Christmas Above the Artic Circle

I spent Christmas with my girlfriend's family way up north in Finland at a ski resort called Levi. It was above the arctic circle so the sun never came up! You might think it never got light but for a couple hours a day the sky looked like the sun had just set and there was plenty of light.

Here you can see the sky and the ski hill all lit up

We stayed in a great cabin only a short walk from downtown.

There were wild reindeer wandering around the cabins! Unfortunately I couldn't get any pictures of the ones with big antlers

Here is the entire group sitting down to a great Christmas dinner.

Guess what we had for Christmas dinner...Reindeer!!! It is a common food in Northern Finland. It tastes similar to great roast beef but with a stronger flavor. Here is my christmas plate.

The four mystery piles around the side are different potato and carrot casseroles. MMMMMMMmmmmm!

After dinner Santa made a delivery. Finland is the home of Santa Claus. People do not give gifts to eachother, they are all from Santa. He makes his porch delivery in the evening.

I received many great gifts for Christmas and my birthday.

The gifts were all Finnish. The hat and wood cup are traditional to the nomadic reindeer herders of Northern Finland.

Sanna's family are into cross country skiing so I gave it a shot

I was crap for about an hour until I got the hang of it. Its fun and a killer workout. My super gift from Sanna was a Polar heart rate monitor so I could keep track of my workouts like she does. My heart rate hit 95% of max while skiing!

Check this thing out!

Its a snowmobile with one ski! You have to balance the crazy thing while riding it like a motorcycle!

Another cool thing we saw was this:

Its a Mink. It was like an otter/ferret and very rare.

Log cabins are popular here since Finland is mostly forest and there were many huge ones.

That one belongs to Finnish Formula One racing champion Keke Roseberg

This one is only the garage of another huge cabin:

We took a trip to the top of the ski hill. Here is the view back down on Levi:

The summit looks like another world with tons of snow covering the small trees.

This shack was up there too. Brrrrrrr!

Overall it was a great trip. On the way back from Northern Finland I just had to take this picture:

The Finnish are very against illegal downloading of music and other copyrighted content so they started a new branch of the police. Since illegal downloading first started in Germany with techno music they call the new police branch TechnoPolis!!

Yeah Right

I will leave you with this sunset shot I took near our apartment...at 1 in the afternoon!