Well I arrived in Finland yesterday. I was up for way too long, but managed to beat jet lag and get a full night of sleep! Yay me. And soon enough I will have my website up and I won't have to use this blog anymore :)
Here is what we did yesterday:
Kirppu made a great breakfast that consisted of Karelian pies with cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers, yogurt, juice (she had made rhubarb juice - so good!) and tea :) mmm
These are the Karelian pies. They are by far, my favourite thing about Finland. I remember them from the last time I was here and I have been counting down the days until I could have them again. Basically they are a pastry filled with rice porridge.
Here is me trying a typical Finnish yogurt. It has the consistency of milk that has gone bad (stretchy) but is actually sweet. You can see how it just hangs off the spoon...mmm. The one I had was flavoured with rose hip jam. (Pardon the chin fat)
Then of course after me showering all the plane dirt off and getting ready for the day, we were both ready for lunch:
Kirppu had made pasta with tomatoes, basil and reindeer meat. Yep, reindeer meat - it's really good!!
Then we hit the town. It was really quiet in Helsinki due to the fact that everyone has fled the city to go to their summer cottages for midsummers! There was no one around.
I fared pretty well touring around the city considering I was working on no sleep. I got really sleepy on the bus ride in though. We went to go visit another friend, Kristiina, from when we were studying in France. We went to her place for some aperatifs and then on to a restaurant for dinner.
We went to Savotta for dinner - it's a tourist place and the inside is designed to look like it is inhabited by tukkijatkat. Ha ha that translates to lumberjacks. (almost). Kristiina and I had a pike-perch dish with beetroot and some sort of coleslaw (yummy). Kirppu had the muikute (traditional Finnish fish - called Vendace in English, they were like smelt but a little bigger) which came with garlic potatoes.
Oh AND the waitress charged us an extra 66 cents a glass because she poured us too much and got in trouble my her boss. Seriously!!!After dinner, we walked around the city centre looking for a bar - all of which were pretty empty. We settled on an Irish pub, hahah go figure, and enjoyed a pint of Hoegaarden rose, which tasted just like juice :)
This post is getting very long. We left the pub at about 10:30 and it was still broad daylight out.
Notice the time on the building and how bright it is still!Anyway, that was my first day in Finland. Very eventful. I almost passed out a billion times on the bus on the way home!!!
