First two days

I arrived at the school on Monday morning after a three and a half hour drive from Mikkeli, and got to meet the rest of the students and our main teachers for the course. We introduced ourselves and had an small introduction to the course.

Where we're living for the next ten months

There are seven dudes in our flat, and everyone else in in the flat next door. I'm sharing a room with Robin from Scotland, lucky for him he already had a pair of earplugs cos he's gonna need em! Everyone else is pretty sound so we should get on alright.




Sauna

We got shown around the school, all the important places like the sauna's both regular sauna and smoke sauna. Also the forge where we're going to be forging our own knives in a few weeks.




Fire place and smoke hut

When we have done our basic kayak saftey course at the end of the month the kayaks and canoes are free to use in our own time on the lake. We also have fishing equipment and a boat. So it's not too bad here.

Today we headed out in the minibuses to check out a few of the schools area's in the forest's, where we're going to be staying next week for our first camping exercise. We'll learn how to set up camp correctly, test our basic skills, fire lighting and woodcraft. The trips start easy and get progressivly harder as the course go's on.

This week is all introduction to the course. We went through the year's program today and although it's ten months and sounds like a long time there is a massive amount to do and learn. It's all hands on, so there will be no sitting around in a classroom for hours on end struggling to stay awake.

Right I'm off to the forest, these plants aint gonna learn themselves and ther're gonna be gone soon so I've gotta get it while the getting's good.

Laters.