Chapter Three: Tour of Kokkola and trip to Alavetli – or Finnish Sightseeing… [2/2]

above: our archaeologist explaining us how the tar was made

Helena

thought that the archaeologist was fed up with us from the start and didn’t really know what he had to tell us. He told us he didn’t want to ‘bullshit’ us by telling us something wrong and he couldn’t really explain everything as a ‘shit load’ of things could have happened. This vocabulary was quite surprising for a university trip. However, it was interesting to see all these, to know that things we wouldn’t expect to be prehistoric are all around us.

We played Kubb, a prehistoric game, actually still played all over

Sweden

(perhaps they feel prehistoric inside themselves, you never know).

above: people carefully listening to the Kubb-rules

In this game, you have one team on each of the two sides. Every team stands behind his six soldiers, and has to try to knock down the opposite soldiers with wooden sticks. This was actually very nice, we were not all with our own teams (but we were together and we won! team 1 rules!).

above: team 1 (Helena- Liu – Cyril )– we won together with some other people

The archaeologist said we had won a bottle of Koskenkorva and that we had to ask Esko for it.

We had a last look at cairns(where people used to be buried) on the way back. To be honest, it was quite a pity because – yes, you can see the stones and other mortuary things – but, everything is just left like that in a poor state, with moss growing everywhere… You can’t really see what it was once. Just holes with stones standing.

above: our archaeologist showing us some ancient remains

This trip was a nice one, it was interesting to see some actual Finland in the morning and then some prehistoric Finland the afternoon. We could see that people have always taken profit of their surroundings to live: in the past to make their homes (stones, moss, etc), and nowadays, to be competitive (port, deep waters, etc).