Finnish Culture

Thank you to all those who comment on the blog. It is very much appreciated, and it lets me know there are people out there listening to me. Let me repeat again that any of you can tell others about this web page. You can tell professors at Trinity, people in your community, fellow classmates, coworkers, third counsins twice removed, people you meet at the airport... etc. I just want to give everyone who might be interested an opportunity to visit this page.

So to answer a few comments, Christy, did you see what my parent's wrote? they responded in their comment: "Jay grew up as a scientific wizard reading the World Book Encyclopedia for fun and pleasure all the while absorbing a great deal of foundational insight by living/working on the family farm." I guess that is as good an answer as any to how he ended up doing this sort of stuff.It is good to here from my family. I am glad you enjoy reading the blog. It's great to hear about your job with UPS. Elise, thank you for the information on American Idol. I don't care much about the show, but it was interesting to know.

I had an opportunity to experience Finnish culture last evening. Jay and Milka are not the only people who work here. There are Lao people (whom I will be teaching English later), and other Finnish families. The Finnish families have a small school with six students and two teachers (sounds a little like your school Alyse). Since the children are all Finnish, it makes sense that the school is all in Finnish. (My first day here, I visited the school for a little while.) Yesterday (Friday) was their last day of school, and Finnish tradition is to have a "party" where the students sing, do skits, and present projects they did during the school year. Everything was spoken in English, so Jay translated for me. It was a nice expereince. Looking at the Finnish language, it is interesting, they have some extremly long words. For example eläinlääkäriluettelo -a directory of veteranarians (pardon my spelling...speaking of which, I don't think I have made an official disclaimer about spelling in general.) *Official disclaimer of Spelling and Gramer* Please note, that Luke is not typing this blog on Microsoft word, he has no spell-checker, and does not care too much about spelling mistakes or grammer errors. I am aware that my spelling abilities are not the best. After the students performed, we had food and fellowship (mainly deserts)

Today we went to the Tennis courts, and I attempted to learn a little about playing tennis. In order to play well, you need to get te swing down. Jay spent some time trying to help me get that right. IT went ok, but Jay said you need to get about 10 hours of practice on just the basics before you can really play tennis at all. So we just hit the ball around-not keeping score. Then afterwards Jay, Milka, Miku and Mikko (one of the Finnish workers here... who by the way, I think looks like a character from Hunt for the Red October... I don't remember the name, but the Russian Captain's second in command) all played some real games. These people love Tennis. (these people being all the Finnish families) They quite enjoy the sport, and talk about it a moderate amount. Mikko enjoys challenging people to Tennis. (The other night at the school party, he chllenged Jay, and then they played today, and Jay won)

I ate dried squid today. It was good. (Kind of like jerky, only it was squid flavored, and they and put something on it to make it a little spicy)

You may have tried the web site I created, well it is still under construction, I will let you know
when it works.

-Luke

postsript: did you know Finnish has two n's... I found that out after I typed up this whole entry... i had to use "find" to fix the problem... oops