MoM's visit

My mom arrived in Finland safe and sound. The day she came it was snowing! So right away she got a taste of what I have been living with the last few months! The day she got there i still had a practice that night since we had started the finals. But I think it worked out perfect because she needed a nice long nap! The next few days we just walked around my town and I showed her what my life has been the last 8 months. We walked around the castle, around the lake, went shopping a few times,went to a hockey game to watch my friends in the semifinals, ate at the lunch place i eat at everyday, visited my friend/bartender at the bar next to my apartment and showed her a few of my favorite things in town.



Once the finals ended we were able to go outside my town to the bigger cities. We spent a day shopping and walking around Tampere, one of my favorite cities. It was perfect weather for sightseeig and walking around. We also ate at a yummy restaraunt for dinner that has great food and also brews its own beer!





One of the days my friend had hooked us up with a day at a reindeer park! I was so excited to go see the reindeer and have my mom see them too. What comes to mind when you think Finland....reindeer!! So we had a great time at the reindeer park feeding the reindeer, petting them (they were so friendly!), learning to lasso a reindeer, trying some reindeer food and then finally the owner of the reindeer park insisted that I try on some traditional outfit worn by the Sami, a group of people that live up north in Finland. The owner of the park was real nice altho he didnt speak much English, but we made it work and im sooo glad we got to spend the day there!!





The last part of our trip we headed to Helsinki for a few days. My mom, Thais,Anni(libero on our team) and me stayed at one of the girls on my teams home and they took us sightseeing thru Helsinki. We walked around and saw many churches, museums, the parliament, and went to one of the bigger shopping malls. We then had some nice Finnish meals at her house that her mom had cooked for us!!





We had a great time while my mom was here visiting but I think we are both looking forward to going home!!

sidenote....

My mom is coming on Wednesday and staying for 2 weeks and then we will leave together on the 21st!! I am soooooo excited for her to come out here and see where I have been living the last 8 months, meet the team and amazing friends that I have made here, watch the finals and just experience life in Finland!

Playoff update!

Going to the 'ship!!! HPK is in the finals!!! We had a great semfinals series, taking the series to 5 games. We won 4 and lost 1. The first 3 games were close going back and forth and those 3 games going to 5 sets. The last 2 games that we played our team definitely came together and played great to win in 3 sets! It was nice to get done with the semis in 5 games so we would have at least a week to rest. We had played 5 games in about a week!

We start the Finals tomorrow against a really tough opponent. They have gone undefeated the whole year! It is a best of 7 series. Our team has been playing great lately and we are all excited to play in the finals and have a chance to break their undefeated streak! One team, one dream!!! Simply the best!!

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!! Out here in Finland they celebrate Easter all weekend. Everything is closed all weekend, except for Sat. and everyone is spending time with their families. I spent my Easter weekend by practicing, weights, spending time with some of the girls, and even trying some Finnish specialty foods for Easter. One dish was an appetizer called Mammi, and they say either you hate it or you like it, but most people hate it and if you like it, it is because it is an aquired taste. But to my surprise I actually liked it!! :)

On Easter Sunday I decided to make myself a nice yummy Easter brunch. I made an egg and bacon casserole, deviled eggs (my favorite and i always make them for easter), apples, oranges and cinnemon rolls. It was delicious!


Once again I am away from home on another special hoiday, but the great thing about this holiday is that I can celebrate it one on one with my God! It was a great to take time out and thank Him for the life He gave and the life He has given me. When I was cooking I had my worship music on and when the song Above All by Micheal W.Smith came on it really made me stop and think about the events of His death and resurrection. It is amazing to stay still and think about His love,sacrifce and power!

Above all powers, above all kings, above all nature and created things,
above all wisdon and all the ways of man, You were here before the world began.
Above all kingdoms above all thrones, above all wonders the world has ever known above all wealth and treasures of the earth, theres no way to measure what Your worth

