This morning (which is now actually yesterday morning since I never got a chance to finish writing) started with a big breakfast of lots and lots of meat, cheese & bread! We then had a bus tour of Helsinki and got a little history on the country.  I'm a bit embarrassed to say, I basically knew nothing of Finland and my attempts to get a guide book before leaving Canada weren't successful.  Turns out that Finland's big exports are ships, Nokia phones and trees.  There's your little bit of Finnish trivia for the day!  We did a few stops on our tour and visited the harbour & market, the Olympic Stadium (Helsiki hosted the 1950 Summer Games) a really cool church (more on that in a minute!) and a famous sculpture.  Of course I can't remember any names of anything since I'm without a guidebook so just bear with my ignorance! 

The first stop on the tour was to a square near the marketplace and port where we got our first photo of all the team dogs minus Encore (who arrived this morning).


L-R Kaizen, Monroe, Phoenix, Rio, Shy Spirit
Stevie Ray, MooseDoggie, Flip, Nitro (aka the Ladies Man) & Copine


Team Canada takes over the market


Here's where I tell Lynda & Justine to put on hats and the shopkeeper tells us 'No Pictures!' (that'd be the hand on the left )  Of course I snap one just 'cause....   At least he didn't charge like the Lace Lady in Brugges!!!

Next stop was the Olympic stadium where Rio found lots of bunny poop to eat.


We then drove to a unique church right in the center of town.  There are tons of rock formations all over Helsinki that we've seen that just seem to have buidings built around them instead of being blasted.  Well, I guess a couple of engineers got creative and decided to blast into one of these big rocks and then built a church in the crater that the blasting caused!  It was a totally fascinating building!  (on a side note—I'm not sure why the pictures are coming out in such poor quality.  I will try to fix before the next posting....)


The front entrance—Not your typical church!


Inside the church—You can see where they dropped the dynamite down the rocks and then where they used the resulting rocks to build it up a little higher.  The roof was made of 22 km of copper piping that is coiled.  Apparently the accustics in the church are phenominal.  There are grates in the floor all the way around as apparently when it rains, the water drains down the rock walls.


I climbed on the roof of the church, which was really neat BTW, to take this picture of the gang.  Of course by the time I got down 30 seconds later, the whole Canada group had disappeared along with the bus....  Don't worry, John Hill eventually came back to rescue me.


Outside view of the church from the roof

Okay, enough about the church—dogs weren't allowed in, so hence no Rio photos.  She had to stay on the bus.

Next stop was a park with a contravertial (sorry, no spell check) statue dedicated to a famous Finnish composer (at least that's what I think he was!).  Once again, Rio posed nicely and Nan & I got cursed in Finnish for being too close to the bike path (did you know that being cursed at in Finnish really sounds like a ticked off squirrel???)


This is the composer's head....


Rio (who's really saying 'stop making me pose!') in front of the giant hunk of metal.  It took 5 trucks to haul the metal in and several months for the female artist to weld the 'artwork' together.

We then headed about 50 minutes out of town for our first practice.  I wish I'd gotten a picture of the training building.  Hopefully I'll be more organized on Tuesday.   The surface was similar to indoor/outdoor fake grass carpeting and all the dogs had no problems with it (probably due to the fact that they had adjusted a little bit with the carpeting at Say Yes).  It is actually the exact surface that we will be competing on.  They are just going to roll it up and take it to the Ice Hall (trial site).  

The contact equipment is all made out of big pieces of wood (pine probably as it wasn't that heavy).  Even the see-saw which made an interesting wooden THUNK! instead of the usual metallic sound that we hear at home.  We did have to stop using a couple of the tunnels and the chute as the dogs (even the minis) were sliding and flipping.  Rio and Phoenix each had a pretty spectacular smash in the chute barrel as it was painted in high-gloss paint with no traction....  Hopefully it won't be the same chute for competition!  Rio and I had a great practice and she looks in great shape.  Her only thing that I'd like to improve apon is her dogwalk which has become a little 'sticky'.  She's used to sliding into her 2on 2off position but with the addition of slats, she slides, sticks and then walks into place.  Restrained recalls over the dw have been working well, but I think I need many more repetitions!  Back at the hotel, Phoenix and Rio got adjusted (apparently her head wasn't on straight?!?  Hmmmm.... that actually explains a lot about her!) by teammate/chiropractor/vet Roxanne while Linda B.  provided us with shots of Baileys....  We then had a late dinner and all got a good night's sleep (especially since the disco and drunk Finns aren't out on Sunday nights!).

Today (Monday), most of the gang headed out to Estonia to tour the town of Tallin.  I really would have liked to go, but decided that in the best interest of Rio and I performing our best later this week, we should probably take it easy today.  A 14 hour day with more buses, long ferry rides and lots of walking, didn't sound all that restful.  I think Rio and I will do a long walking tour of Helsinki today and have a little downtime in the hotel.

So far the internet service here has been pretty good.  I do have to get a new password from the front desk every 24 hours and I'm never sure when the 24 hours is going to click out (you'd think it would be 24hours from the previous time, but apparently they run on a different clock LOL).  I did lose half my blog posting this morning, but its free and decently easy to use.  I also am using my mom's new laptop this time instead of Kyra's laptop and its working really well.