Our First Day in Beautiful Rauma

Posted by Patti Keillor

This morning our team was busy packing up to leave Pori and drive to Rauma. At my host family, I was living on a pennisula on the sea. I ate breakfast this morning the same time a beautful swan was bobbing on the sea, doing the same thing! What a wonderful site. It took a good 20 minutes for us to pack all of our luggage into Kari's vehicle. We are definitely gaining weight in the luggage department and we are only halfway through our trip!

We arrived in Rauma to greetings from Pekka and Mikko. We then headed to City Hall, where the city sponsored a wonderful day for us. At City Hall we met with the Deputy Mayor, Tomi; The City Administrator, Sari; and City Planner, Johanna, who did the GSE Exchange last year to Brazil. They were all fantastic hosts. We learned about the school system in Rauma, and that the majority of people in Rauma are employed by the municipality. They also have several Nuclear Power plants, and have more planned. We will get the opportunity to visit one of them tomorrow.

After our visit in City Hall, we toured the new local library. It has a very friendly design with a lot of natural light incorporated and a geothermal heating system, that much of the city also uses. The librairians said the glass was specially designed to block UV rays that would damage the books. There were many interesting break-out spaces for flexible learning and also unique circular skylights to provided lighted nooks in the even in the middle of the library.

After the Library, we headed to a local school The Kari School. It was a school for general education, with an emphasis in Music. The music students performed a song for us, and they were excellent! When the students heard we were from Minnesota, the instantly knew the Minnesota Wild, and Mikko Koivu. If no one has mentioned yet, the Finns are HUGE ice hockey fans. It is worth mentioning again, I think because it is often a topic of conversation here.

We left the school on foot for a tour of Old Rauma, which was gorgeous. Rauma is one of the six Medieval towns in Finland and has a rich heritage of wooden houses. We visited The Church of the Holy Cross built in the mid 15th century. We also visited a home, now a museum that was originally built 300 years ago and another home that was built in 1820 for a rich man in the shipping business. Apparently that house had the first indoor bathroom, which consisted of a toilet seat and a bucket...just use your imagination!

Rauma is well known for lace-making, and we had the exciting opportunity to see a woman in-action making lace! Amazing. That is the best word to describe it. The town has "Lace Days" in the summer and every year crowns a "Lace Lady."

After our wonderful day in Rauma, we all went back to our new host families for dinner and of course coffee and tea!