Hello everyone!

I hope you are all doing well wherever you are. My thesis brought me to Rovaniemi in Lapland, coincidentally the same place where Santa is from! Here I am following my internship at the Arctic Centre where I´m writing my thesis about NATO enlargement in the Arctic. My time here has been amazing thus far and I have met a lot of cool people and done things I have dreamed about since I was a child (such as seeing the Northern Lights, go dog sledding, attend an ice hockey game, and much more). The cold took a bit of getting used to (temperatures have reached -30 degrees Celsius over here) but now it´s quite manageable, also since we are moving towards spring. The nature here is fascinating. I have never seen so much forest in my life and I must say the remoteness is doing me a lot of good. Two things I could not leave behind though and that were my love for football and the gym, so I decided to join a local gym and a football team called FC Santa Claus (Santa approves)! They have received me very well and it has helped me make some really awesome Finnish friends apart from the other internationals who are following their internship here as well. Besides this, I have also started a new hobby which is bouldering at which I´m progressing quite steadily.

This has been my little story so far. I hope you guys liked it and I would certainly recommend visiting this place once in your life! (Don´t go during Christmas though, tourism peaks here at that time of the year and I think you might get a better experience planning around it)

Thank you for reading / Kiitos,

Iris. N