Jyvaskyla 2014: Day 2 - Monday 7th July

At 5.21pm this afternoon, a truly bizarre thing happened. A cloud passed over the sun, though it only lasted for 43 seconds. Apart from that short time, the sun has shone constantly today since I got up at 6.00am to check out the new day. It has been a remarkable day too- not only has the sun shone all day long, but the temperature climbed as high as 28.9C this afternoon, and even now, at 9.42pm, it's 24.1C outside! So, it appears that we really did bring the summer to Finland this July! This morning, I was out in the garden early, with my camera, looking for some unusual pictures. Last night, I took a photo of Sandy diving into the lake, and I noticed when I uploaded it that there was a small sauna visible in the distance on the faraway shore, just behind Sandy. I wanted to test out my zoom lens, to see firstly if I could zoom in quite closely to the building, and also to see if the picture would turn out reasonably clearly. The result really quite impressed me!

After breakfast, Anna and I went to the new S-Market supermarket at Vaajakoski to get some food. It's a really fantastic, large shop with an amazing selection of food, but the thing that caught my eye was the recycling area just inside the door, where you bring your bottles, cans and even bottle tops, all of which have a value, and pop them into the automatic machine that then totals up the value and prints off a slip with the total, which you then hand in when you pay for your shopping and it's deducted from the total. These actually exist here in every supermarket, and I always ponder why we in Scotland couldn't adopt this easy way of encouraging folk to recycle effectively.

Once back, with the temperature already at 25C at 11.00am, we decided to enjoy the sun, which kept us happy all afternoon, interspersed with trips to the sauna and the lake to swim. The lake is warming rapidly with the hot weather, and it's already noticeably warmer than yesterday when we arrived. I checked the water temperature this evening, and it has risen from 14C in mid-week last week when Sari and her family were here, to a much more respectable 21C this evening. The Finnish Metereological Society website suggests that the water temperatures in all lakes in this area will top 25C in the next few days, and I am sure this will be the case.

Cousin Arnold on the trampoline.

Sandy gets ready to swim.

A side view of this wonderful place.

We ate barbecued sausages this evening, then swam some more while the sun continued to shine. I would say that my brother Keith must have spent at least 4 hours in the water today swimming- so I'm not sure exactly what distance he swam, but quite a distance anyway!