Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day is mostly the same as in Canada: families meet and eat lunch together. But for me, it involved more piano than eating. Today I played piano at Valimo (restaurant/business center) from 11:30-1:30 and again from 2:30-4. On Friday I also had a 2-hour practice runthrough, so that's almost 6 hours of piano this weekend! My current host father is a part-owner of Valimo so this was a great opportunity.

Click here to see my name in an advertisement on the Valimo website (my name is horribly misspelled although I believe it's the Finnish phonetic form of my name).

My host family came to eat at 2, and I joined them briefly for some food. From the left: Pentti (Host dad's brother), Pentti's/Host Dad's mother, Aino-Kaisa (my host sister), Juho (her husband), Me, Pirkko Seesvaara (host mom), Eero Seesvaara (host dad).

My host parents, Pirkko and Eero.



The man himself, at home.

Aino-Kaisa is a musician and this family is very musically orientated so it was great playing for them especially. It was also a new play-time record for me: 3.5 hours in one day is a lot, so right now I'm exhausted.

There are a few new Vappu shots and Russia pictures but nothing post-worthy in my opinion. Both events were amazing nonetheless! And GO CANADA today against Russia in the ice hockey finals!

Tomorrow I am going to the Fazer (Finnish candy company) factory in Helsinki and on Saturday I'm heading to another city to meet more exchange friends for a get together. This is last full week of normal classes in school in Finland and there's only 20 more days until the Rotary Euro-tour! Epic.