It's still summer in Finland (though the newspapers here state that summer is soon over) and so the ice cream adventures continue on. This past week we tried...Blueberry Pie ice cream. It was one of the best ice creams Niko and I had ever tasted. It truly tasted like blueberry pie. It's vanilla ice cream with blueberry swirls all throughout and on top were little crumbles, like a pie crust. Mahtava.

 This Saturday Niko and I went to Vantaa and visited Ikea. We bought many things including bed, sofa and dishes. Ikea is great because everything comes in flat boxes, so our move to Lappeenranta next month should be relatively easy. 

On the way back, we stopped by an ABC. For those not in Finland, ABC is in general a gas station and then inside can be a number of things including a small supermarket, cafe, lunch buffet, Hesburger, post office, etc. This one, since it was on the ,highway, had all of those but the posti, so we grabbed some lunch. ABCs are also open later than most supermarkets, and this one is apparently 24h. Juhannus was last week, the mid-summer day, and all of the supermarkets and the entire city was closed. The only thing open was...you guessed it, ABC. 

As we got closer to our little city, we passed by another ABC and I had to take a photo. On the front of ABC's, they have big signs announcing what is inside. Hesburger, Market and this one announced in the blue sign to th right...Novita. YARN. Novita is the most common brand of yarn here in Suomi, to me it's like the Finnish version of Lion Brand in that it's cheap, has fairly good quality and has a wide color variety. And it's found everywhere. Including supermarkets and gas stations. I got a kick out of seeing a sign for it though and wish that every place that sold yarn had a sign announcing it on the front of their store. Wouldn't that be convenient?

The concept of a Finnish ,highway, is interesting, as there really aren't many cars, most of the roads are two lane (one coming, one going) and you don't pass through any metropolitan areas. Most of what you see when you look out the window (in summer) are trees, grass, rocks, farms and fields. (In the winter all you see is snow snow snow). We kept passing by these giant fields of yellow and at first I thought they were just flowers or weeds or something, but I learned that what I was seeing was actually rapeseed fields. Now I know where our cooking oil comes from. Nice to see such active agriculture going on and a very pretty view too. 

In other news, the cow eggs are have been laid and are waiting to be hatched. For those of you that have no idea what I am speaking of, please read here. Yes, Samu, in my country, we have cow eggs.





Thus concludes another week in Finland. Knitting continues ever onward. A hat turned table mat is now completed and a new dishcloth will jump on the needles very soon.

Also, if you have never seen Hachiko I highly recommend. Two paws up.

Mustikkapiirakka : blueberry pie
Mahtava : awesome
sänky : bed

t.Kati