It's Snow Problem!

Since arriving back in Kuopio, Helen and I have decided to finally do all the thing's we've been meaning to do!  This weekend, we walked on a frozen lake!  Lake Kallevesi surround the whole of Kuopio and during the winter months it freezes over, changing the appearance of Kuopio completely.  Everyone here adapts straight away.  In the summer, people swim and boat, but in the winter, they skii and skate!  It's amazing how everything changes so quickly, it really is 'snow' problem for anyone.

To make sure we were safe, we visited the part of the lake by the harbour, where many people gather on weekends.  There are 2 tracks set up and stretch quite far out onto the lake.  One snow covered track is for cross country skiiers, whereas the other has a cleared ice skating track.

Whilst on our walk we discovered that one of the harboured boats was open and contained a small cafe onboard.  After a pleasant coffee and doughnut, we found out they also did skate hire.  Thats next weekend's plans then!

Return to Kuopio

We returned to Kuopio a week ago, already missing the first week of term.  We attended our first class of 'Material and Structure' on Wednesday.  We thought we had been put into the Jewellery and Precious Metals course, but quickly realised after a pretty heavy metal work demo that this wasn't the course for us!  Turns out we'd been put into the Industrial Design class!! 

So, after about 40 minutes we went to see Pirjo, who was very helpful and understood our problem.  She went through all the other courses available to us this term and we considered going back to Textile Design.  However, once again we found out that course just is not what we want to be doing with our time here, as it is an academic semester and a lot of Finnish lectures and written modules are involved. 

Between us, Helen and I came to the conclusion that what we REALLY want to do this term is a personal project, that combines textiles with glass and ceramics.  The next part was to convince someone to let us do it.  Initially, we approached our projects from a textiles point of view, but after talking to Kaisa we realised we weren't going to get our own way.  So today we spoke to Merja, taking it now from a ceramics approach, which in hindsight is actually a much more relevant angle for it to be marked from.  She agreed that if we both created our own project and handed in a technical file of sampling (clays, engobes and glazes etc) and presented a final peice, she could mark it and give us our ECT credits accordingly.  I am SO happy Merja was so understanding, and seemed quite keen on the idea of letting us get on and do our own thing.  It also works out well as she told us she does not have an classes to give this semester, so she will be around to give us as much guidance as we will need, which is amazing!!

In other news, we went to an 80's theme night, that started out really great, but turned into a complete shambles...