A reason to get out of the city.

It's been a little more than a month now in Finland. I have finally settled into life here and am in the normal flow of things. My Finnish is progressing, slowly but surely. I still cant speak for shit, but I think once I leanr some better sentence construction, I will. Last weekend, I went with my liason Tuula and her family to Kuusamo. It's about three hours north of Kajaani. We were celebrating here grandson's first birthday. Her daughter is married to a man from London, so he has an english name Samuel, but all of the finns pronounced it phonetically saying "Samwell" =). There are some slight phonetic differences in Finnish. The letter Y makes and oo sound and the letter J is always soft making a yuh sound. You get used to it after a while, but its wierd at first. Hah, then you take Russian and the finnish alphabet seems easy. Kuusamo was incredible. We were in a summer cottage about half an hour from the main city, right on the side of the most beauftiful lake I have ever seen. th sauna was built right next to the lake so we got to run into the lake after going to the sauna. I saw tons of reindeer. They are really docile and there are lots of raindeer herds like sheep. At one point, I went for a walk and got about 10 meters away from a group of them, but alas,I didn't bring my camera. I also saw some moose. One mother and two babies. The babies were of course enourmous, probably the size of a full grown deer. I will be going to Helsinki at the end of October with my host brother. I am really excited for this. Rest assured, I will take like a bajillion photographs. Speaking of which, here are some I took in Kuusamo.
Kiah.