HAPPY EASTER!

I am back from Lapland, Rovaniemi yesterday night! Today is Easter Holiday so we don't have school!

The journey to Lapland is a long long one... We travel there by VR so it took us 14 hours plus to get there. And to make it worst, there was no more seats left on the train on Thursday so we have to stand for like 11 hours plus when we change train. But we just sat on the empty seats and get up when the seat belongs to someone. I have to change my seat twice but Thank God that at least i can still find an empty seat. However throughout the whole journey it was rather stressful for us and we could hardly slept. I manage to catch about 4 hours of sleep though.

Finally, we reached Rovaniemi on Friday morning at around 8am. The weather was freezing cold! Since it's up North, we expected it and at least we came preapred. We find our way to Guesthouse Borealis but we can only check in at 2pm as the rooms were not ready yet. So we just left our backpack there and went to walk around the city center. But to our dismay, all the shops were not open because it's Good Friday! So we feel like we were in a zombie town!

We went back to the Guesthouse and rest at the eating area. By then all of us were really tired and really low in our spirit. Then we got a phone call from a China man that we met in Lappeenranta train station. He was talking to us on the train and he told us that his friend knows Santa Claus so he helped us to find out if he will be around. He told us that Santa Claus will be around so we decided to go to Santa Claus Village on Friday.

We went there by bus and the ride there is around half an hour. When we reached, at least our spirit got lifted up. It's really beautiful there and it started snowing as well after we took photo with Santa Claus. For the first time, i actually enjoyed the snow. Really nice! The admission to see Santa Claus is free. But we have to queue up just to take photo with him and we paid like 30 euros for 5 postcard. So each of us took 1 postcard photo. For the first day, we only went to Santa Claus Village as we were really tired.

On Saturday, we went shopping at the City Center in the morning and we then we decided to go to the Zoo- Wildlife Park Ranua in the afternoon! The bus ride there is like 1 hour and it's really expensive to travel around in Finland. The bus trip to and fro cost us 26.90 euro!

We reached the Zoo around 3pm and we started exploring the igloo that is at the entrance of the Zoo. I climbed into the little hole just for fun! And there are ice sculpture displays as well. Nice! The zoo is unlike Singapore's zoo as it is really big. Due to winter, some animals were taken away so it was not in sight. I saw owl, hawks, birds, raven, polar bear, wolf, wolverine, deer, moose, fox, musk ox and reindeer. Some animals were cute. We walked about 2.5KM in the zoo and by the time we covered everything it's already 4.50pm and we could not buy anything from the souvenir shops as they were already close. And we have to wait for the bus that comes at 5.45pm! It was terrible waiting in the cold for the bus to come! My toes went numb despite using toe heat pad that day!

We then had dinner at the train station restaurant as it was too cold to walk elsewhere for food. In fact, we had dinner at the same restaurant for both night!

The trip to Lapland was rather disappointing as we expected so much more! We wanted to try some winter sports but it was too expensive! But anyway, the trip was a good getaway for us!

Photo time!

We spotted SINGAPORE!