Exploring Lahti

Hello everyone!

Well this week was a busy one, I have been exploring Lahti and we also had our orientation this week. We first explored the sculpture park in downtown Lahti. The sculpture park is located on top of a hill in the forest and the sculptures are located on the trails through the forest. This time of year its hard to spot the sculptures because they are all covered in snow and a lot of them can be mistaken as trees or rocks, but when you do notice them they are quite impressive. Most of the sculptures that are pictured below look quite similar to one another and have the same motif, they are also mostly made out of cement, believe it or not, even though they look natural. Pictured below are just a few of the many sculptures located in the forest.

The orientation week started out with a music concert at Felix Krohn Hall located on Sibeliuksenkatu. The concert was a symphony orchestra with many guest opera singers, they were all very good, and the orchestra also sounded very good, and it was all free! There is also another music hall in Lahti, it is called Sibeliustalo, or Sibelius Hall, it is located on the harbour front and is home to the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, its quite a nice looking building and another place that would also like to visit.

The second day of the orientation we had a cultural walk. We first visited the Lahti Ski Museum, where we saw ski's as old as 2000 years ago that the viking's use to use for hunting reindeer and moose. There are also a lot of fun things to do at the museum, you can try the ski jumps in virtual reality, I wiped out, lol! You can also try cross country skiing, target practice, and virtual ski jumping and skiing on another machine as well, it was a pretty good museum. Below are pictures of the museum and the 3 world renouned ski jumps located right beside the museum. The ski jumping festival is at the beginning of march every year.

We then went to the Lahti City Museum, which held a lot of artifacts on the history of Lahti, as well as an artists exhibition on the first floor.

Most of these artwork installations had motion, the swings moved, the coats moved, and the projection of the carriage also moved. The theme of these works was life and death.

There were many different parts to the museum, inlcuding the history of the city itself, and the history of design and furniture design in Lahti and Finland.

These are pictures of the outside of the City Museum. We also visited the Church of the Cross, which is pictured below.

In this picture is Lotti, she is from Southampton, England, she is also on exchange in Fine Arts.

On our own time, we also walked around the harbour on the other side of the sculpture park. There is a huge marina here and many walking trails, including a walkway that goes around the lake. The pictures below show the opposite side of the lake to the previous pictures on the blog from my place in Mukkula.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures!