Camping Trip

This afternoon, we made it back home from our camping trip. It was a busy week! When we got back, I had the strangest feeling though. I just got home (see?) from a week-long trip and I had this weird feeling of finally being home and back to normal life, but then I remember that this isn't normal life, and it's not officially my home, but it's an exchange, and it’s awesome. It was great to have the feeling of home though. It really means that this isn’t just a trip, it’s a homestay.

Since being outside of Turku and near the archipelago, we drove north and camped in both Uusikaupunki (uusi-new + kaupunki-city = New City! Nystad in Swedish) and Pori. Both cities were along the coast of the Baltic Sea, just like Turku was.

On the way to Uusikaupunki, we stopped for lunch at a country restaurant and had a very typical and traditional Finnish meal. Filled with different potato dishes, salads, bread… everything! I also tried the beer made there…and the wine… (AH! Just kidding, they were both non-alcoholic.) The beer was definitely an acquired taste, and the wine was made from blackberry leaves I think… but it tasted like flowers and perfume. Surprisingly (and differently) good!

Next to the restaurant was a museum that we then toured. It was the house built by the richest man in Finland at his time, Fleming of Louhisaari, and there Carl Mannerheim, the Finnish hero and president of Finland during World War Two, was born. So I was in the room he was born and also his office during the war in Mikkeli!

It was pretty cool to see the changes in this house over the centuries. Although the tour we had was all in Finnish, it was still neat to see all the rooms and different places in the manor.   

The first night in Uusikaupunki (oo-see cow-poon-kee), the main event was going to the sauna. I went from sauna to sea twice before the changes in temperature started making me dizzy (woops!) For the unseasoned American, the Finnish sauna can be pretty tiring (good night of sleep after though!) (word to the wise: DON’T put your head under the water when swimming after the sauna…) 

The next day in Uusikaupunki, we went in to the town and walked along the river for a while just to see what was there. We stopped at a few places but then we went back just to relax. After a while back at the camp grounds, my host dad along with Petri (father from family with us) and I went to the Uusikaupunki car museum. Uusikaupunki has a long history with car production and still has a huge factory where they currently build different car brands. The Valmet Automotive factory has built Saab, Renault, Porsche, Lada, Talbot, Opel, Fisker Karma, Think, Marussia, and Mercedez-Benz cars through the years. In the museum there were at least over 200 cars, probably a lot more. Saab was the car produced the most at this factory, and saabs filled up about half of the museum. It was neat to see how cars changed through the years, even more neat to see all the cars in person! 

heaviest car in the collection

That night in Uusikaupunki, I stayed up until after 1:00 in the morning talking outside with the parents, even though you could still see some light off in the distance.

The next morning, we went to the “Bonk Museum” in Uusikaupunki. The museum was filled with machines from the history of Uusikaupunki that were supposedly designed by a man named Pärre who was a local. We got a personal tour from one of the employees of the museum. The first machine we learned about was a machine that took the oil from the Baltic Anchovy. This fish had no use to any fishermen until the oil that could be produced from the fish was discovered. It could be used for industrial processes and also people drank it, and it gave them a ”floaty” feeling… But the fish was eventually overfished and became extinct. Okay. Sounds like it could be true… I believed that this in fact had been invented for that purpose, but then the tour guide started telling us about how Pärre invented a tree that had a trunk that grew in a square shape, not a circle, so that it would be easier for the lumber yards to cut… and at this point I felt like an idiot. This museum was filled with useless machines that just had silly stories behind them. So we got a tour of the rest of the museum, and it was very funny to hear all the nonsense about the machines. It was well worth the visit. And props to the tour guide who remained completely serious throughout the tour! My favorite machine was “Canned Hate” machine. You put on a head-set and the machine would take all your bad thoughts and turn them into grilling charcoal that was canned and labeled “Canned Hate”. Every family in the US in the 50’s had them! (I remember my grandparents telling me about their machine… hmm…) 

From Uusikaupunki, we drove to Pori to another camp ground next to the Yyteri beach (eu-teh-ree). This beach is one of two popular beaches in Finland that have fine grain sand. (My host brother Eeti (ay-tee) was amazed when I told him that all of the beaches on the East coast at home were like this!) The dunes on the beach here were gimungous (is that a word?) though. When walking there for the first time, I first had to walk along a planked walkway through no-man’s-sand-land and then I had to trudge up the side of a giant sand dune (hard when the sand is loose and deep!) and when I got to the top…BALTIC. Wow. The last two camp grounds were technically on the Baltic, but only on the side of an inlet of the sea. So this was the first time I was seeing the wide-open sea (besides on the plane). Our trailer was at the edge of the park basically as close as you could set-up camp to the sea.

I touched the Baltic!

Pictures don't do the size of the dunes any justice. 

Of course the first night we were there, I went to the beach three different times, but the next day is when we had our beach day. After eating breakfast, we went off to spend some time in the sun. It was pretty windy, but the sun and all-over happiness of everybody on the beach made up for it. I walked down to the water when we got there and yes, you probably think it was really cold because it was the Baltic, and it was, but not too bad compared to the Atlantic. The Gulf Stream weaves its way to the coast of Finland. :)  After taking a quick dip (well, I only went as deep as just above my knees) I took a walk down the beach alone, just happy to be in the Baltic. After a while of walking down the sparse part of the beach, I finally looked up from the water and sand to see how far away I was from where my host family was sitting, and I noticed that everybody was naked. It was a cultural experience. I guess the fact that Finland is open to public nudity (obviously you can’t walk through a town center with no clothes on…keep it to swimming and the sauna) made it not too shocking to me that I had walked into a nude beach, but the fact that I was the only completely clothed person in that spot was really pretty funny… and now we’re moving on…

For the rest of the time on the beach, I was occupied with going back and forth from the water to the sand, burying my legs in the sand like a little kid again (the little girl in the other family with us thought I lost my feet!) and eating ice cream. I don’t want to leave pear ice cream. It’s the greatest invention on the planet. After guacamole. 

Pingviini pear ice cream!

For the rest of the day we just hung around the campsite. But that night, Petri had something planned for us. CRAYFISH. The fish were caught by his father the day before and were boiled and ready to eat when we got them. So, here we were sitting around the table, everybody was cracking into the crayfish, and I had never eaten one before so Petri was my crayfish-opening coach. It took a while for me to get through the first one. They hurt your fingers! So after taking the meat from two fish, I piled it onto some already buttered bread and then put some dill on top (dill is definitely a popular herb here and is used in a lot of foods).

My sister would be screaming.

That night was our last night camping, and it was nice to reflect on the full week of adventures that I’d had. It was also my last night of sleeping on a kitchen table. My bed in the trailer was the kitchen table bench seat, and when it came to night-time, the table lowered to fill in the space in the middle of the seats. Any mom would be so proud at how many times I had to make and unmake my bed!

The morning we left, I woke up and went to the sauna with my host dad for a quick sauna lasting about ten minutes (I'm an amateur in Finnish standards…). We went back to the trailers and had breakfast and soon after, we were packing up, hitching the trailer to the car, and heading back to Nokia.

It was my first time camping, and I’m glad to have done it for the first time in Finland. Another amazing memory to have!