Rovaniemi

September 30, 2009

Yesterday, I went to Rovaniemi with the Architecture kids. It was an extremely fun trip! We met outside at 7am and it was quite frigid. 

The minibuses began pulling in and we piled into them. I love early morning field trips. They remind me of things like going to Barrier Island in fifth grade or going to Conference last year with Campus Outreach. It was a bit over 3 hours in the car. The closer we got to our final destination, the more snow I was seeing. I had my camera pressed against the glass and I was listening to my iPod just watching all the white objects fly by. 

It was something beautiful. There was so much land and so many lakes with small cottages here and there. Perhaps there would be a lifted truck and a few hybrid cars in a driveway. I even saw one trampoline, which reminded me of the best snow cream I used to make off of the trampoline I had as a kid. This is one of my favorite parts of traveling. When your eyes can’t move fast enough to see everything they want and you’re in your own world, remembering old experiences and anxious for the new ones to come.

We arrived at the University of Lapland in time to look around and go to a lecture. We then ate lunch at the University before going to see some buildings by Alvar Aalto. He did a city plan that shaped out a reindeer antler. We couldn’t exactly see that from the ground and Leena the Great fell through on arranging our personal helicopter rides. We toured through a Library he designed and also a Theatre.

 They were both amazing and I saw a few chairs that I had to draw in my second year History of Design class (the very class that got me interested in Scandinavian design in the first place). We then went to the Rovaniemi airport and saw signs of Santa and some cute little woodland animal scenes. After touring these buildings, we went to Santa Village. I was probably the most excited about this. If you can imagine a little biracial girl running around saying “Where’s Santa!?” and leaping over the Arctic Circle line, well, you can probably paint a pretty clear picture of what happened. 

We went through a sort of Haunted House entrance to an upstairs where we saw Santa sitting in a large chair (for he was a large guy). He spoke so many languages, I was impressed. We took a picture with him and then had to rush back to the vans so that we could go to the museum. We spent a few hours touring the museum. It was pretty interesting.

 I liked petting all of the stuffed polar bears and things… of course. We had to leave by 5:00pm because our minibuses still had their “summer tires” on and it was supposed to be freeeezing and icy that night. It was a very fun trip!!!