You may be asking what we’ve done the last couple of days, other than sail boarding, bungee jumping, and burning the city of Vaasa to the ground for the second time? There goes my overactive imagination again! But as you can see, we are doing amazing things.

Yesterday morning we travelled down the coast from Jakobstad to Vaasa with Juha and Maj-Britt. We stopped to look at some swans and other unnamed white birds with wings. It’s been a real cold spring so the ice has not yet left the harbours and ponds. It’s supposed to warm up to 15 degrees in a couple of days. That’ll be real nice as most days have been cool and windy.
In the afternoon, we went to visit The Archives in Vaasa. 8km of old papers and books lined up in a row. Down in the bowels of The Archives we visited a near retired lady who restores these old books using Japanese paper and other things that I’m sure are quite amazing. You’ve heard of the patience of Job. I’m guessing Job had nothing on this lady.

This morning we went took a tour of Vaasa. We saw Old Vaasa which actually did burn down in 1852. The fire was started near the middle of town and after a strong wind pushed the fire to one end of the town, the wind changed and the fire proceeded to demolish the rest of the town. One of the only things remaining was the hospital which is now a detention centre for mentally incompetent criminals. The fire left 3000 people homeless. Some kitchen girls were blamed for the fire, but a couple of deathbed confessions many years later revealed that the fire was actually started by a tired, or drunk, or both, farmhand who fell asleep while smoking a pipe. Vaasa was rebuilt a few kilometres away using Russian money. The rebuilt city was named after a former czar and was called Nikolistad which the Finns said was pronounced Vaasa.
Harri toured us through an elementary school built in 1907. He gave us a rundown on the Finnish education system. One of the many points of interest was the way he described the Finns universal trust of their public school system. There are very few private schools in Finland.

Well, I’ll head off to sleep after a tough game of ball hockey. It was great to experience Hockey Night in Finland. The Finns definitely showed their ball hockey supremacy versus their Canadian guest. I’m just not fast enough. That said, I really was going pretty fast when I tripped on a competitors stick and all 240 pounds of me went flying over the barriers on the edge of the playing field. That was a fair sized splat. By the way Myrna, how many broken fingers does my insurance cover. Just kidding. I should be fine in a few months. Typing this blog with beat up fingers is killing me.

Over and out.

Marty