Vierumaki is a sports institute and conference center, a little north from Lahti along route no. 4, 150kms from Helsinki. Of course it’s in the middle of nothing, the nearest village is 10kms away, and here there is no shop or anything. It is good in that sense that there is no temptation to spend my hard-work Hungary earned money on expensive Finnish stuff. So I did not spend an euro since Sunday.

 

The conditions here are fantastic, it’s designed for top Finnish athletes, there are icehalls, football pitches, running tracks, lakes (of course) to do water sports and outdoors skating, 50kms of cross country skiing tracks etc. The accommodation is in huge 6-person cottages, filled by 4 persons each. In every cottage there is electronic sauna, a full kitchen (why?), flatscreen TV, terrace, cloth drying machine and fireplace. The cottages are at least 30-40 metres from each other, separated by forest.

The food is unlimited 3 times a day, I think I don’t have to tell u anything else if I tell how much the organizers pay after our meals: 6-20-20 are the prices of breakfast, lunch and dinner in euros, respectively. For one day.

 

We don’t know the price of the accommodation but I think I could live for months in Hungary from the money what the organizing institute pays on food and housing after me in this 5 days. But it’s better not to think about this kind of things too much, I just wrote about them to let u know how luxorious it is here.

 

The summer course was about psychology and business (contrary what the website says), recently only business and marketing. I am not really fond of these topics, so I am more and more on the long and frequent tea breaks side during group work, and I am just sleeping with (little bit) open eyes when it comes to lectures. The first two days were good, because there was a fairly interesting psycho part, and also because I have some tolerance level regarding business and marketing as well. But now we are far beyond any tolerance levels, so I look forward to the end of the course tomorrow.

 

The course will have a second part in Eindhoven in 2 weeks time, hopefully I will either get my tolerance back by that time, or the course will have less business and more … I was about to write IT but let’s just put: anything else.

 

After eating some more salmon and other fish, tomorrow afternoon I depart: I go to Tallinn (ferry) late afternoon, then to Vilnius by night bus (Eurolines), then probably spend the day in Vilnius (by what???), then in the evening I take a night bus (EL) to Warsaw from where train to Budapest.

 

I am writing from Scandic hotel Vierumaki where we had dinner, my cottage is 20 mins walk from here, I hope I can make it coz I very much feel the salmon in my stomach … I tried hard to eat enough in advance J

 

I think I will write one more post from home, but I haven’t decided yet if it will be about my trip home, about how good place Russia is, or about something else. But there will be one post in the beginning of next week, for sure.

 

And as you might have already figured out, there is one huge similarity between the In Finland and the In Russia blogs. Ok, there are two: the other one is that they both contain a little bit of the other country. But the more important one is that neither Harry Potter not Voldemort died, so there is always a chance to continue. The In Finland blog was already continued once. I put a poll here so u can let me and the others know what do u think when will this one continue: