The biggest Finnish festival for students was just a few days ago – Vappu! In order to be able to experience this with all my senses as an exchange student, I and my tutor Suvi took part in various tasks of their student association around the May Festival. This enabled me to get to know some traditions, Finnish terminology and activities related to Vappu. On the one hand, we traditionally prepared the yeast drink Sima, bought the traditional meal for May Day – sausages with potato salad, of course also drank Sima and successfully carried out some activities and tasks together. In order to understand the activities of the pirate.ru student association, I had to translate the explanations from Finnish to English or German every day in order to know which challenges there were to be overcome. This was good practice in identifying the words you already knew and learning new vocabulary We carried out the following activities:
- Drink a glass of sima at Plevna
- Take a photo infront of the Restaurant “Zarillon”
- Take a photo with the 50 years old Näsneula
- The sewing of our patches on the overall
- Wash the student overalls in public water for the upcoming celebrations
- Eat a munkki without licking your lips
- A selfie with a May Day balloon
- Do your own Spring Challenge – spring cleaning in a creative way was the order of the day
- ….and so on
I had great fun doing these Finnish activities in connection with tradition, the language, games and fun and was able to add a few words to my Finnish vocabulary.
Best regards
Christine
Comments