My Second Trip to Porvoo

On Monday, June 23, I woke up with a bit of a headache because I had to wake up at 9:00 a.m. and I went to bed at about 1:20 a.m. Even though I had intentions of going to bed early the night before, I ended up checking what the other FUSYE students were up to. I had a great breakfast of warm croissants with jam and Nutella and a little after 10:00 a.m. I went to the thrift shop with my host mother. She has a small booth there where she goes quite often to reorder and organize her stuff because many people just throw the clothing on the the floor of the booth rather than hang them up once they have tried them on. So, while she was deciding how to reorganize best, I looked around the store. They have mostly clothing but also a large collection of CD's, records, and books. Because Finnish is not a very popular language, it often takes months for American books and movies to be translated into the language only spoken by about 5 million people. As a result, people build up their English skills by reading the English versions of new books and I was lucky enough to find quite a bit of cheap books in English. I ended up buying "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell for only €1! After I bought my book, we went back home to get ready for our 3 hour car ride to Porvoo. I was so excited to go to Porvoo again because I really enjoyed it when I went with the other FUSYE students only a little over a week ago. However, our main reason for the trip was to visit my host mother's goddaughter who was having a small "coffee and cake" party for her 18th birthday. Me, Niklas, Aleksi, and Johanna packed into the car and headed to a restaurant near Mika's workplace. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet and I was quite hungry so I was very glad to see so much good food. After our lunch, we said goodbye to Mika (he had to work) and got back into the car and started our long drive to Porvoo. The ride was pretty fun though because I enjoyed listening to the radio and hearing the occasional Finnish pop song or rap. After about 1.5 hours we stopped in the large suburb of Espoo (where my last host family lived) and picked up a very good friend of Johanna who was the other godmother of the girl we were visiting. We then drove for about 20 minutes before stopping at the Brunberg Chocolate Factory! We were only able to see the factory through the window of the gift shop but I could taste almost every single type of candy one could buy. 

The Brunberg Factory

As you can probably imagine, this experience was like The Fazer Factory Part II but I managed to make it back to the car after buying a small packet of fruit sweets. We then drove a bit longer and finally arrived at the apartment for the birthday party (the apartment was on the same street as the café where I had lunch with my FUSYE friends during our visit!). The apartment was small but very nicely decorated. The girl's room even had a balcony and part of the wall was a chalkboard with inspirational quotes, which I found pretty creative. The mother said that she had been in the mood for baking the day before so she ended up making three cakes: one strawberry, one blueberry, and one chocolate! The strawberry cake was my favorite but I only has two slices because I was still so full from the all-you-can-eat buffet lunch. We then all talked to one another (but they mostly spoke in Finnish) while a German soap opera was running on the TV in the background. Two cups of tea later, we said our "moika's" and did a bit of sightseeing before we got back into the car. We actually went to see the same exact church that I saw with my FUSYE friends (it's the most popular site in Porvoo) and we walked down the same beautiful streets. 

However, this time it wasn't raining and I could see the sun peeking out from behind the clouds.

Porvoo is a pretty small town and quite empty, but it's very beautiful and one of my favorite places in Finland.

 After our nice walk, we got back into the car and started on our way back home. We dropped off my host mom's friend on the way but other than that and a stop at a McDonalds for dinner (yes, it tastes the same) we didn't waste any time coming home and arrived at about 11:00 p.m. 

McDonalds in Finland

I had a great day and also ended up learning quite a bit of song lyrics from the radio on our long drive. I went to bed excited to visit the Sibelius Museum and finally get a much needed hair cut the next day.