We have had a fair amount of snow, and it has turned off really cold!
It has been below freezing all week long.
We find the snow removal equipment here quite interesting.
It is similar, but different from what we have in the U.S.
Sister Lehtinen told us that Finland has "snow how". They know how to handle snow.
We saw an little snow plow clearing the path through the forest.
This is NOT a paved path, but they clear off the excess snow without tearing up the path.
You can see Elder Shurtz is bundled up for the cold.
We got an email Tuesday morning saying that we had 10 packages in the aula.
Good thing that I had Elder Shurtz go with me to pick them up!
When I started taking care of them, I saw that there were actually 11 packages.
Sister Saarinen got a message saying that we had a package at the Taj Mahal African Asian Market.
She and I went over and picked it up.
Just before we headed home, I got a message that we had another package at Taj Mahal and one at Sello posti. I waited until Wednesday and Sister Helske went with me to pick those ones up.
Our shelves are filling up with packages!
On the top, and the big boxes in front are for sure Christmas.
The shelves on the left are unknown if they are for Christmas or not (mostly from Amazon.de).
The shelves on the right are ones that can go out at transfers if that works.
You can see a fresh layer of snow. There is no longer the freshly scrapped path from Tuesday.
On Wednesday, we woke up to a fresh layer of snow.
It looked very peaceful looking out over the driving range.
Wednesday turned into a super busy day, with several things going on at once.
This is at lunch time. Some Elders needed a new battery in their car. Elder Shurtz had hoped they could use their gas card, or one of their MSF cards to pay for it, but the place that they had replace it said that their card reader wasn't working. They wanted to be paid by mobile pay rather that bill the office. Sister Helske could do mobile pay and the mission reimburse her, but she didn't have as much in her account as was needed. The missionaries added the cash they had on hand the between the two things, they were 1 euro short. the shop guy said that was OK. This is a picture of them working out a plan.
On Wednesday evening we went to the temple. They have their nativity scene up.
You can see the temple up the hill in the background.
During the week, we have had show moving equipment taking care of the snow on the paths outside the office buildings. I thought that it was interesting that these tractors could either push, or pull the snow, depending on where they were working and which would work better.
In this photo, it came as far forward as it could and then put the shovel down and would back up and scrape the snow back to the main path.
On the other side of the office, it was pushing the snow from the main path and piling it up just outside of the Assistants' office. Now matter which it was doing, it was LOUD!
It was soooo cold!
We enjoyed looking around even though we didn't find anything that we wanted to buy.
On Thursday morning, we stopped to get a picture of the pile that is just outside of our office building.
It was getting crowded.
On Thursday, I finished my moomin impossible puzzle. There was one piece missing!
We had planned to go to Turku with the Kites on Saturday, but Sister Kite got covid, so she wasn't able to go. We decided to wait until they could go to go to Turku.
I thought that maybe it would be fun to go to Tampere to the Christmas market there.
We talked to the Cardon's and they expressed an interest in going with us.
It is about a 2 hour drive.
At some point we actually saw some blue sky and maybe even a bit of sunshine. 
As we got closer to Tampere, it got more cloudy and there was even a little bit of snowing and some blowing snow. I am always grateful for the winter tires when we are driving in the winter!
We are always amazed by the Finnish people. It doesn't matter if the weather is super cold,
or if it is snowing, or even if it is difficult for them to get around because they use a walker.
None of that keeps them inside.
We saw this man at an intersection, slowly walking across the street.
We got to the Cardon's apartment about 12:30.
They drove us around and first we went to the old stables (which have now been turned into shops) where there was a smaller Christmas market.
At a little shop of miniatures, I found a little laser cut miniature nativity
Below are people lined up to get into the chocolate shop. We opted not to stand in line.
that had to be punched out and put together.
It is only about 2 1/2 inches tall.
We saw this cute donkey in a little stall.
Just before we went in we saw this little booth covered in graffiti. As we looked closer we saw it said puhulin (phone). We realized it was an old phone booth.
Then we drove over to the keskustori (central market square)
where the joulutori (Christmas market) was located.
Also note the cute child in their warm snow clothes.
We stopped back at the Cardon's apartment to warm up.
She had some herbal tea for us and we made some broiled open faced sandwiches for a bite to eat.
We took separate cars to a place called Idea Park. It is a huge shopping center.
I read somewhere that it might be the largest in Finland.
We wanted to go to a Christmas song sing-along that was happening between 4 and 6. We got there just before 5 and walked to the place where the sing-along should be. It was rather quiet and quite empty. We found out that not very many people showed up so they decided to end early and pack things up.
The Cardons showed us around the mall. There was an interesting restaurant that we walked through. We especially got a kick out of spoof film posters. 
They had a large sports area that had miniature golf, bowling, arcade games and electric go-cart racing.
Even though it all seemed like something that you would find in the U.S. instead of Finland, it was still different; like they took their idea from something in the U.S. but it was way over the top.
And, because it is Finland, they also include a sauna.
We went to see the gingerbread display, which apparently is a yearly thing.
This year it was a world theme, and they had sections for the different continents of the world.
It was fun to see the creations even though some of them didn't look very professional.
We went to see the giant teddy bear with walls of bears behind it.
We had to say good-bye to the Cardon's.
We enjoyed spending some time with them and getting to know them a little bit.
Before we left, Elder Shurtz stopped in at the DNA store
to pick up some spare SIM cards to have on hand as he was about out of them.
We left a little after 6:00 to head back home. It was a dark drive and we were driving south. We could see a bright light a bit above the horizon, but couldn't really figure out was it was.
We also saw some ice crystal light pillars, but my phone camera would not take a picture as we passed them, and we didn't see any after that. They looked very similar to this:
We got our Christmas tree put up this week, 
It was so cold! This is what it showed on our car dashboard. 
I know that it is -13 celcius, but to me it felt like when it was well below 0 F in Chicago!
(-13 C is between 8 and 9 F.)
This morning as we drove to Church, we saw the sunrise! The picture was taken at 9:18. 
After church, there were families with sleds heading to the park.
It is so fun to see the kids in there winter gear.
I especially like to see the kids being pulled on the walkways in their sleds.
Notice the sun in the sky. The picture was taken at 12:18.
This is the highest the sun got in the sky today!
as well as a few other decorations we found in the apartment.
Notice the snowflakes, The star on top of the book case and the candle bridge in the window.
We hung our cute little stockings that some of Stephanie's kids made for us.
I also put up the lovely nativity set that I got from Sister Alakoski last week.
Also the little Lapland one, also from Sister Alakoski.
Sunrise/sunset Sunday 3 December 2023
Espoo Finland 9:01am to 3:20pm for 6 hrs 9 min of daylight.
Provo Utah 7:31 to 5:00 pm for 9 hrs 29 min of daylight.
The good news is that there is only 3 more weeks of losing daylight.
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