A day trip to Tampere (Finland)

Photo by Monika Csapo

Tampere reminded me partly of Mikkeli, partly of Kuopio, and partly of Turku. The weather was not so great most of the day, but if you have lived long enough in Finland, you learn how not to let the weather affect your mood to a very big extent. There were some hipsters, but people are in general not so urbanistic as in Helsinki- which is true also for other cities in the Finnish countryside.

I saw a nice cafe on the way to the Moomin Museum where I drank a coffee and had a piece of banana-cake on the way back. At the same time I listened to the latest album of Jenni Vartiainen what I wanted to listen to already since last week. I liked the cafe, because it was not this minimal design-comformist place what you have often in bigger cities, but it had its own style. Which was a bit more the taste of my hippie high school-self, but it was refreshing also now to see something different than what I am used to. At the end I felt really comfortable there.
The name of the place was MimiBo Cafe, and it is at the beginning of Puutarhakatu.

I liked the city centre with its red brick buildings. When the sun was not shining I was taking photos of the reflections of the buildings over the water. These were mostly nice abstract patterns what I fancy a lot.

I visited the Moomin Museum after this which was a nice surprise. I have not watched the cartoons, I knew the moomins only from the times when I was babysitting Finnish kids. Besides one small girl, there were only adult visitors when I was there. Moomins must be very popular in Japan, because eighty percent of the visitors were Japanese tourists. The info books were in four languages: Swedish, Finnish, English and Japanese. Tove Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and on the original graphics in the museum the texts where therefore in Swedish.
Even if the cartoons were not familiar to me, only some of the iconic figures, i got mesmerized very fast by them. The world what Tove Jansson created is full of warmth and magic, and it brings back one to his child-self within seconds. I liked the texts in the info book which served as a narrative to the pictures- I assume these were original text from the Moomin-tales.

“The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It's a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you've got in as many supplies as you can. It's nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won't find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.” 

― Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November

After this I went to take photos to Koskipusito again, meanwhile the sun started to shine. I saw some nice bridges, graffitis and teenagers skating and fly fishing by the river. People started to gather for Saturday-night, and I continued taking more photos until my bus came.

It was a good random decision to do this day trip to Tampere. I fell asleep on the bus exhausted from all the walking and was very tired when I got home. In the morning l stated happily that time goes in a different way while being on the road: sometimes it is possible to collect as much good memories within a day what you might collect during a week`s time at home.