Squeaky CHEESEEEE!!!!!

First off: Thank you Val for you suggestions on the music, I will look into them (I like the Kooks a lot)! 

So, not much happened on Sunday...  I went for a walk and ran into my advisor/teacher Rebecca and had a power walk through the woods.  She showed me how they have lights with these buttons for you to turn them on and it illuminates the track for 30  mins or so! That will be very handy when it starts getting dark at 3 PM!! Then I ran into some the of the 3rd year Nordic students who were going mushroom hunting.  I went with them but we didn't find any good ones so me and 2 of the other girls went home (after we found 2 ticks! YUCK!) but as soon as we left they found a TON of good mushrooms.  Of course...  Then home to watch an absurd but funny movie called Kopps and make lasagna... which turned out odd, but very edible! Then I did have a little culinary adventure.  I went and had Coffee Cheese... aka Leipäjuusto or squeaky cheese.  It was really good but weird.  Apparently it is a big tradition in Northern Finland.  So I had that with a Fin,  Dane, Norwegian and Englishman.  It was good but weird and really it was squeaky!  Read the link (thank goodness for Wikipedia!) it explains the whole situation way better then I can.  But here are some pics:

This is regular pan warmed with some cloudberry jam on the plate and the jar behind the plate.  You eat pieces with the jam and drop a few pieces in your coffee.  I didn't like it in the coffee so much... especially at the end when there were just pieces of weird cheese in your last few sips... weird.

This is cooked with cream in the oven for a while.  It was really good.  So rich and heavy! But delish and we all ate WAY too much! But it was hard to stop!!!

Then today, I am finally mostly over my sickness! So it was hot shop work in the morning.  We didn't have enough glass to work on the big molds today so we got to make little schnapps glasses! It is amazing how blowing into molds is completely different every time the mold is different.  This time we had to gather once, make a quick bubble, stuff it in the mold, then make a neck and be able to take it off the pipe before it got cold! Talk about working fast! It was amazing how quickly the molds cool the glass! It was nice to be doing something different.  The 2nd year Nordics are supposed to make mold blown wine glasses this week! I hope I get to try that too! 

Then in the afternoon we went on a little field trip to Hauges Hantverksglas.  They use recycled glass to make bottles and etc.  They don't have a big furnace where they keep tons of molten glass, just heating ovens where they heat bottles (anything from coke bottles to schnapps to vodka to whatever type of glass you can think of) and then open them up and put colors on them and make them into something new.  It is nice for the environment and much cheaper way to do glass.  Here are some pics:

They slumped a bunch of bottles into a bowl shape.  Pretty cool I thought.

This bottle was a fish... they opened the mouth and added the blue.  It was hard to photograph, sorry about the poor quality.

I took this one for Val since she was talking about it a while back and is the only person who comments on my blog... hint hint.

Then this evening I relaxed.  I am still a little tired from being sickly and really want it to go away ASAP.  Then Martin and Christian (the Danish guys) invited Sarah (Finish roommate) and I to the nearby lake and we watched the sunset which was beautiful! Also Christian went swimming! It was cold enough for me to wear my little winter coat... I couldn't have swam if I was "COVERED IN BEEESSSS" as Eddie Izzard might say.  

Tomorrow I start in the cold shop then back to the hot shop in the afternoon! I am excited and can't wait to try more cold working... and blowing! I am also glad that I am getting to know more and more people here like the 3rd year Nordic students and they seem really cool even if they put cheese in their coffee! haha