Savonlinna - the end

Holy crap I seriously thought I was going to have so much time to post lots of pictures for this place but no such luck. Today's our last morning/afternoon here in Savonlinna... it seems so weird to say it. This place has in some ways become a second home. I'm going to miss a lot of people and places, but that's beside the point. Pictures!

Inside of Olavinlinna - that awesome castle. This time we went on a tour.


View from Olavinlinna looking out at the nearby area of the town.

This is the biggest wooden church in the world - kinda neat! I kept envisioning what would happen if you lit a match.

View of inside of the church. If you can't afford marble, paint wood to look like it!

I'm seriously going to miss this place and all the friends I've made here - it's been a wild 3 weeks in Savonlinna... saying goodbye is hard.


I think it'd be pretty fitting to close this with pictures from the last night here, spent with good friends, good drinks, good music and wonderful conversation. The girl I met from the Netherlands, Manon, and I spent a good chunk of time at this place - it's a rock/dance/live music venue, and any place that will play industrial in varying flavours or just randomly play CoF and Bodom is cool by me. We spent many a happy night drinking and requesting songs, and met a lot of fun people there too. I give you: The Rocks.


And so, as the final image - some graffiti that made me giggle helplessly. Initially it said "Elvis oli kala" (Elvis was a fish), but they changed it to read "Popin kuningas oli kala" (The king of pop was a fish). So in the case I can't update from Helsinki before I leave, I hope everyone has enjoyed this blog and I'll talk to you all soon.



Tavataan taas!

Savonlinna - the beginning

Considering this is going to be the longest stint I've spent in a place on this trip, I'm going to devote several posts to this city...



At any rate, Savonlinna is absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous. One of the most notable things I've found on this trip is Finns are very concerned with the care and maintenance of their environment. Trash is sorted by biowaste (biodegradables), recycling and normal trash, plastic bags are reused at the store (and it's so much simpler to bring your own cloth one anyway...), they ride bikes everywhere... it's fantastic compared to the US, where we're still rather behind on this sort of thing. And it pays off - the nature here is just beautiful. Thick forests, sparkling lakes, wildflowers everywhere...

This is the view from one of the main walking bridges going towards Olavinlinna, the medieval castle. Lots of lakes and boating here.

Same bridge, looking at the other side towards the city. This was taken on one of the few solidly sunny days - the weather changes quickly here, so we've all learned to carry umbrellas everywhere, even if the sky is perfectly cloudless.

Olavinlinna - the medieval castle. Built by the Swedes as a fortress against the Russians (considering for a long time Finland was a piece of Sweden...)

It's an absolutely breathtaking building, built into the rock of one of the islands here - the rock is actually incorporated into the floor itself in some places. I'll post more pictures of the inside at another point - these were preliminary pictures taken within the first couple of days of getting here.

Savonlinna is the site of a huge opera festival every summer, conveniently exactly at the time of our course here... which means we went to see an opera! The operas performed take place inside Olavinlinna itself, in an expansive hall. Now I can say I've watched an opera in a castle. We went to see Lucia di Lammermoor, thankfully subtitled in both Finnish and English...

The kids I've been hanging out with - from left to right: Wil, Mike, Kendra. Wil and Mike are from Michigan but attend Indiana, and Kendra is from California but attended Columbia. Madcap adventures ensue.

So far things're pretty fantastic. It's neat to meet people from around the world - life story comparisons are so varying and intriguing.

That's about all I have for now, but I'll add more when I can.

Tavataan taas!

Helsinki

Okay this is the last of the catching up on the country-wandering entries, and soon I'll be able to post lovely pictures from Savonlinna. But first - Helsinki! Gorgeous city, that. Sadly we only really had one full day's worth of time there, but we wandered a bit and it was lovely. Got to see the newer and older sections of the city, and wandered out for an evening too. We did come across a guy who was pretty confused wandering the streets... asked us what day it was, what day of the week it was, and what time it was. He was pretty drunk and confused. On the train to Helsinki I ended up catching one of my lobe horseshoe earrings on my suitcase as we shoved it into the overhead bin, which meant that it bent irreparably and needed replacement... so I did manage to visit a Finnish piercing parlour. Visited some fun stores, wandered the streets, and acted like a tourist snapping pictures.

This statue is pretty famous.

As is this fountain.

Gorgeous, gorgeous church... This is the Helsingin tuomiokirkko - the Helsinki Cathedral. Beautiful, is it not?

And my personal favourite and the highlight of Helsinki for me? Tavastia klubi. Sadly there was no band playing that night, so the club was closed and we couldn't even get a drink from the bar, but I can at least say I've been there.

I'll conclude this one with this picture...
Next up? Savonlinna!

Tavataan taas!

Ruisrock

Woo, okay I have a little bit of time to post some of these pictures so everyone gets an idea of Ruisrock and its fantastic self.
Children of Bodom at the Niittylava - Alexi Laiho was fantastic, as expected.



Disturbed at the Rantalava - definitely a good show. With the number of people watching when they played "10,000 Fists" raising their fists in the air, it really did look like 10,000 fists...

Seriously - no open container laws. What the hell. Best thing ever! Drinking strawberry cider and watching awesome Finnish bands play? Hell yes.


