The sky is falling!

My studies were interrupted by a loud fire alarm about 15 minutes ago. I thought about staying inside, as the last two warnings were false, but finally I left my room and walked toward the front door.

Firemen came, checked out the situation, stopped the alarm, and told us something in Finnish that we didn't understand. A friend said someone had burned food in the oven. Federiko was not happy. He was in the middle of watching Top Gun. "And when I watch Top Gun, I cannot be interrupted," he said. Anton (from Canada) was listening to music through earphones, and didn't hear the alarm. He read about it on the Lapinkaari facebook page.

Suddenly, someone announced that it was snowing. I looked outside, opened the door and felt a surge through my body -- it was finally snowing!* I walked outdoors and felt like I walked into a giant toy snowball with soft pieces of cotton falling from the sky. It was a serene and wispy scene.

The weather probably won't let the snow stick this week, but it was a nice preview for the heart of winter. It topped off an evening with a group of friends, listening to festive music, eating christmas cookies and drinking the German version of glögi (with wine). For dinner I had some mac and cheese that Maiko sent me.

Here is an awesome documentary that we saw during the seminar on Friday: Steam of Life.

It captures natural, emotional conversations and stories from Finnish men in the sauna. It is about loneliness, companionship and social pressures. The doc captures a lot of great stuff, including a man using a telephone booth as a sauna, another man using a car, a group of elderly men sitting side by side in the sauna, a father pouring water on his three children, and landscapes in Finland; the finale is just beautiful.

I have an exam for New Lits tomorrow, so I'll study a bit more and then get some sleep.

Yay!

*Update: five minutes after I posted this, my friend Henri informed me that what I saw was sleet, and not snow, "since it's not crystals, but wet, melted blobs kinda like a slushie rainstorm," he wrote.