Our story begins on monday at 5.50Am in the parking lot of the school of Valtimo. Everyone were filled with excitement, and innocence as we stepped on the mini-bus and started our journey to Norway.
The views were gorgous and the company was enjoyable enough to spend the next thirteen hours with, as we travelled across the border, cheering our lungs out and getting nervous tingles of excitement.
Oh, how we were naive.
After just a half an hour, we started realizing that we were actaully in Norway, and this scared pretty much every student to the core, and we started anxiously whispering about going back to Finland. After another 30 minutes, those whispers became shouts of agony and despair to go home, as we rolled to the schoolyard and saw the Norwegian students.
I met with Henrik, the guy I was assigned to live with, which was all well and good, until we were told I wasn’t going to be living alone; Veera was going to be living with me, and nobody had bothered to tell me, OR her.
We talked with the family, told about ourselves and vice versa, visited Elina and her family, before going to bed, scared, but thrilled.

We woke up on tuesday morning and found ourselves in a nearly empty house, where only us, Henrik, and his little sister were present. It was odd at first, because they didn’t say good morning and they didn’t offer us breakfast or lunch to school, but I’ll write that off as the first-day-awkwardness. We
We went to school and got to know everyone by games and talking. We showed off the presentations of Vltimo and our school we had prepared prior to the trip, and we got a tour of the school from the students.
We ate lunch and shared our experiences so far with our families, and at this point, we were starting to get the idea that the Norwegian kids hadn’t been prepared that well, but we didn’t comment on it yet.
We did some arts and crafts at the end of the day; shaping little pieces of a reindeer’s horn, whic we hoped were harvested from the wild, not cut off of a reindeer’s corpse.
Some finnish students had a horrible idea of getting together by themselves and seeing around the village, which was quickly dropped and replaced with a better plan; getting to know everyone rather than only finns.
That night was probably the best of all of them. First we dropped our stuff and got together with a group as big as our class back here at home. We circled around people’s houses before finally setteling down on Robin’s home, also known as the place Kiia was staying in. Eventually there were over twenty people there, almost every students from the project, and we had a great time. Robin’s mom had baked buns and had brewed coffee for everyone, and we had a blast getting to know eachother, laughing and comparing music taste’s. Even a guy outside the project hung out with us, and personally, it was one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time. Even the aurora borealis looked like they were laughing with us.

We woke up to a much better start on wednesday. We got sandwiches and juice for snacks of the day, and we weren’t so awkward around the houuse or eachother. This was the day we went to Tronso, and first we went to the planetarium. I think someone might’ve slept through the show, but I found it fascinating and really took the whole experience in. Then we walked to the science centre under the planetarium, and if I had to compare it, it was a lot like Tietomaa in Oulu, but just smaller. We walked to the shopping centre, which wasn’t that good for my back and I had to sit down for a long while before getting up and exploring the stores. I had absolutely no intention of buying anything, BUT, a book I wanted that wasn’t for sale in finnish stores yet was on sale in Tronso, so I tookthe oppourtunity and... I had no money so I asked Emmi if she could pay it for me in exchange for food. She did. After I pleaded my eternal love for her, we went for lunch, and here we actually chatted with the norwegian students and had some really fun conversations. On the way back, the norwegians and finns seperated again, and Enni got a really bad nosebleed, which jst didn’t seem to stop. After we got back, we gathered a group (significantly smaller group than on tuesday) and went circling around town. It was a little bit weird for me, and honestly, I didn’t enjoy the company that much as they were making me uncomfortable, so I walked back to the family I was staying in.

Thursday morning was about the same as before, and today was the day I was looking forward the least to. It seemed a bit brutal to me to slaughter an ox in front of students and let them play with the intestines, but you do you Norway, you do you. We started walking, and the group quickly seperated into the finnish and the nowegian, the latter walking far ahead of us and not really caring about us, which was a bit rude, but understandable, so I didn’t mind. Before we could even get to the farm, my back started hurting, and I couldn’t walk, so we stopped and one of the teachers came to pick me up and gave me and Kiia who was my moral support) a lift to Henrik’s house so I could lie down and relax. When the others came back, we continued the tradition of touring houses and public places, and I started getting extremely uncomfortabe around this group, because these definitely weren’t my type of people, I started realising. The farewell party was just pizza, with seperated finns and norwegians, which was extremely awkward, but we got our diplomas and some chocolate, and went back to someone’s house again. Things got really messy and there was easily avoidable drama, and I got tired of it really quickly, so I went to Henrik’s house because I simply didn’t want to be involved. I took a nice shower, read a bit and thanked Henrik’s parents one more time before going to bed.
On friday I woke up at around 4.30am and packed the last of my things before saying goodbye departing.