Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Tampere...again!

So in the last two days I've had two more wonderful outings with friends in downtown Tampere. Tampere is only about twenty minutes away from where I live in Nokia, so I seem to go there a lot.

Yesterday afternoon, I met two other scholarship students (4 of the 12 of us live in and around Tampere) in the main square of the city. I met up with Lex and Emily along with Emily's host sister. Like it always is, we didn't have any exact plans of what we would do when we got to the city. So what do you do when you have no plans? Walk in circles, literally. So we just started walking. Turn here, turn there. Oh! That's a cool looking street! Let's turn there. Here? Okay! So basically we made a whole circle around the downtown area...but it was a good circle (square? rhombus.) (triangle.) Anyway, we walked through parts of downtown that I hadn't seen in any other times I've been to the city.

Somehow we managed to end up right back where we started from. It started to rain so we ducked into the Sokos department store. When we got in, gravity pulled us to the whole. wall. of. candy. guh. I ended up buying black licorice (a necessity in Finland) and then we headed into the cafe next door.

In the cafe I ordered ice cream. I had heard from a former exchange student to Finland that she missed pear ice cream so I got chocolate. Kidding! I got pear. Ordering in Finnish went pretty smoothly. But when you order pear ice cream in Finnish, be care not to ask for potato ice cream. Pear (päärynä) and potato (peruna) sound similar, and I may or may not have asked for potato ice cream. Well, I got pear and it was hyvää (good).


From there we went back out onto the main street and walked around again and went into a few stores before Emily and her host sister had to return home. When they left, Lex and I walked back to the main square area and from there we ended up taking bus number 17 from there to her house where I met the rest of her host family (I already had met her older host brother). I just hung around with Lex for a while and it was nice. 


Even though much didn't happen, it was still absolutely amazing to be in Tampere, an awesome city.

Today at around 10 o'clock, I went with my host mother and brothers to an observation tower and cafe on the top of the ridge that runs through the city. There, we met my scholarship friend Tristan and his host mother who is also my exchange support person. We had coffee (surprise, it's Finland) and munkki which is like a sugared doughnut but with cardamom in the dough (so good.) It was so Finnish to be there, eating munkki and drinking coffee. But when we were done, Tristan and I walked up to the top of the tower together where you could see the whole city and surrounding lakes. 

Pyynikki Observation Tower

Woah!

After the observation tower, I went downtown with Tristan to meet up with his host family's former exchange student from Prague, Czech Republic who was visiting, Katerina. Together the three of us went to a music store and then went to the Rax Restaurant on the main street, Hämeenkatu. It was on the second floor of a corner building with giant windows with a great view of the busy street below. people watching ;) It was an all you can eat buffet. Mostly different types of pizza and a huge salad bar. And there were also chicken wings (and I thought I could get away from Buffalo!) We had lunch and were there for a super short time. Just three hours. (sarcasm, folks) We were being European and taking hours for lunch. It was so great! But then we left finally and hung around in front of the fountain in the main square for about 15 minutes dancing, playing tag, taking weird pictures, playing with a balloon, and just making a scene. FUN! And then we parted. 


View from the table
Fun in the square!
Seriously, this guy keeps appearing in my pictures... 
 Today was a great day. I was busy and the weather turned out to be one of those days of sunshine that just make you totally happy. Oh, Finland :)

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