It's summertime!

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and there's no snow left on the ground: summer has finally made its way to Jyväskylä. No, not spring. Summer. We do have four seasons here, but spring was the few days during which the snow was melting. Now that the ice is completely gone from the lakes, we can officially say that it is summertime. In fact, our Finnish moms told us that according to ancient Finnish lore, this grants us permission to not carry around hats and scarves anymore. Given, we've been wearing flip-flops and skirts for a week, but we're the crazy foreigners.

Now that it's summer, we've been hearing a lot about Juhannus, the summer solstice. Because we're so far north, the amount of sunlight we're getting each day has been steadily increasingly, and currently the sun rises around 4:30 am and sets around 10:30 pm. Though we're enjoying the extra hours of daylight - for instance, taking a sunlit walk at 8 at night - we've also become subject to waking up every morning at 5:00 when the sunlight can't be contained by our curtains any longer. But never fear, we don't have much of a problem going back to sleep.