Tuesday 17 October The journey starts
After buying some goodies for the journey I headed to the airport by car with my parents. Most of my fellow travellers were at the airport. As I arrived there, I joined them and said goodbye to my parents. I put my luggage on the custom convey and started chatting with my friends. We talked about shopping abroad and the excitement of travelling. A little later, we went through the security check and had some lemonade and continued chatting. 19.40 was the time to board the plane. I stepped out of the door to the snowing airfield. Rammstein's Reise Reise (Journey Journey) started to play inside my head. Before taking off, I and my friend Kalle had to move to the front of the plane to balance the plane for the flight that didn't last long to Helsinki, only about two hours. In Helsinki we lodged in to the airport hotel Cumulus. We splitted in to pairs or groups of three in to rooms. I got Mika as my room mate. There was news about a potential strike of the flight attendants of Finnair. I and Mika laughed and chatted that it would be quite cool to stay in Strasbourg, but we didn't take the strike seriously. We fell asleep at about 23.30.

Wednesday 18 October
I woke up at 4.00 am, but I was too tired to stand so I slept to 5.15 am. I and Mika took our luggage to the lobby and went to the restaurant for some breakfast. We freshed up by eating. Harri said Kalle had snored at night, and Mika complained that I had spoken asleep. At 6.30 we left Cumulus and headed to the airport. At the airport we hung around the shops and cafés. About an hour later, we stepped on our aeroplane. The two and a half-hour flight to Brussels was easy to bear. We listened to music, chatted and we were also served breakfast and some refreshments by the flight crew. We started to get to know the airport of Brussels after we had organized our luggage to Strasbourg. We went to cafés and kept our peeled for potential souveniers. The building of domestic flights was not interesting enough for us, so we were allowed to enter the building of international flights by the teachers. We got through the security check and started to hang around the shops. I found some good Napoleon sweets in one shop and bought a bag of them for a snack. In another shop, I and Kirsi were served free chocolate samples by a nice man, who also told us the legend of the Manneken Pis, who saved Brussels from the siege by urinating on the explosives that were meant to blow up the city wall. It would have not been clever to buy any souveniers then, but we would do that on the way back home. In the afternoon, we flew to Elsaß-Lothringen. As we were landing to Strasbourg, we saw the Louiss Weiss building. After arriving at the aeroport, we took a bus and a tram to our hotel Cape Europe. After settling down, we went to see Srasbourg on foot. Almost all the stores were closed, so we just decided to get an overall picture of the city. Later we had our dinner in a local pub, and we were served local Elsaß-Lothringenian special pizza that was a thin and only a few fillings, like cheese, onion and ham. After having this traditional meal our teachers walked back to the hotel. As the cats were gone, the mice started hanging around the center of Strasbourg. Because all the shops were closed, our only destinations were cafés. I and Kirsi were a little bit tired so we went back to the hotel. The others "toured" in cafés and they had a ball. The time was about 0.00 as I fell asleep. I would be very tired the next day, because we would get up very very early at about 6.00 am.

Thursday
The main day of our journey. The others were more tired, because they had hung in cafés. The tram took the tired (except teachers) gang near to the Parliament House. It rained. On the inner yard of the Louis Weiss there were an Austrian group. I was a little bit shy, but a couple of seconds later I was brave enough to go to them and test my German skills. We chatted about the usual things, like favourite music and homes. Some other nationalities were there too, expecting the Euroscola. Ten minutes later we got in to the house and security check. All the students were splitted to groups of five and we got name tags that contained our names and groups. We hadn't eaten our breakfast, because we were promised to have breakfast offered by the parliament. Well, we should have remembered that the main morning meal here is the brunch. We had to survive the morning with the help of coffee, juice and croissants. The next thing we had was entering the main parliament room as one famous hymn was playing in the background. We got known to the headsets, our voting buttoms, and our Spanish, French, English and German translators. First the students from different countries represented their schools and countries for a minute. Finland was introduced by Leena. She said later to us she was very ancious of performing in front of the big crowd. After having some information on the other students, a very high authority told us facts about the EU. We also had a chance to ask things about the EU before we splitted to various workshops.


Departure at Ivalo airport


Euroscola meeting


Tarte flambee, local pizza


Finnair airhostesses and stewards were on strike, we had to fly home by Spanish wings from Brussels to Helsinki.