this has been a very special weekend, for two reasons:
* the ice left and
* we had a walpurgis party with our village community.

the ice first:
i’ve already told you a lot about the ice, and i guess some of you might be a bit bored of it. but i promise you, thursday last week was really amazing! there was quite a big piece of ice left on the middle of the lake, maybe 800 * 600 m (or more… i’m not good at judging distances, as some of you might now…). it had started melting little by little from both sides, but more on the outlet side than on the inlet side. it all went very peacefully, with the edges just “disappearing”, no ice floes breaking lose, and even though i thought it was exciting seeing the lake grow more and more lake like every day i was a bit disappointed that there was so little “action” going on. i had expected to see the ice cracking open and making noise and move about…

but last thursday the action suddenly started! at first i saw an opening growing in the ice. i went to look several times, because i saw that the crack was growing very quickly and i wanted to go down to the bridges when the piece had detached, to see it go by and throw some stones at it. suddenly it was gone, so i took bob with me and ran down to the bridges even though i understood it couldn’t have travelled all that way in such short time. when we got back home again i saw another big crack, so i sat down to read in the window in order not to miss what happened. as soon as the ice floe had been separated from the rest of the ice it just sank. and during the day and evening pretty much all of the ice had sunk, except for some small pieces attached to land. during friday you could still see some ice floes right under the surface of the lake, but now it all seems to have melted. so now we have a real lake here in nyland!

and now the walpurgis party:
our village has a “village community” together with two other villages, and they arranges parties and pub nights now and then. we had been looking forward to walpurgis for a while, because we thought it would be fun to meet more people, and hopefully “get to know” them a bit (we have talked to people who have lived here 12 years and who apparently still are considered to be newcomers, so i guess it can be a bit difficult to be totally “accepted” by the community…) anyway, the walpurgis evening started about 17.30 in the village café (which is not a cafe, but the meeting place for the village community), with an accordion band, coffee and biscuits and people selling lottery tickets. tommy and i bought a ticket each, had a cup of coffee, said hello to some people, and went home to bob at about 19.30, to go for a walk and have something to eat. at 20.30 they started the bonfire, so we went back again to look at the fire and listen to the choir and the speech and watch the children run around with their crackers for a while. then one of our neighbours invited us home for some wine, before the pub night started.

after a nice talk and some wine we went back to the café, where the “accordionists” were still playing. we didn’t get home until about 2 (the accordions stopped playing at 24). during the evening we got to talk to lots of people, and they all seemed very nice and friendly. to show you how extremely friendly out neighbours are here in nyland i’ll make a list of a few of the things i was promised during the night (i’ve left out quite a few things, so this is just a glimps:):
* i’ve been invited to join a hunter this fall, to see what i think about it
* i’ve been offered a rooster
* we’ve been promised that we’ll get broadband to the village by may 7
* i’ve been invited to watch a turkey get killed, and maybe learn how to kill a hen if i want to
* i’ve been promised to get the tank on the car fixed in exchange for a hair cut
and we’ve been invited for several litres of coffee :)

i enjoyed myself a lot, and it was really nice to get to talk to so many neighbours. they seem nice all of them (i guess the unnice ones didn’t go to the party).
  ¶ 12:56 PM