Finland!

I arrived in Finland two nights ago after almost 24 hours of traveling, phew! I traveled over with Skyler, and we only had a slight delay in Frankfurt, but other than that all the flights went smoothly! Almost everyone is here (in Viermaki, Finland) now, a lot of people have been trickling in on different flights, but now we pretty much have the whole team! The hotel is very nice and big, and has ski trails about 200 yards from the back door! We're not exactly in a town, but we are in what seems to be a huge sports training complex. All around here are some other places to stay as well as a golf course, hockey rink, cleared soccer fields, an indoor track, indoor tennis courts, a swimming pool, and a lot of other facilities. 

Yesterday I went for an easy classic ski and explored the trails. The skiing was very nice, there's lots of snow, perfect grooming, and an abundance of easy trails, which is perfect for these first few days after traveling! The Canadian WJC/U23 team is staying here as well, so we had a fun bowling match against them in the basement bowling alley, which was by far the nicest bowling alley I've been to!

The food here is very good, we have breakfast in the hotel: cereal, oatmeal, fruit, bread, meat, cheese, vegetables, eggs...I think its typical scandinavian food. There's one thing, that I guess is made of rice, but looks like a baked potato that you're supposed to eat with meat on top...I'd never seen that before, it tasted kind of like something you'd eat for dinner though. We eat lunch and dinner about 1km away at another dining hall that a lot of other sports teams eat at. They really like to serve hot dogs, which aren't my favorite, but are ok if they're the only meat (?) option, but other than that its been good. 

I've tried to take some pictures, but I didn't get very many, I'll work on being better about that, but here are what I've got so far. You can click on any picture to enlarge it.

it took 3 TSA people to make sure Skyler's bag was safe to go on the plane

the ski trails, I think this is "Opiston 10k"

its not really that dark here..but it has been really foggy, so it seems dreary, but its actually not bad at all:)

road crossing, but they don't use sand or salt, so its still nice skiing

this is where we start our ski each day

the hotel, its about 4x as big as you can see

Jessie and my room

and our euro bathroom, notice the hose like thing next to the toilet:)