Apulanta. They're rather like the Finnish version of Green Day. I was so happy when they played my favourite song of theirs: "Koneeseen Kadonnut".
This picture about summarizes the 3 days - huge stages, lots of Finns, great music... maybe someday I shall return.

Tavataan taas!

Pori and Part of Ruisrock

This giant basket was pretty fantastic.


Pretty awesome sculpture on the Pori riverbank.

Okay so I realize I'm drastically behind on these but man... not a lot of time lately! At any rate, Pori. After Rovaniemi, I caught a couple trains to Pori, where I met up with Laura and her other grandparents. There really isn't a lot to say about Pori - we shopped, hit the town a little, had dinner at her uncle's restaurant and later with her aunt and uncle at their house... Only pictures I really have to offer you kids are of the gorgeous mausoleum we visited while there, as Laura's great-grandparents are buried there.

Story of the mausoleum is a sad one but rather pretty. We couldn't take pictures inside, so I can't show you anything of that, but story goes that this little girl died of tuberculosis and her father had this mausoleum commissioned for her with gorgeous paintings by famous Finnish artists and her coffin encased in a daisy-shaped sarcophagous sort of sculpture because daisies were her favourite flower. Place burnt slightly in a great fire shortly after the death of at least one of the artists, the mausoleum was restored to near-original shape with the help of that artist's son who was also a painter.
It's such a beautiful building...
After that, we caught a train to Turku and Ruisrock, which was 3 glorious days worth of bands and fun. Altogether we saw more than 15 bands...
Day 1: Deathstars, Children of Bodom, Disturbed, Slipknot
Day 2: In Flames, Egotrippi, Eppu Normaali, Ladytron, Maija Vilkkumaa, Scandinavian Music Group
Day 3: Volbeat, Amorphis, Apulanta, Stratovarius, and part of The Crash's final concert.

I'll upload pictures of the concerts later, and add Helsinki into the mix!

Tavataan taas!

Bite it like a bulldog!

Woo, okay so now that I've got a few hours in which to update this, I can add the pictures of Rovaniemi, the Arctic Circle line, and Lordi's Rocktaurant!


This is the sky outside of my window in Rovaniemi at midnight. No joke. I stayed up until midnight exactly to get a picture.

So today I awoke (late, thanks to the phone deciding that 8.30 wasn't a permissible time for me to awaken, and changing to 9 behind my back...), ate and then walked down to the bus station (which is blessedly very close to my guesthouse) to catch the shuttle/bus to Santa's Village. Getting there, I definitely got the sense it'd be more entertaining in winter when the "Christmas spirit" seems to abound... but my main motivation was to see the Arctic Circle line anyway so it was fine.


Very commercial, lots of capitalizing on Santa being from Finland. Also would be great for people who really like Christmas, which I am not one of those... At any rate I can say I crossed the line at the Arctic Circle, which was the objective of visiting.

After this whole bit, came back to the guesthouse for a bit and then it was off to Lordi's Rocktaurant! First, however, I needed to make a stop at the square. Renamed Lordi Square, it has a plaque with the imprints of the bandmembers' hands.

And from that point it was time to go eat!



Inside it was a little more fast food-y than I expected, but it was still cool to see Lordi stuff on the walls and the chairs were definitely pretty awesome.


I got curry!

Well, at this point that's all I have to update... tomorrow I catch a couple trains to get to Pori, where I'll reunite with Laura and perhaps go on more madcap adventures.

Tavataan taas!

From Jyväskylä to Rovaniemi...

So it's been a few days since the last update... things seem to pile up in terms of travel and availability of internet. At any rate, Laura and I moved to stay with her grandparents, both very kind people. I stayed only about a day or so, long enough to check out the Panda candy factory and the water tower Vesilinna which her grandfather helped build. The view from the tower was fantastic!

Later that same evening we went to a midnight hot air balloon race - the idea being that one balloon leads, lands, and the others push out the sandbag ballast and try and land it as close as possible to the landing site. Either way, it was definitely neat to watch the balloons inflate, and there were a few fun ones... Like the sauna balloon! They rigged up a sauna in it - so Finnish. You can see the guy standing right next to it is holding a vihta, the bundle of birch branches used in sauna.

You can of course imagine the jokes resulting from this one...


Keep in mind this was all around 11 or so at night... the near-constant lightness here is so awesome.

Next morning (today) I caught a train from Jyväskylä to Rovaniemi. Actually, to be more accurate, it was a little more like 3 trains and a bus. But my trip to Pori will be easier since I remembered to ask for the least number of changeovers...
At any rate, I got here with little difficulty (granted I was nervous about figuring out the Finnish travel system because seriously - being lost in a foreign country where there's a mild language barrier because of your lack of fluency? Not fun. But I found the city just fine, met a girl from Ohio and a couple from Australia on my last train, which was neat. And so, here I am at Guesthouse Borealis. I went out to explore a little of Rovaniemi tonight, ending up at Restaurant Nili where I tried reindeer.


It was all rustic and fun inside! And the reindeer itself was wonderful, although really not unlike beef. I had two different types in the same meal - grilled silverside and braised foreloin. I wasn't sure which was which, really, but one tasted rather like beef tips in stew, and the other tasted like a gamey steak. Pretty good stuff!

I'll upload more tomorrow perhaps, as I'll be going to the Arctic Circle line and Lordi's Rocktaurant, the main reasons I came here!

Until then,

Tavataan taas!