Ooha, just got back from the sauna. I don’t see how a day could have ended better than it did. It began with a morning run, then studying for Suomi class, then lectures, lectures, lectures and finally a two-hour documentary session for one of the classes. So my 12 hour day ended with a sauna. I guess I deserved it.

Last week was just as interesting as any other, but the culminating point was definitely the excursion to Saarijärvi Stone Age village on Saturday. It is a site by the Summasjärvi lake where they have built a reconstruction of a Late Stone Age village. Saarijärvi is a village located about 60 km north of Jyväskylä. The excursion was organized for students attending Nordic history lectures, but as a Digital Culture student I could come along. The excursion was led by professor Brian Magnusson who is visiting Jyväskylä but is otherwise professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.

Of course, if it wasn’t for him, the trip wouldn’t have been as interesting as it was. It is amazing how genuine and knowledgeable he is and how many things he explains just by the way. For instance, as we stood by a museum building at the site he noted that the house was a typical Finnish building and outlined major characteristics of a typical Finnish building: saddle roof, eyebrow windows, symmetry, built out of beams, position of chimney in the center of the building, the completely covered porch, the lifted entrance, and of course the characteristic yellow ocher color (or red) to name just a few. And that was just about architecture, thus you can imagine what all we heard about the archeological findings and reconstruction at the same site.

After the Stone Age village we went to the actual Saarijärvi village where one of the largest wooden churches in Finland is erected. The church itself was established here in 1628, but was renovated and enlarged several times. It is just amazing to see a wooden cupola measuring 18 m in diameter. Yes, the church is made completely out of wood. There are a few things that I really found interesting. One is definitely that the church (like almost all churches in Finland) is a central building and thus although it’s a protestant church really resembles an orthodox church. And it was the Russian Orthodox church architecture that influenced this change. Another characteristic that was immediately obvious is the scant decoration which gives one the sense of overall austerity. It was also interesting to see that stone is not used whatsoever, but rather, columns in the church are painted to imitate stone. And on top of that, there are no bells in the church building itself, but rather in a campanile located some 100 m away from the church.

I could go on an on about this … so to make long story short, definitely make sure to check the gallery for some of the images from this trip.

Last week I bought my first National Geographic … in Finnish of course. Yeah, I cannot really read it, but nevertheless I could not resist the temptation to get a copy and give it a try. It’s challenging, but I should probably remind myself how long it took me to be able to fluently read that magazine in English. I have long ways to go, or to put it into the right perspective: my Suomi journey has just begun. Besides the Geographic I have also been trying to read some daily papers and am slowly beginning to enjoy content on Finnish web sites. Hey, if anyone wants to see what I am watching every night, and give it a shot at understanding here’s a sample. Have fun and do make sure you let me know how it went or how you liked it.

As you all see I am having a great time here. OK, school is fine and things are finally picking up the pace so I’ve got quite a few articles/books to read and essays to write. But so far it’s really been fun as everything is very dynamic.

Just before I finish off this entry there’s one more thing I should say. One of the friends who is studying sports sciences (biomechanics to be more precise) at the University has made arrangements within his department to perform a few tests on me. Don’t worry mom, no matter how taxing these test are, they are not harmful. If everything goes according to plan we’ll do a VO²Max test next week (which we’ll repeat every month or so to measure changes) and later we might do a gait analysis, LT test or anaerobic threshold test and so on. For those who have not figured out yet, yes I am basically talking about my running here. This is all exciting news for me as I have not imagined that I would actually have a chance of doing these tests ever. I’ll let you know how things went.

Later.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 12:24 am and is filed under Culture, Finland, Travelogue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.