Rantasipi Laajavuori Hotel

The city on Jyväskylä

by Gili_S

The city on Jyväskylä located 300 km north of Helsinki. It is somehow a typical urban-rural metropolitan in Finland, city centre, train station, lake, university and of course, great nature around. Just visiting Jyväskylä for tourism only is not really necessary, but the region surrounding with great nature, national park and other wonderful attractions I haven’t had the chance to see yet.

My second visit to Finland

by Vinitha

"In the middle of the land of lakes"

I was just 21 when I went to Jyvaskyla to participate in the Finnish language course. You must have noticed my love for languages by now. It was the middle of summer (5-24/07) and I was so young. Unfortunately the name of this marvellous school has escaped from my memory chambers. All I remember that we were lucky to taste all Finnish traditional dishes because the school educated the future cooks. Karjalanpiiraka, for instance, is something you can taste in Finland. What did I do besides learning Finnish? Well, I tasted salmon smoked in a special (Finnish) way for the first time in my life and I thought i never ate anything more tasty! I visited Alvar Alto's (Finnish architect and designer) museum, tried a Finnish sauna but without a jump into a lake afterwards (due to my fear for water then), hiked in the woods and celebrated midsummer in a Finnish way. Two things that happened to me during this stay were the following: I met a Danish girl who became my penfriend and the teacher of Danish after this course and I became a vegetarian. You would not believe but out of 33 foreign students from 13 different countries 18 were vegetarians!! When I heard that I pretended to be one, too, and since then I have enjoyed only vegetarian dishes. Imagine the shock my parents got back home when I broke the news to them! They thought I will starve to death...but I am still around!