Finnish midsummer festival

Last day was pretty good. I woke up 5am to watch the Australia go through the next round in world cup soccer. At 8am I went surfing to Newcastle beach for few hours.

There's a midsummer in Finland and during this weekend heaps of people tend to have a party. We also had a nice traditional bbq with few beers here at the campus with the finnish Matti. We tried to speak a bit more finnish to each other during this special moment, since we hardly ever use finnish. Well it turned out that speaking our native language isn't so easy anymore and we ended up using stupid sounding finglish which combines words from both languages. Had fun time though :)

New pet

I managed to reserve my flight from Sydney to Auckland yesterday. I'm departing 3th of July by Lan Chile air company. From Auckland I'm gonna travel all the way South to Queenstown and atleast do some tramping/kayaking/snowboarding along the way. I'm probably flying back to Sydney after a month in 8th of August to begin my Oz-tour.

Surf has been really bad recently. One of the reasons might be that the sandbanks in the Newcastle beach have transformed so that all the waves seem to be closing out, which means that the whole face of the wave crashes at the same time. Well I'm going to beach again to check if it has got any better...

..yes and we had a new pet in our house yesterday. When we were watching telly, my aussie mate told me that I have something moving on my leg. It turned out to be a spider and it didn't take long for me to recognize it when I saw the white tip on the spider's tail. It was a male white-tail spider which is one of the poisonous spiders in Australia among the redback and the Sydney funnelweb spider.

It's not living in the house anymore.

Blackbutt reserve

I went to this funny sounding reserve this Saturday to finally see the koalas, wombats and other unique aussie animals. The reserve is located just here in Newcastle and you can see all the animals for free. I went there with the dutch guy Sjoerd who had so fun time with the emus that occasionally he looked like one himself. We also managed to pat the koala and weird looking owl which the friendly staff kindly introduced to us.

I'm currently checking out the airfares to New Zealand. It seems that I'm gonna flight to Auckland in the beginning of July and return back to Sydney in early August.

Tonight is the soccer game Australia against Brazil. The party is going to be massive if the impossible happens...Good luck socceroos.

Free Willy

I was surfing today(surprise) and soon realized that there was lots of bluebottle-jellyfishes in the water. I might be a sissy but the tentacle of this creature really burned my hand when it tangled around my fingers and I had to get out from the water. This nice experience combined with shitty waves made my surfing quite lame.

As I was listening to Stewart's laugh about me being sissy, the lifeguard told in the loudspeaker that there's a humpback whale around 200meters from the beach. And there it sure was making huge splashes in the water. The east coast of Australia is pretty good spot to sight these huge creatures since they're on their way migrating from Antartic to North.

This was my first time seeing a whale and so the day ended up being quite special. We decided to celebrate this unique moment and went through liquorland on our way home.