During our winter break from school, my host family took me to their summer cottage in the small village of Pielavesi in the center of Finland.
It took about four hours or more to get there, and so on the way there we stopped at the Panda candy outlet in Jyväskylä to look around a bit and perhaps pick up some sweets.
When we arrived in Pielavesi, we stopped at my host grandparents house to eat some lunch. It was so hot inside the house I thought I was going to pass out, but luckily I didn't. After we ate, we went to the store and then drove to the summer cottage called mökki in Finnish.
In this case, the cottage was more like a talvimökki (winter cottage). It was pretty nice though and there were two bedrooms, a kitchen, and fireplace, and an outhouse a little bit away from the house.
We were at the very end of the road and surrounded by lake, so it was really quite beautiful. I loved how the sun fell on the lake and trees in the morning during sunrise. We spent two nights there in mökki before leaving and heading back to Lahti.
A snow covered rowboat down by the lake. The first night we were there, we walked out a bit on the lake and drilled a hole in the ice to get water for sauna so that we would be able to take a shower in the sauna that night.
The sunset was absolutely stunning. This picture doesn't do the justice at all, because it was such a brilliant red color, surreal.
Looking across the lake as the sun had finally fallen behind the trees on the other side. Far, far away in the distance there was someone riding a snowmobile around for a little while too. The ice gets to be really thick here in Finland, in many places they make ice roads across the lakes so that it is quicker for people to drive their cars over the frozen lakes instead of around, on the roads.
One of the days, we went ice fishing on the lake. It was alright, but I didn't catch any fish. The very first time I went out on the lake, I was a bit afraid because when we were there everything was of course still frozen, but things were beginning to unthaw, so the lake was very wet. Snow had melted on the surface of the frozen lake and was hidden under the freshly fallen snow, so it was very went when you stepped, but luckily the ice was still sturdy, so no one fell through.
My host dad caught two fish while we were there, but threw them back into the lake because it wasn't enough to cook. We didn't have so much time out there fishing because there was a winter storm while we were there, so we ended up retreating back inside when the snow got too hard.
On our final day, before we headed back to Lahti, we stopped back at our host grandparent's home. There we took the snowmobile out onto the lake. I didn't drive it then but rode on it with my two other host siblings. It was so cold moving in the wind that we only rode it once, then came back. It reminded me a lot of driving a snowmobile in Utsjoki. It was -30 celsius then, so much colder. Either way, I never got frostbite, and it was a lot of fun.
This is a picture of an insane looking, old-fashioned wood cutter which we were going to take back to Lahti in a carrier. It was too heavy to lift and move by hand, so we towed it with the car. It was quite difficult and a crazy idea, but in the end it worked and we got it loaded into the carrier.
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