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Alumni meeting in Helsinki 20th - 23rd January, 2005Hello all! Here is a short report of EESTEC Alumni meeting 1/2005, held in Helsinki, Finland (and areas near by) during a long weekend Jan 20-23, 2005. The planning of the event got started when I asked from Alumni people in the mailing list if someone is willing to organise an alumni meeting. Leo immediately pointed out that I should do it. And then, of course, I promised... I contacted some other EESTEC Alumni from Helsinki and Tampere and asked who would be willing to help me in organisation. I got around 15 people involved. Together we spent the busy autumn planning everything... NOT! Basically we just decided the dates and invited people over. We reserved a cottage by the sea for the weekend and changed a couple of emails of what should we do with the people who are coming. We did not set any limitation into the amount of participants because we were self-confident that we could handle as many as there were to come. And so we did. So who came?
On Thursday afternoon our guests arrived. The external participants were:
In addition to these there were all together 19 people from LC Helsinki and Tampere more or less present during the event. So what happened? Thursday evening we had a dinner in a restaurant called "Manala" (that's Finnish and means "abode of the dead" or "the underworld"). Anyway, they have quite good Finnish menu there with relaxed atmosphere and service. After the dinner we went around some pubs and the most eager people still continued to Kalle nightclub. I think Marijn (and others) can comment later in this forum about how it went there. After the good night sleep and heavy breakfasts at hosts' places we put the group into cars and drove to the old wooden city of Porvoo. Luckily there had been snowing for a couple of days and the narrow streets in Porvoo were nice to explore and have some snowfights. In the afternoon some more people joined us and we packed the cars with food, beer and people for the weekend. Then we took off for Porvoo archipelago, drove to the sea, took a small ferry into an island of Pellinki, had a little snow rally in non-ploughed small roads and ultimately arrived to the cottage for the weekend. There time was mostly making food, heating up sauna, having sauna and swimming in the Baltic sea (which was open due to storm previous week - the water was still 0C), drinking beer and other EESTEC spirits, playing games and doing some outdoor activities like wood chopping with chain saw and axe etc. THe main issue was that everything was done according to the extremely tight schedule we had planned. Comments from the participants are welcome... Finally after two a bit darker and one a bit lighter periods of time it was bright again. And then we realised that it is actually time to head back for the civilisation. So we drove the foreigners (including people from Oulu - they are foreigners because they arrived by plane) back to the airport and they most probably headed back to the civilisation. We locals were left here in the deep deep forests of Finland. --- So that's basically it. I hope our example generates more Alumni events still during 2005 and in becoming years. I think it is great addition to current active EESTEC events. And of course it all starts from the people: you, me and other Alumni. Also the co-operation with currently active LCs is a nice add-on to pass opinions etc. from oldies to younger ones - and sometimes (maybe even more often) - vice versa. So be brave, meet the challenge and organise yet another Alumni event! Keep up the good spirit! Written by: Harri "Hapo" Mansikkamäki |
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