Fun in Finland part 1

I'm currently sitting in a lightless guest room at a family friend's apartment in Helsinki, after my mom forced me to turn the lights out because she wanted to go to sleep. I also can't type this on my laptop as my mom refused to buy an adapter for the trip, and has now succeeded in using my computer every day since we arrived last Thursday, draining my computer of its limited battery and forcing me to type this on my phone. But I'm a survivor.

I originally wanted to title this post "Hip in Helsinki", but I realized that that makes me sound like a total douchebag. I think "Fun in Finland" is an appropriate replacement.

I've been here for 5 days now, but I've spent half the time sleeping (almost literally) so I don't feel like I've done as much as I would have liked, but I still have over a week to make some magic happen. Still, I don't want to cram everything into one post. "Fun in Finland part 1" has already been a bit of a jumbled mess talking about nothing, and I don't want to make this any more chaotic than it already is. So I'll do a little introduction to Finland by discussing Helsinki's Market Square:

When I first visited Finland with my mom six years ago, Helsinki's famous Market Square was one of the first things she showed me, and one of the few that I can still remember vividly. While not impressive in size (it spans maybe 2-3 New York City blocks in length), it's a hotspot of Finnish culture.

The market square is composed of a mixture of food vendors and trinket sellers, much like a traditional flea market. In several tents, you can find little magnets with Finnish flags on them, moose with shirts saying "I <3 Finland!", or any of your other stereotypical tourist-y items. However, in most of the other tents you find items celebrating Finnish tradition: hand-made dolls line the walls of several shops, fur scarves or coats hang from the roof of tarps, and children's books detailing Finnish history lay in stacks on various tables lining the market. It comes as no surprise that tourists frequent the agora, making the Finnish population appear much more heterogenous than it actually is.

Of course, my favorite part of the market has to be the food. While I have yet to try any if the incredibly greasy fish vendors yet, the berry vendors and pastry shops are undoubtedly some of my favorite places in the world. 

Finland has the best strawberries in the world. You don't know a real strawberry until you've had a Finnish one. They're about a third of the size of a normal strawberry, but pack the same amount of flavor. If I could only eat Finnish strawberries for the rest of my life, I don't think I would complain that much.

However, if I could pick one other food to be able to dine on, the raspberry jam donuts would be a very close contender. They're very simple: a piece of dough with some raspberry jam fried and sprinkled with sugar. It doesn't sound too fancy, but sometimes stuff is better that way. And they shouldn't make it any more complicated, because it's perfect the way it is.

Now that wraps up all I have to say about the market square, but there is a lot more to Finland than just that. I'll hopefully be able to write about my day trip to Tallinn sometime tomorrow.

Moi moi (bye)!