Waking up to a beautiful sunny morning was a good start for the day. After breaking our fast we headed to see St Mary\u2019s Day in Hetta. As we expected, the first traditional S\u00e1mi outfits were to be seen at the market. Deciding to have a look around central Hetta, which mostly consisted of a few buildings on either side of the main road and the church, we separated and met again later on. We (the students) went to see the chuch, being interested in the S\u00e1mi flag \u2013 a thing we rarely even see down in Southern Finland.<\/p>\n
St Mary\u2019s Day in Hetta includes many S\u00e1mi activities like reideer racing and casting suopunki, a type of lasso used to catch reindeer. We had planned to talk with some of the S\u00e1mi folk at the lake by which the day\u2019s events took place. It appeared to be quite hard to come up with something like a fluent conversation. Approaching the S\u00e1mi people wasn\u2019t quite that simple, as there still are differences in the culture and customs.<\/p>\n
However I managed to have a chat with a couple of the natives, resulting in a few shots of the S\u00e1mi people. I was intrigued by the traditional Lappish costumes as they represent the area of origin as well as the culture of the S\u00e1mi people.<\/p>\n
Earlier on in the day we had had a chat with a man from Kautokeino. When we were about to head to get lunch, I let the girls go and gathered some courage to go and ask for a picture of this man. He turned out to be a great bloke, instead of letting me take a picture of him, he wanted to have a picture taken of him with his reindeer! How good is that? Meeting him was great and really helped me realize that the younger S\u00e1mi folk (he was around 30ish) are much like us and just as open to conversation as any.<\/p>\n
Seeing and hearing the S\u00e1mi people just casually do what they do and meet each other was a real eye opener. They are a very tight community and enjoy doing what they do. Nothing seemed to be awfully stressing and everything they did seemed to be of a certain interest to them.<\/p>\n
After the races we interviewed a S\u00e1mi woman. She was a retired teacher in her seventies, selling jewelry and other S\u00e1mi goods with her husband. She told us a lot about the life of the S\u00e1mi people and their traditions.<\/p>\n
Jaakko Lahdenkauppi<\/p>\n
Waking up to a beautiful sunny morning was a good start for the day. After breaking our fast we headed to see St Mary\u2019s Day in Hetta. As we expected, the first traditional S\u00e1mi outfits were to be seen at … Lue loppuun ![\"kollaasi\"](\"https:\/\/blog.edu.turku.fi\/tsykkuvis\/files\/2014\/03\/kollaasi1.png\")
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