My trip to Finnish Lapland!

Last week I finally traveled to Lapland! Although I have been living in Sweden for a year and a half, it was only recently that I decided to book the trip. In this blog post, I want to tell you about my experience and encourage you to do the same if you have the opportunity.

Linköping University has two international student organizations, and both organize trips to Lapland as well as other trips around Sweden or nearby countries. In my case, I decided to choose the trip that ESN organized at the end of February. This trip was by bus to Finnish Lapland. Other trips to the north of Sweden like Kiruna are somewhat shorter than this one and if you have an ESN card the trip will be cheaper.

This trip was by bus but I know that other trips take place by plane although they are more expensive. I decided to choose the bus trip because the price was much lower. Although it seems a very long bus trip, the trip started in the evening so we spent the night on the bus and went to sleep. The seats were very comfortable and we had plugs to charge our mobile phones and we made stops to eat so the trip did not take very long.

When we arrived at our destination we met our guide who was very funny and explained a lot of things about the place and the culture. When we arrived at our cabins, we left all our stuff and decided to go and explore the landscape and we were lucky enough to see the northern lights from a campfire near a lake while eating candyfloss. It was an unforgettable experience. We were also lucky enough to see the northern lights every day and even from places with light pollution.

One of the excursions was to travel to the Norwegian fjords from the city where we were staying. They let us swim in the arctic ocean and have sauna sessions which were very different from what I was used to. The scenery was beautiful and on the way back we stopped at a restaurant where they gave us a taste of reindeer meat for those who dared to try.

The trip offers you a great variety of activities so you can do them all during your stay in the city. One thing I regret is not selecting all the activities. I feel that everything we did was a lot of fun and I regretted not going to a couple of activities that I did not select at the beginning of the trip. Some of the activities we did were cross-country skiing,which was something I had never done before and they lent us all the material, a visit to a reindeer farm, a husky ride, and a visit to the Norwegian fjords.

Another of the activities that were included for free was the visit to Father Christmas Village. Personally, I liked this activity the least as it seemed to me a very touristy area mainly full of souvenir shops, but as it was a stop on the way back to Linköping I didn’t mind visiting it.
From there we sent postcards from Finland which we put in two mailboxes. One of the mailboxes sent the postcards at the current time and the other mailbox kept the postcards to send them at Christmas.

Overall I felt that the price of the trip was very economical for all the activities we did, the treatment we were given, and the place we were in. It was an experience that I am very glad I went on and would not change for anything. If you have the opportunity to join one of these trips I totally recommend it and I am sure that you will not regret it.