Sytykeruusut & roses

This week kicked off with learning how to make "sytykeruusut" out of egg cartons.  These are roses that you dip in wax, decorate with glue glitter, and use them as kindle in your fireplace.  Eija taught me how to make them on Monday night so I could teach the sisters at church on Tues. how to make them.  It's a great way to recycle.

Here we are in the kitchen making the sytykeruusut.  The woman standing in the back is Sis. Aalto.  I love her!  And the sister missionaries just moved into our ward last Sunday.  There haven't been sister missionaries in JYU for over 10 years.  They are truly inspirational young women.

Reetta, my classmate, is pictured in the back by the door.  She stays one night a week here at Eija's.  It's always the best night of the week as we cook dinner together and go on long walks by the lake.  The sister in the foreground is dipping the roses in the hot wax.

I was leaving the cafeteria and looking for the restroom facilities.  I found them but the question of the hour was, "Which door is the RIGHT door?"  Which one would you guess?  Thankfully for me there was a guy standing where I'm standing.  I stopped and looked at both doors, wondering which was the women's restroom.  I thought to myself,"Come on people.  How am I supposed to figure out the right answer with just one letter? Where are the handy pictures?"  The guy saw me looking at one door and then the other.  He just pointed to the "N" door.  Thank you kind stranger! 

The week ended with beautiful roses on my desk, a gift from Eija. So sweet of her!! And, I didn't realize until I looked closely that they are the exact colors of the roses in the card that's sitting on my desk. (I didn't move anything on my desk for this photo--it looked just like this when I came home.) The card is a watercolor of two yellow roses with pink tips.  G'ma Lamm painted the roses and sent the card to me for my 24th birthday.  The message inside really touched me then and has taken on even greater meaning as the years have passed.  How sweet that Eija's roses match my G'ma's roses.  It was a great (and so fitting) way to end the week.

I have greatly missed hot yoga class.  As in, I could cry I miss them so much.  Alicia, a Ph.D. student in the dept., connected me with one of her friends who is a hot yogi.  She suggested I check out this studio.  It seems like a GREAT studio!  I took a tour of their facilities and was impressed with the instructor who gave me a run down of their classes and what to expect.  Tuesday's evening class can't come soon enough!

The tall building in the background is Jyväskylä’s new water tower.  It has an observation deck on the top and a natural history museum on the first floor.  Fridays are free admission days for the local museums so I went to check it out on my way home from school.

One of the views from the observation deck (which, sadly, was encased in glass).

The stairs to climb up to the tower (this is looking down from half-way down the stairs).  You can see the lake in the background.

This is the temporary exhibit in the natural history museum that's housed on the first floor of the new water tower.  Mushrooms!!  Do you recognize any of them?

Black horn mushrooms!  So, it turns out that they're actually called black trumpet mushrooms.  My bad on the translation.  :)