Yesterday evening I experienced a very popular Finnish tradition with university students - a "sit sit". A sit sit is essentially a formal dinner where you end up drinking far more than you actually eat because there are so many rules about when to drink, and what to drink, and you have to sing songs constantly. And then drink. The dress code was formal wear meaning for the first time in months we all got dressed up and wore nice dresses. Apparently the rule is that your dress has to be knee lenght or longer, but as we were erasmus students we didn't know this and therefore a couple of people broke the dress code on the skirt length!

Upon arrival everyone had to find their set seat in the arrangment of about 150 people and then sit down at the table armed with a glass of wine and 2 vodka shots. This was at 7 o'clock in the evening and we were completely sober. So to start off we had to sing a song (in Finnish) to open the events and then there is a guy who is essentially a caller, who constantly bangs on his glass and shouts out "song number 38!" and then everyone has to stop eating, stand up, sing the song. And then once the song is over you then do a toast with the person on your left, drink, toast the person on your right, drink, and then the same with the person opposite you. There were 40 songs on the sheet and we got through all of them in a 3 hour period so you can imagine how often we were singing!

As this was an international sit sit organised by ESN there were also songs in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German to go with the Finnish and Swedish traditional ones. The one thing all of the songs had in common was that they were essentially 'odes to alcohol' and talked about drinking, favourite drinks and being drunk. The songs were all accompanied by lots of banging on the tables, screaming and general drunkness as we all got slowly drunker throughout the night. The finale was a song at the end by which they toasted to the students who started university in 2008 (there were also Finns here) and then these people had to get on their chairs and down their drinks by the end of the song, then we continued to 2007, and then to 2006 and so on. In the UK this would be a very short song given that an undergrad degree is only 4 years (or only 3 in England) and then postgrad is one more. But in Finland, people can study for as long as they want and there is only a recently introduced time frame of 15 years by which one has to finish their degree, meaning we were toasting right back until 1997 for people starting university.

The evening then ended with an after party which scarily turned into a school disco type thing from when we were around the age of 12 in secondary school. But by that point everyone was too drunk to care, so once the party finished down stairs we went back up to our rooms (convieniently, the resturant it took place in was in my basement) got out some vodka and carried on drinking until around 6am, and then some idiot Spaniards set off the fire alarm so we decided to go to bed and call it a day. Needless to say the hang overs were huge the next day!

Other than the sit sit, nothing of noteable happenings has occured here. We're in the last week of classes which is scary - I finish my couses tomrrow and then I have just got 2 essays to write next week and I am offically finished at Helsinki. We're not leaving until the end of May though so we've got loads planned for May, including trips to Sweden and potentially Riga.

The sun is shining in Helsinki, finally. It is still fairly mild in comparision to the rest of Europe, we're at around 4'c whereas everywhere else seems to be in the 20s. But that didn't stop a certain Scotsman getting sunburnt whilst playing football on Tuesday. Yes that is right, sunburn at 4'c is entirely possible when you've lived in sub zero temperatures for over 6 months!!