Linnan-Juhlat, Pikkujoulu and Footbag

Over the past few weeks, I've acquired pictures from the 3 events I mentioned in the topic: the Linnan-Juhlat on Dec. 4th (dance at my school where I played keyboards in the band), the Rotary Pikkujoulu I attended in Helsinki last Saturday (Christmas party, pikkujoulu = little Christmas), and the Finnish Footbag Championships I participated in this past weekend!

From the Linnan-Juhlat... (photo credit to Heikki Leino for all 3 photos)

Guitar: Tatu Tamminen, Bass: Simo Loikkanen, Drums: Pauli.

Now the pikkujoulu! It was mainly just chilling at Johanna's house (Rotex member). Here's a group shot of (almost) everyone who came: (credit to Blandine Degeorges from France)

I played some Christmas music while everyone sang along: (credit to Blandine Degeorges from France)

Unfortunately, I only have one good photo from the Finnish footbag champs this weekend. I was too busy playing footbag to take pictures! Soon I hope to acquire more, including a video of my routine... which was quite bad since it was my first time but I'm still proud that I did it. And this was the coolest thing I've done in Finland yet.

This shot I took during the net semi-finals (doubles). I play freestyle footbag, but net-footbag is also quite popular and has rules similar to beach volleyball.

I also have a photo from the Lapland tour! On our way back to Southern Finland, all the buses stopped at Rovaniemi to meet Santa. The real Santa actually lives in Rovaniemi, a relatively small city in northern Finland that lies directly on the Arctic Circle. We went in small groups, so this isn't all the exchange students! (this is a photo of a photo so it's not good quality - photo credit to Elli Fiedler from Germany)

Now I have one more picture slightly modified recently posted on Facebook by my friend Chris Poitras from Oshawa, Ontario! It was takne at Karkku Camp, the orientation week we had during the first week in Finland. Specifically, it was during the Canadian presentation at the talent show held on the last night of the camp.

I'm holding the flag behind everyone! Me olemme kanadalainen = We are Canadian (in Finnish).

Now I am on the Christmas break from school, which lasts 2 and half weeks here in Finland! We don't have much snow in Lahti right now, although it's snowing right now. It's been very cold, but the snow has been more like sleet lately and looking out the window shows more brown than white. Hopefully by Wednesday that will change. In Finland, gifts are opened on Christmas Eve, so Wednesday is the big day for us! On Christmas day we'll visit some nearby family.

Over the break I have some projects to work on, the most exciting one being the Queen's Entrepreneurship Competition that our Shad 2007 business plan has a chance of winning! Along with my 47 Shad friends, we submitted our business plan we created last year to this Canada-wide business competition through Queen's University.

We just found out that we placed very highly in the Top 16 and are invited to the finals in January in Kingston! 4 of us will travel there to make various presentations to judges over 4 days. Meanwhile, we need to revise our business plan based on the feedback of 6 judges. I wrote the original finance plan so I'm busy re-working that part with the help of the other financial experts in my Shad group.

If we win first, we receive $15,000, which we'll use to organize a cross-Canada reunion! It's very exciting, but lots of work: we need to communicate constantly to ensure the prototype is ready, the presentation is ready, and the business plan is improved before Jan. 15th. I'll update on this later, but it's really quite exciting! For those of you who don't know, this same business plan won best in Canada last year out of 12 Shad University Campuses from 2007, among other awards.

That's all for now! Merry Christmas to everyone, and I'll post again before the new year.