around 12:05 in the afternoon. In Helsinki we were given a tour by my father's friend Georg. After eating at a tasty Chinese restaurant, we started walking towards the Stadium.
The opening act was a English-Swedish band called Razorlight. I hadn't heard of them before, but they have quite a known song named "America", which I recognized there.

This is the highly creative stage they had there (this photo isn't from Finland though). The point of the 360° stage is that the audience can be all around the stage. The band members would move around on it a lot.

U2 arrived a bit after 21:00. They played 5 songs from their newest album, No Line On The Horizon. I really liked the concert, as did the rest of the people I was with. You could see the band pretty well, where ever you were, the place wasn't overcrowded and the selection of songs was great (even though I don't know a single song by them which I don't like).
At the end of the concert it started raining, and we were soaking wet when we returned to the ship. The sea was slightly wild and wavy on our ride back, I really liked it, soothing.
I'll probably be abroad in September again.

Leaving

Well, I'm back in Estonia. Feels sad in several ways.
On the 17. August I visited High Park, the largest park, which is fully in Toronto. There were a lot of dogs. The residential area west of High Park is very relaxing and it has really good architecture. Then I started walking along the coast, and ended up at the Waterfront Condos, which are beautiful, the whole area is completely different from the rest of Toronto that I've seen. In the evening I joined a garden party at the Müllerbeck's house (where their relatives, the Undusks were staying). There were a lot of people who recognized me and a lot of people who I didn't recognize. Anyway, it was fun, and I got to say goodbye to everyone.

High Park.

A view to the most recognizable area of Toronto.

The Waterfront Condos.

A small animal I saw on the coast.

My lunch: 3 donuts from Tim Hortons and and a sour apple ice drink.

A very friendly cat I saw near High Park.
On the 18. my flight was going to leave at 10:50 PM, so luckily I had all day to spend in Canada. I bought a few things from shops and visited Little India. They sold exotic things there, like sugar cane juice, which I tried. I felt quite bitter during the whole day, knowing that I was going to leave in a few hours. So, after 8 PM Viive and Rob took me to the airport, the flight wasn't such a luxury as the one which took me to New York in the beginning of the trip. Nobody had their own personal TV screen, there were a several on the plane though, so you could watch whatever they decided to play there.
Now that I'm back in Estonia, everything seems so small. It seems like a simple thing to walk from one end of Tallinn to the other.