Friday consisted of me going to buy shoes. That’s a whole bag of complaints right there, so I’m going to leave it be. Instead I’m going to talk about Saturday, a much more interesting day. Saturday was the 30th of April, the eve of Walpurgis Day (also known as Labour Day and Mayday), which we call Vappu. Vappu, or the eve of it, is a day celebrating spring and workers. In Finland, it’s sort of a carnival for workers, spring and especially students of higher level of education. Children usually dress up in costumes, like Americans do on Halloween – just minus the trick or treating, and there are a lot of balloons and colourful things all over the place. Getting drunk is also a big part of this celebration.
University students usually spend the whole week preceding Vappu weekend doing all sorts of stuff to celebrate the occasion. Here we kick it off with a rowing contest that’s between different student guilds – organizations representing different areas of study. It’s done on these long and big church boats, which get their name from the fact that they were used in travelling to church in the old times.
Some images of this year’s rowing contest, more here!
Didn’t go see this year’s rowing contest but I hear our guild did well. I might just sign up to row next year. It seems like fun, though I bet I will regret it the day after when my muscles are so sore I can’t get up.
Some of our guild’s members. You can recognize us by the color of the coveralls: brown
That picture leads me to talk about a big part of student culture, which is very visible on Vappu: Student caps (white caps for people who have completed upper secondary level education and the Matriculation Examination) and student coveralls. In higher vocational schools and universities students get to buy their own coveralls during the freshman year. The color of the coveralls depends solely on what you study. For example at our university chemists have neon yellow coveralls, medical students, chemical engineering students, architect students and pedagogy students have white ones, anthropology and archaeology students have dark brown ones, mechanical engineering guys have bright red etc. This somewhat varies from school to school.
As you can see in the picture, the coveralls are decorated with sleeve badges (often humorous ones, stuff related to their own field of study or more recently even internet memes - case in point: I have a trollface sown onto my coveralls) that students buy and sew on themselves during the year, along with sponsor ads that are printed on the coveralls themselves. Sponsors are acquired so that buying the coveralls will be cheaper for the students.
During the Vappu week, students often wear their coveralls daily and even those who don't will get them out in time for the weekend's Vappu celebrations.
I started my celebration on Saturday like majority probably did also - although I did see a whole bunch of people riding the "water bus" on Thursday. It's a party bus that only picks up the students of the university and takes them around while they drunk and go nuts.
This year I was late on the celebration just a bit. I missed the part where representatives of the humanities place a gigantic student cap on the head of a statue - it's a tradition. My friend and I were just in time to partake in the student parade, where all the students march around the city with a university orchestra playing music from the trailer of a truck etc.
After that we proceeded to go watch the freshman engineering students dive into a dirty river, while trying to egg on people so they would go completely nude. Yet another tradition that probably sounds a bit crazy.
You can get a pretty good picture of the celebration by checking out this video. It's of last year's Vappu celebrations in my city (no, I'm not in any of the shots, luckily) and narrated by some foreign student.
So, this was what I was up to yesterday. After those shenanigans my friends and I went to have some Chinese food and play the newest Mortal Kombat game.
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