MORNING WITH LIVE MEETING

Today we would have taken you on a visit to LUT, our local university with a global outreach. As we can't do it, we'll have to be content with their online lecture on green urban solutions and rainwater harvesting later today. Before joining the university people online, you should know what LUT, Lappeenranta University of Technology, is like and what they are doing:

The university campus is a few kilometres away from the town centre. If you are thinking of university studies abroad, you might give LUT a thought or two, too:

Another online lecture will be presented by the Lappeenranta Department of Environment.

In 2020, the city of Lappeenranta won the title of the greenest city in Europe, the European Green Leaf Award 2021, in a competition organised by the European Commission. The Green Leaf competition is open to towns and cities of 20,000 - 100,000 people in all EU member states and candidate countries, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

Lappeenranta shares the title with the Bulgarian town of Gabrovo.

According to the jury, the city of Lappeenranta has made a visible commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.

The jury met in Lisbon, Portugal, on October 8, 2020. Watch Lappeenranta's European Green Leaf Award finals presentation here:

Watch the official opening of the Lappeenranta Green Leaf Year 2021 here:

As the lectures start at 11:00 WET / 12:00 CET / 13:00 EET (check the time here), there may still be time for a quick lunch. If you had been here, you might have tried kebab casserole and semolina porridge with fruit soup at school.

Then it's time to go online.

We'll begin at 12:00 CET with Satu-Pia Reinikainen from LUT talking about urban rainwater harvesting:

• Amount of rain and urban run-off water (10 min)

• History of treatment (10 min)

• Modern utilization and harvesting of rainwater (25 min)

There will also be some interactive tasks or assignments to keep the audience awake.

After rainwater harvesting, at about 13:00 CET, Kati Korhonen, Project Manager for Green Leaf 2021, explains how and why Lappeenranta is one of the greenest urban areas in Europe. Her topic is green life and green lifestyle.

The lectures can be accessed on Microsoft Teams by clicking the bar below:

AFTERNOON

With the end of this meeting, we also come to the end of today's academic programme.

As our region is traditionally called the county of music, we could hardly spend the rest of the day better than listening to the sweet sounds of Southern Karelia. The local music scene is rather vibrant with a music institute, school of performative arts, city orchestra and a multitude of bands practising in barns, garages and basements.

For some reason, many of the local bands have found metal as their genre of choice. There are so many aspiring metal groups that Lappeenranta has even be called the Capital of Metal:

See for yourself - here we have a couple of samples, Stam1na and Kotiteollisuus. These two bands are no longer up and coming; they have gained a faithful core of fans and are almost larger than life now. Admittedly, they have been around for so long that you can no longer say their music is for the young by the young - it's really for the middle-aged by the middle-aged who still in their early stages of balding have a proud and deep aversion to mainstream hair-styling.

Stam1na was founded in 1996 in Lemi, which is a small municipality of 3000 people some 25 kilometres from the centre of Lappeenranta. The band has released nine studio albums; the latest one, Novus Ordo Mundi, came out in February this year.

Kotiteollisuus is a Lappeenranta-based band, which was set up as early as 1993.

Music tastes change over time. Before the reign of metal, Lappeenranta used to be called the Capital of Humppa with annual humppa festivals and dance marathons in the 1970s. Humppa is a type of Finnish music that evolved from the genres of jazz and foxtrot played in the 1920s. The first humppa bands toured the country in the 1920s and 1930s, reaching their heyday in the post-war Finland of the 1950s. With the emergence of rock and later pop, the genre was deemed dead in the 1960s, but for some unfathomable reason, it experienced a sudden resurgence of popularity in the mid-1970s. Even though the interest lasted only until the end of the decade, it's still possible to hear and see humppa bands playing in rural dance halls - this piece is called Come To Lappeenranta With Me:

EVENING

For those of you who might find some other types of music more pleasurable, here's the Lappeenranta City Orchestra who are ready to baroque you...