Exploring Lapland

For my two day trip to Lapland, I had three goals.
1. See Santa Claus and his reindeer.
2. Eat reindeer.
3. See the Northern Lights.

Three goals aren't that much to ask for, right??? Well, I was able to do the first 2 but the Northern Lights did not happen unfortunately. It was too cloudy and rainy/snowy while we were there. But, we had a great time together and had lots of laughs.

I went with my two Hungarian friends Zofie and Eva. They are both studying nursing and graduate this spring, so we can all relate :)

The trip started with our 16 hour train trip. You read that right. There was not a direct connection from Savonlinna, so we had to go down to Helsinki (almost 4 hours) before catching the night train up north. Since we are poor college students and were backpacking, we decided not to pay the extra 100 euros to get a bed, but instead we decided to sleep on the regular ole train seats. That's fine. Except they didn't turn down the lights at all. We came into Rovaniemi at about 8am. Nothing was open, except McDonald's so that's where we started haha.

Next stop Santa Claus Village. We rode the 15 min busride and made it there at about 11. Seeing Santa was the first thing we had to do.

There weren't that many people there so we made it in pretty quick. The line actually reminded me a bit of a line at Disney World or something, you know with the lights down low, music playing, and lines wrapping all over the place. Turns out Santa can speak many different languages. He just waited to see what language we used and then spoke that. He speaks English very well :) And I heard Chinese for the lady in front of us. An elf let us into Santa's office and we chatted for about a minute and then took a picture and left. We didn't even have time to tell him what we wanted for Christmas :( Anyway, we bought that picture, so it will be posted sometime next week once we scan it.

Here's what Santa's Village actually looks like:

Just so you know, I'm really pointing at NewYork, the only US city there. 

Glögi. A traditional winter spiced drink. Also my favorite. 

Santa's Post Office

Today's mail for Santa.

One of my favorite things that we did was the husky ride. There were 13 dogs pulling the sled, and the sun came out just in time for our ride. The dogs go so fast, and apparently they love it! It's like playing for them. Unfortunately (for the dogs) the weather was too warm. They like it to be in the negatives Celsius and it was only at freezing. We had such a good time though. Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn_mIcs-5os&feature=youtu.be

In the afternoon we explored an ice hotel that is one big igloo and the bed frames made from ice sculptures. We had fun posing there and speculating how cold it would be to sleep there. But the best part was outside the hotel.

 A huge snow slide that we rode down on intertubes! SO MUCH FUN! We tried it out everyway, individually, linked arms. I ended up going backward and losing my hat.

Watch us scream like little kids going down the slide here :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5agcw6LvpgU&feature=youtu.be

We spent a good amount of time there and would have stayed longer but the Santa Village was closing at 5 and we still had to ride our reindeer. I think reindeer could be fast, but ours was actually really slow...like a walking horse. But I'm glad to say that we did it, and I enjoyed singing jingle bells even though nobody else knew the words :)

We were so tired that evening that we just went back to the hotel, watched a movie, and waited for the Northern Lights. Every hour we checked the clouds, but it was too rainy, so we saw nothing.

The second day we had less planned. We went to a museum (I know, how cultured!) We wandered around for a while just looking at the stuff. Most of it was about the native Sami People and talked about living in the Artic Circle. There was also a movie about the Northern Lights. Let's be honest, that was my main motivation for going to this museum.

We spent the rest of the day looking at souvineer shops and around town. We explored the walkway down by the river and basically discovered that apart from Santa Claus and winter sports (which is hard when the snow is melting), there's not much to do in Rovaniemi. That evening we went out for our special dinner. We had packed food for the whole trip, trying to keep the cost low, but Leena sent some money with me to treat us to a nice sit down dinner at the end. We all ended up eating sauteed reindeer and mashed potatoes, which was so good. It didn't taste different from beef, except maybe it had more flavor.

We spent one more hour walking down by the river with hopes of seeing the lights. Even though the clouds were clearing out, there wasn't any Aurora activity :( That's ok though. Last night, I spent about 3 hours in the tower, on my computer, and on the balcony trying to see them here. There was a huge spike in activity, but we had clouds here, too. It gives me hope though. As soon as clouds clear out I might be able to see them before I leave. And THEN I could leave and feel like I've done all I wanted to see. Just Kidding. Kind of.

I'm so glad we took the few days off to see Santa Claus. Even though it was such a long train ride, we had a great time!! I loved that in Rovaniemi, Christmas happens all year long!