The Roberts Report: May Day, YSA Dinner, and Bunco!

May Day is a HUGE holiday in Finland!!! We spent April 30th in downtown Helsinki! Sister Horning, who works in the office, never gets to see "the sights". So she took the train into town and we showed her all the major tourist attractions. We also saw the preparations for May Day (Vappu) Balloons were for sale everywhere!

May Day is a big holiday for students. Kids wear their university jumpsuits (each college has their own color) and have patches on them for their various activities. All over town were huge groups of kids gathering in preparation

for their evening revelry!!! (Drinking!) Missionaries were to be in their apartments by 6PM)

Here is the group from the School of Economics...about 300 of them. They are standing in a fairly major street that the police had blocked off for them to gather in. At 5:00 pm they would all proceed to the center of Helsinki.

This is Senate Square earlier in the day. By nighttime there

were 50.000 people here! At 7pm, a "graduation hat" would be placed on the statue of Alexander the Great in the center of the square.

Juha is modeling a graduation hat...high school graduation. Everyone in Finland keeps their hat and wears them on Vappu. Eighty-year-old people were wearing their yellowed hats they had had forever! They look like miniature Captain's hats. We saw 1000's of these on Vappu Day!!!

On May Day, our Young Single Adults had a picnic in Kaivopuisto Park, along with 50,000 other people. It is the place to be on Vappu!!! We staked out our spot early and had 55 kids attend!

As you can see they are wearing their hats!!! The streets were full of people streaming toward this park which is 2 blocks from our center.

This is a view from the top of the hill where we had previously gone sledding:

There was a row of "Porta potties" set up for ladies but there were also some special ones for men...we couldn't believe it!

Only in Europe...

Anyway, it was a great day and we were

definitely where the Vappu action was!

We also serve as the Young Adult Advisers for our ward. On Fast Sunday they get together after church for dinner and this month it was at our apartment.

We had 26 here including ourselves.