FI22 Cruise

All students and teachers discovered the Hanko peninsula on board of a boat. During the cruise, the Finnish teachers introduced Hanko, one of the many 18th century port cities, the southernmost city in Finland located in the province of Southern Finland and the Uusimaa region. The peninsula at the end of which the city was built has about 130 km of seashore, 30 km of which is sandy beach, and about ninety small islands, and it juts out into the Baltic Sea at the boundary between the Gulf of Finland to the southwest, the Kihti to the west and the Baltic Sea to the southwest. Its most extreme cape is the southernmost point of mainland Finland. Geologically, its soil is the western end of the Salpausselkä, a set of moraines from the last ice age. The peninsula's shores are covered with sand dunes. The Baltic Sea is an inland, intracontinental sea of 364,800 km2 located in northern Europe and connected to the Atlantic Ocean by the North Sea. The neighbouring countries are Sweden to the west and north, Finland to the northeast, Russia (through the Gulf of Finland) and Estonia to the east, Latvia to the southeast, Lithuania, Russia (at Kaliningrad) and Poland to the south, Germany and Denmark to the southwest. These countries and the sea have been the subject of a "European Commission Strategy for the Development of the Baltic Sea Region" since 2009, including an effort to de-pollute the Baltic and a joint maritime surveillance system.

The students enjoyed the cruise and developed their knowledge of geography during an exchange and sharing activity with Finnish students and teachers.