Bohu & Robert & kids…

The time before Christmas is always busy. First of all there is a lot different pikkujoulu (=small Christmas) parties with people from work, from club, these friends, those friends. TuS ‘elite’ group pikkujoulu was in Salmi´s party house. Vröni refused to make typical Finnish Christmas food and if it really is what we usually get in student restaurant every year before Christmas, then I somehow understand. It is cold ham with two different kinds of mash stuff of various tones of brown and according to taste I got no clue what it is made from. It actually doesn’t taste bad, but it doesn’t look delicious (tempting). Well, a typical Finnish Easter food is very black porridge called mämmi and it tastes very special. It is suppose to be very healthy, which just reminds me my younger brother who as a kid refused to eat anything healthy, since he soon realized that it is just synonymous for not tasty. My Finnish friends say that mämmi doesn’t taste so bad if you add a lot of cream and sugar. I mean nothing tastes bad if you add a lot of cream and sugar (eventually ketchup). So during Salmi´s pikkujoulu we had traditional Swiss food – cheese fondue, and a lot of other tasty stuff. For the first time in my adult live I have made some typical Czech Christmas sweets (without help of my mum or sister, just Robert’s) and I have to commend myself

And then of course, we have also been training. Robert has been training quite well recently even if he broke his forearm some 3 weeks ago (he slipped and felled on ice while running). Now he is already in Czech and today he’s run 30km xc-running race, which should be quite much up and then more up and then back. I only know that he finished 3rd, 4min after winner and I’m proud of him. His training diary is on TuS web page, mine is there also, but so far accessible only for TuS members. But I’m thinking to go public as well, I found out that to have public training diary is very good motivation. TuS trainings are very good this winter again; we have gym, interval training and map training every week. I just feel a bit disappointed since not so many people are going there anymore. True is that people are in different skiing camps right now or sick and probably it is natural that they are not so enthusiastic about common trainings as much as they were in the beginning of the season. We have had one alternative training this week, which was carrying of 1200 liters of concrete through 500m of forest, since TuS is helping to build some kind of tower in the middle of the forest. I admire all who participated; they manage to do it in 1.5 hour.

I have been quite busy in work. My boss finally over talked me to become a member of ISB Graduate School, which is some kind of “organization” to get together postgraduate biochemistry students in Finland. The negative thing is that it gives me more work (writing application, all kinds of abstracts and reports). The positive thing is that they organize every winter few days meeting in Lapland. So on Monday, I’m leaving to Saariselkä, yes! The negative thing is that I have presentation there, which means more work and some stress, the positive thing is that lectures starts in the afternoon and there is plenty of time for skiing. So far it was not possible to ski in Turku, it is one more time an icy winter here.

And the biathlon world cup has started, I can’t miss that. And watching 10 series of Friends (we got them as a wedding present) takes some time as well. That reminds me that Iva and David, our very good Czech friends (alive not on DVD) here in Turku are after 4 years in Finland moving back to Czech Very sad indeed, we are definitely going to miss them a lot.