5 things...

One of my favourite things to do when visiting my family in Finland is taking the dogs for a walk around the Espoo neighbourhood. When I first went to Finland I met Gapu (9) who was a permenant member of the family and Vauhti (3) who was being trained to be a guide dog. Vauhti would go back to the guide dog school for periods of time and then spend time with the family the rest of the time. Vauhti Vauhti passed the guide dog training test earlier this year and was subsequently homed with a visually impaired person. If the dog does not pass the test after a year, they are not taken on as guide dogs and are homed with families. The family has worked with the Guide Dog school http://opaskoirakoulu.fi/?lang=en since 1999 when they adopted their first dog, Cola. Cola Reko and Gapu With the recent addition of Reko, a white Labrador to the family, I thought it would be nice to look at how my Finnish family got connected to the Guide Dog school and ended up givi

I'm back in work after 5 glorious days in Finland last week. I'm happy to be back at work, diving into some design work, feeling refreshed and re-energised from my trip, but I'm also missing Finland once again. We spent most of our time in Espoo catching up with friends and family and enjoying obscene amounts of cinnamon buns, coffee and, of course, enjoying sauna. We crammed a lot into 5 days, here's a brief overview of our 5 days in Finland... 1. Wednesday So we arrived late Thursday night. After a midnight feast of macaroni box, we headed off to the 24hour Prisma to buy a few bits and pieces, mostly tasty snacks to scoff before we headed to bed. The following morning we took Gapu for a walk around Espoo, calling at the local Alepa for more tasty snacks! In the afternoon we went to Helsinki University where Tuomas was giving a lecture. I sat in the back with his parents trying to understand extremely advanced mathematics. The post-lecture pizza and drinks