In search for snow

...and we found quite a lot in Lappeenranta; and place we visited last summer already. The city was hardly recognisable under the thick layer of snow. The gate of Saimaa lake really suffered the consequences of the hard Finnish winter. Our expectation was fulfilled: the greatest lake in Finland, the one that we sailed last summer, was totally frozen. The ferry we took for the nice journey around the lake and through the islands was now trapped into a 50 cm-thick ice layer. We asked to several local villagers if it was safe to stand on ice and most of them had no clear answers. Sometimes is not easy to get clear answers fro Finns but we thought that probably it was just that they did'nt want to be responsible for the death of your young foreigners. Since we could see even marks from tyres on the ice (somebody even drove a car on the lake!), we jumped on the frozen lake hoping that the surface would´t collapse. And it did'nt, of course. We shared experiences with a Finnish guy fishing through a hole in the ice and we tried to do the same. We missed the rods at home but we still wanted to do the hole in the ice ;-). It took quite a lot of time and effort, really. After that we walked around the lake and also up-hill to have a full view of the lake and the bay. It's another beautiful image to keep in mind when I return to Spain next year.