Tampere trip on spring

On 4th and 5th May we had planned a spring trip to Tampere. I actually met with Mayu and Rika also on 14th April, since I really wanted to bake cinnamon rolls, and I asked if the girls wanted to join me. It’s not really an EOTO-meeting so I’m not going to write about it.

But on 4th and 5th May we had planned a similar trip to Tampere as we had done on autumn. I asked the girls what they would like to do in Tampere, and tried to plan some kind of schedule for us. Sadly earlier the week Tiia said to us that she couldn’t come, since she had to attend her cousin’s birthday party that weekend in Helsinki. Jonas was also unsure whether he could come or not. And on 3rd he told us that he’s not able to go with us. So in the end it was only the three of us.

Actually I also had some other plans for Sunday, but Mayu and Rika still wanted to come to Tampere. I went there already on 3rd and the girls arrived early in the next morning. I went to get them from the train station and we went to supermarket, and bought some foods for the weekend.

After we finished shopping we headed to the center of the city. We decided to go to Kauppahalli at first, just see how it looks like there.

In Finland these kind of places are quite often more expensive than supermarkets, so I  was really surprised to hear that in Japan these kind of market places are usually cheaper than supermarkets! I had no idea about that.

After going around Kauppahalli we went to take a look if the old church in the center of Tampere was open.

And it was! Lucky us.

After visiting the church we headed to Alexander’s church.

There was one another church where I wanted to take the girls, but in the end we didn’t have time to go there. We also took a peak at Tampere's library Metso and visited the Moomin museum again.

We walked along the Hämeenpuisto for a bit, and then went to take a look of Kehräsaari. Mayu and Rika both liked the place a lot. Too bad that the weather wasn't as good as they had promised earlier the week..

We were getting pretty hungry so we visited the café in Amuri, Amurin Helmi, but of course they didn’t serve lunch during weekends. We were wondering where to go, and in the end we decided to go and buy some tortilla ingredients and go to my sister’s place. We also visited the market place really fast, and bought some black sausage.

Mayu and Rika had both also said that they really want to try making some karelian pies. I myself had never made any so I was feeling little bit hesitant. But in the end we decided to make some. And they turned out quite nice. Maybe the taste was little bit more like cocktail pies, but they were good!

Sampo was also interested in what we were doing.

Delicious!

We decided to watch some movie, and ate the same time. We also tried playing the game called Africa’s star.

Later on the evening we decided to go to Pyynikki’s Näkötorni. The girls visited the tower, and we also took a little walk on the woods. We saw some signs of spring.

On 5th I left pretty early with my sister to go to the flea market, which would be on the center of Tampere. Mayu and Rika stayed at my sister’s place, and I met them later on, when they visited the flea market. We made a plan to meet at the café in the center at 4pm. I took the girls to this waffle café there is in Tampere. We sat there about 40minutes, and after that it was time for the girls to catch their train.

This was our last EOTO-meeting, but we have some plans to keep some kind of small party before Mayu and Rika are going back to Japan.

This whole EOTO-course has been really fun, and I’ve learned to cook many Japanese foods, learned new vocaburaly, and a lot about Japanese culture. I hope to see the girls again in Japan, when I have the chance to go there. Hopefully on my 3rd year I could go to Japan as an exchange student, and then I Mayu and Rika could show me little bit about their hometown too. And of course I hope to keep in contact with the girls from on too!

Visiting Tampere

As I mentioned our next meeting was planned on 30th November. Unfortunately that plan got cancelled because Mayu got sick, so we decided to postpone the meeting.

On 15th-16th December we had plans to go to Tampere for a short visit. We decided to buy the train tickets beforehand on 11th December. We all 5 were supposed to go to Tampere, but this time Jonas got suddenly other plans he had to do, so he couldn't come with us. But since we had made all preparations for the trip, the rest of us decided to go and bought our tickets.

I went to Tampere already on 14th and on the morning of the 15th, I went to get Tiia, Mayu and Rika from the train station. 

At first we went to nearby super market to buy food for the weekend. We decided to eat traditional Finnish Christmas meal. Then we headed to my sister’s place, where we would all spend the night. We dropped our luggages there and ate before we left to back the city centre. Mayu and Rika wanted to see the Christmas market in Tampere so that was our first destination.

The weather was really cold, I think it was around -15C and it was fairly windy too, but the Christmas market had really nice atmosphere on it. We also went to another smaller Christmas market in Stable yards, a little walk from the centre. On our way we visited Tampere’s movie theater and I showed that not all movie theater in Finland are similar as in Jyväskylä (to be honest, I don’t like Jyväskylä’s movie theater at all..).

We also took a quick view of Näsinneula from the Näsinkallio park. Näsinneula is the high tower located in the amusement park of Särkänniemi.

Mayu and Rika both like Moomins a lot so of course the Moomin shop was a must visit. When we visited the shop, there seemed to be other Japanese in the shop. Seems like Moomin’s really are popular with Japanese!

We finally decided to move indoors and went to the shopping mall, Koskikeskus. We spend our time checking the shops and around 6pm my sister came to pick us. When we arrived to her house we decided to cook some food and bake Christmas tarts too. 

Mayu and Rika also made these for us

I’m sorry girls, I forgot the name of this dish. But they were really good and fresh! I also served everyone Tampere’s special, black sausage! Seems like it was edible, and maybe even rather good? I hope so!

My sister's friend also baked a reindeer pie for us! I think it was the first time for everyone tasting a reindeer pie.

And of course Christmas isn't Christmas without Christmas chocolates!

This black cat was also our entertainer during the evening.

We were all pretty tired so we went sleep quite early!

On Sunday morning around 10am we left to Vapriikki, a museum in Tampere. It has many exhibitions and it’s very affordable for students with student card, only 3€. It has many exhibitions, I think around 10. We spend few hours walking around and I hope Mayu and Rika learned about the history of Tampere a little bit, as many other things from Finland too. We also discovered a small Angry Birds play ground in of the exhibitions! You could play the game for real. It was quite fun. 

The exhibition that I wanted to see most was The Mummy exhibition and it was pretty interesting.

After going around the museum we headed outside of Tampere, to Ideapark. It’s a big shopping mall about 15 minutes drive from Tampere. So for the rest of the day everyone spent their day going around the shops and looking for something interesting to buy. There was also a gingerbread house contest going on, you could vote for the gingerbread house you liked the best.

Before leaving we went to eat Italian ice cream together.

Around 4pm we started to get ready to leave back to Tampere, because Mayu and Rika’s train would leave at 5pm. We escorted the girls on the train, and me and Tiia took the next train at 8pm to Jyväskylä.

I had really fun weekend, but it was too bad that the weather was quite horrible. Maybe if we have time we can go to Tampere again on spring, so everyone can see little bit different Tampere, and maybe that time with a nice weather!