This week

I had a day off on Monday which was great although I seem to have forgotten already what we did. No, sorry just remembered. It was my name day and for those of you who are not familiar with Finland it's something we like to aknowledge or even celebrate. In my case since it also happens to be the eve of 1st of May which in its turn is a huge celebration in Finland it actually tends to get forgotten. But Husband didn't forget and had gotten up at 5 am (!) to go to the store to get fresh fruit to make a fruit sallad for me for breakfast which he then brought to me to eat in bed. And I got beautiful yellow gerberas with it. Not too hard to understand why I married him, is it ? :)

Tuesday was a public holiday. Vappu i.e. the 1st of May has, I think, the same idea as Labor Day although for the most part it is really the students' day. We have this really old tradtion that all who have graduated from Senior High (we have pretty tough exams) get a white hat that they wear that day. Thereafter the only time of the year that it is used is from 6 p.m. on the Eve of 1st of May through 1st of May. In our case we're not quite sure where our hats are, so we leave the hat part to others. But it is kind of cool to walk to the City Museum's Hill here in Turku and be there when about 20 000 people put their hats on. A silly tradition, yes, but a fun thing to do.
Wednesday Finland was slowly trying to get its act together and I had a busy day trying to get everything done which didn't really work, hence I'm now writing this blog and will prepare the Sunday service next. The reason for the haste was that it had only then occured to me that I as supposed to be in Tampere (150km from Turku) the next day. We had yet another seminar to attend, my colleague and I.

The thing with our church is that it is BIG. And as a result has a lot of employees and it likes to educate its employees on a multitude of things. That's really good for us, of course, but the problem is that interesting seminars do take time and are very seldom in our own town. So, after this one I'm going to take a bit of a break with seminars (although I'm off to Riga next Friday for the synod of the Scandinavian and Baltic countries of the Anglican Church). And there is of course the Conference of European Chaplains in Holland in the beginning of June, too...

Well, after that I'm really taking a break, but that's to be expected since it'll be my summer holiday :). Seriously, though, it's been a busy spring and too much so. The challenge for the coming academic year is to find a balance in between the different meetings and seminars I'm asked or tempted to go to and then with the basic work of being available and involved with my congregation and the students here in Turku.