Crucified, laid behind a stone, You lived to die, rejected and alone, like a rose trampled on the ground, You took the fall and thought of me above all

war in the woods

Paintballing!!!! When my coach announced that we were going paintballing as a part of our team bonding day I was not jumping up and down with excitement like some of the girls. Paintballing is one thing I told myself I wouldnt do..why would you purposely go and get yourself hit with paintballs that hurt and left bruises for days. But the coach assured me we would have some protective gear.
So that Saturday the team loaded up in the cars and headed to the paintballing place. I think most of us were expecting some kind of course or area lined out for us. But we get there and we are in the woods. We are paintballing in the woods with like 2 feet of snow. So we get all our gear which is just like a camouflaged jumpsuit which garnered no protection or padding whatsoever, so i wore my big jacket and sweats underneath for some extra padding. The they gave us our helmets, which didnt have a anything to protect the back of our heads,which led me to more worrying about my safety. And sidenote the helmets were so bad because they fogged up so fast so you couldnt see anything!
So the rules were pretty simple,it was just like capture the flag. We were divided into 2 teams, the blue and orange team. Go blue! There was 7 on each team. We played 3 rounds for 20 minutes. So one team went to one side of the woods and the other side of the woods and the man blew the whistle and we were off. Since I was so afraid to play this dreaded game I offered to stay and play defense and guard the flag. Really I just wanted to find a good hiding spot and stay hidden so I wouldnt get hit. Well my planned worked. I hit behind this huge rock and was perfectly hidden and I nailed our assistant coach before he could get the flag! yes!! But that round ended in a draw, no one got the flags.
After the first round my competiive side came out. I wanted to go and sneak around and try and capture the flag. So the whistle blew and I made my way around the outskirts of the boundaries, hiding behind trees and rocks and laying low in the snow. It is very hard to be fast and agile while every step you take there is snow up to your knees. So I made it close to the flag and all of a sudden someone was shooting at me. The only way I was safe was to stand behind the tree as still as possible and wait it out. Finally, they stopped shooting at me and went on to someone else, thats when i turned at started firing at her, and I got her!! Ok so I was that much closer to the flag. As I was making my way over there I saw my coach, who was on my team creeping forward to the flag, so I thought Ill go and join him. As I was making my way over there I started getting fired upon from 2 different angles. So I quickly hid and started firing away. But then I ran out of paintballs!! I saw some lying on the ground that must have fallen from the gun so I tried to grab them and put them in my gun but then it hit me! I got hit in the leg by the enemy! Right as I got hit the whistle blew. Time was up and it was another draw. But when the final players that were playing that round made it to base, me and a teammate from the blue team realized we were shooting at each other!!! haha!
Third round. Our strategy was to have 2 players go and get the flag and everyone else stay on defense, well right away our 2 offensive players got shot and alot of their players got shot, so I decided to go and get the flag. I was going on the outskirts again and almost made it to the flag but it was gone, another teammate of mine had it and was taking it to our side but time ran out and it was another draw!
I was so happy when it was over and I had only gotten shot one time and it didnt leave a mark or even hurt! But I was a sharpshooter for my team. I had hit 6 people the whole day! The girls said I was a professional shooter ha! Im glad I got out there and faced a fear of getting hit with a paintball! It was a fun day!







After our day in the woods we got to relax with a team dinner then a sauna party. After that we headed over to Thais' apartment to play some games and get ready to go out. We were playing dance dance revelution on the wii and some crazy card games. Once we were all ready we headed out to our favorite place, Cirkus! This was the last time we were able to really go out and have fun as a team before we focused completely on playoffs! We were now ready for playoffs to begin!!

Mita muija, mika boogie!

Fintelligens, you have probably never heard of them unless you are into Finnish rap, but they are definetely a great group! Their new song that just came out is one of the teams favorite songs and we sing it all the time, although me and Thais know only 4 of the words, mita muija, mika boogie. Which means something like how are you feeling tonight or whats your swag like. Anyway, they were having a little concert in Hameenlinna so a few of us decided to go. It was a fun time and the concert was pretty good even tho we didnt know much of what they were saying but the guys in the group, there are 3 of them, were so entertaining and you could tell they loved what they were doing. One of the guys was just up there smiling the whole time, i know thats not kosher in the rap world, but who knows maybe in the world of Finnish rap its cool. He was our favorite guy by far tho so the smiling paid off. Im not a huge huge fan of rap but I just might be a huge fan on this Finnish rap group! the song in the video is the first part of our team song!

CaRnIvAl!!

Our Brazilian teammate, Thais, has not been home for the big celebration Carnival in her country in a few yrs so we decided in honor of her we will have a carnival day at practice. We all dressed up in crazy colors and costumes and practiced! It was so much fun to have something like that to make practice more fun, somtimes after many months of practice you get bored, so it was a great pick me upper! To make things that much better there was a mens volleyball game right after our practice so we had an audience while we were all dressed up! One of the guys asked the girls if we were dressed up as some sort of punishment!!!