SCHOOL VISIT at Tuesday

The Finnish lady-teacher Anna (who lives and works here in Akureyri) came to Gula Villan to get us to the school.
The first lecture started at 8:15 about Geology of Island. Very interesting!

Jónas is surely an expert at these stuff and has his own personal style to tell the stories and everybody listened quietly and eyes open even when we were all very exhausted about the adventure last night.

He told funny jokes about happenings at past and we all loved his stories.

The second lecture was about Icelandic language by teacher Anna – and in Finnish.
There were some interesting similarity with English; like apple – eple (omena) or mother which sounded almost the same, but has these special letter like Icelandic language has…

Then the most exciting moment: our students met the Icelander students for the first time, when they told them about our home town Espoo, our capital Helsinki and Finland.
Our whole class was divided to 5 groups and all groups had their presentation at 5 different classes.
Icelandic students seem to be very interested about Finland and Finnish language. After the presentations students learned words from each other. One class sang a song even to our students! Bravissimo!
Our students handed also some Finnish candy: salmiakki and chocolate. All the students loved the chocolate, but salmiakki divided opinions… Also the teachers loved the chocolate and behavior to have the chocolate was exactly the same among both students and teachers – very excited.

One of these classes was our host/hostess and soon after the presentations all students met each other at the auditorium. We had made a list with Jónas last night and divided all students as pairs.
So, there were 10 4-student groups with 2 Finnish and 2 Icelandic and two 3-student group, where Icelandic girl Jána had two our girls and two Icelandic guys had our brave Justus.
All students were told to do a little project all around the town after lunch and get to know each other on the way. There was two hours time to explore the town and do this.

Before getting to town or lunch we had this interesting tour also around the school: the oldest part of the school was from 1800 century with wooden structure and we got a glance from the upstairs attic also, where had been dorms for the pupils at early days. Nowadays there is storage with old teaching equipment. The old structure was all pale to see and for fire safety it was not allowed to use for anything else. The atmosphere at the old part was dignified, but cozy. Also the principal office with main meeting room was at this part of the building.

12:00 we had a lunch at school cafeteria: salad bar, pasta with cheese and mushrooms and “skyr” with tea/coffee.
Interesting part about the food was that the desert Skyr was same size as the main course, which amused us Finnish – we have these microscopic dessert at school, if any.
Milk was very good – cold and same kind like the 1%-milk back home :)

During the project work adults had a tour around the town with Jónas – but with car.
And there were some things to solve out also for the Wednesday and pay for the bus, so we didn’t have time to go around walking…

Very interesting day at school :)
 

Our islandic teachers seem to like our soveniers from Finland