Job Rotation, Weekend 2

I had a great weekend, I woke up quite early on Saturday, maybe 8am, but I had my breakfast and then started to watch television… Suddenly my phone started ringing; it was 11.50am - no idea where my Saturday morning disappeared. Anyway, it was Terho (one of my hosts), asking if I wanted to go to a car show, he was taking his kids to the Kemi ‘modded’ car show and wanted to know if I wanted to go… I did, so he came to pick me up at 1pm. We drove to Kemi, with the occasional rapid fire of Finnish coming from the back seat; Terho’s kids were mocking me for being scared of Left 4 Dead and wanted to know what was so scary… I explained about the witch and the boomer, but the just mocked me more :-)

Terho was explaining to me about Kemi city and the second World War, how they Russians didn’t bomb this area of Finland when it was invaded, so there was more older building in Kemi, than there is in Tornio. He was right, there were some really nice buildings, one of which was not the City Hall, it was very big and a bit ugly, but there were plenty of other really pretty buildings to make up that downfall! He gave me a bit of a guided tour as we drove down to the harbour where the car show was.

We managed to find a parking spot right on the front so we didn’t have to walk too far, you could hear the bass’y music pumping from the harbour. We had a walk around all the modded/tuned cars, there was some really good ones and some massive sound systems… One guy to his to the test and I honestly thought it was going to fall apart. I got a load of good photos, but my crappy laptop won’t connect to my phone anymore, so I’ll have to get someone good at IT to fix it. I’ll upload them when I can get them off my phone.

We went to a pizza joint up the road, “Puistopaviljonki”. The pizza took a bit of time to come, but it was very much worth the wait!! The nicest pizza I have had in ages, I had cheese, ham and egg… The pizza was massive… We couldn’t eat it all so we ended up wrapping it in foil to take away with us. Terho very kindly offered to pay.

We drove back to Tornio, and had a diversion through Keminmaa and Kyläjoki, the places were very nice, and I have a better understanding now of what suburbs there are around this are of Finland. Some of the houses in these places were very glamorous and with some lakes and rivers in the background made them quite picturesque.

Since I didn’t have any other plans, Terho offered to drive me around Tornio while we had time, we drove over the Finnish/Swdish border into Haperanda where there is the Ikea and stuff I can see when I am on the Finnish side doing my weekly shop. He also offered to show me where abouts he lived; as it happens, right on the bus route I take every morning to get to work… It looked like a nice area to live, quite close to the Tornio river and a primary school.

I got a lift back to my apartment and I said my goodbyes to Terho at about 4.30pm. I got through the door and must have fallen straight to sleep because I don’t remember anything until I woke up at 7.30pm. Luckily because I had a massive pizza for lunch, I didn’t need to cook dinner…!! Woooop.

Sunday… What can I say, I did loads of work which I have wanted to do for a while, tweaked some reports that I wanted to get some information into and then watched some more Alias on my laptop.

I also tried out Skype, thinking that this USB Dongle wouldn’t cope, was proved wrong, it uses surprisingly little data to send video and voice… Had a 15 minute convo with Dad and 30 minutes with Amie, and used less than 40mb download and less than 9mb upload.

Job done, weekend over and looking forward to my next week at work!