Berry Picking and Meeting Family

Lately we have been cramming as many traditional Finnish activities into my last couple of days

here. Yesterday was forest berry picking. I have been strawberry picking and even roadside berry picking but forest berry picking is a sport in itself. You start by putting on your normal outfit with a couple of additions. Rubber boots so that nothing falls into you shoes and you can walk on rocks and sticks and such, and a hair net to prevent these lovely flying tick things from crawling up into your hair. Then you wander through the forest staring at the ground until you see a good berry patch, we were hunting lingonberries. Then you take this odd berry picker contraption and use it to pluck the berries from the stems and collect them in the bottom of its little box. I enjoyed the adventure of it but I think if I did it all the time my back would be so very sore...



This is the fly, it is resilient and so gross.




We went by bike, I love that everyone uses bikes here, its not like at home where usually people riding bikes are a pain in the butt, people here are just like, "hey its a great day and were not going that far away, lets go by bike!".













                                  This is the berry picker.

The forest is all Fall-ish! When I went into the forest in June it was so dark, its amazing how different it is this time of year.

Another goal has been to introduce me to as many of their children as possible before I leave. In the last two days I have met three. Oola and her husband stopped by with their four kids, they are 27, Errki and his girlfriend Julia are here for the weekend, they are both still in high school but don't live at home since they are studying specific things, Errki wants to be an EMT and studies in Kokola and Julia studies music in Oulu. And last I met Tiina, the oldest of the original family, we went to her house for a birthday party where I met her 8 children (all 15 or younger). She was an IFYE in Hungary in 1997 so we chatted about that, she said the biggest difference was the food and how it made her gain 7 kilograms in 2 months, I commiserated. I think its wanting to try everything that you can to experience all you can (even Fish Loaf). The only solution is to just buy bigger pants and worry about it when you get home ;)