Kauppatori ja Toripoliis

Wow . . . I have seen the sun, sky, AND moon 3 times in the past four days!! Can’t believe it! Woohoo!! Haha, yeah well normally Oulu doesn’t see any of that until around mid February March. The temps have been up and down (-6 to 2 degrees Celsius), which is between 19 to 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course what I’ve been hearing is that in TN and NC it’s been as high as 60 and 70 degrees. So, it seems that many places are having abnormally hot weather.
So, Saturday my roommate and I (Eva, from Czech Republic) went downtown via walking. 5.2 km there and back :) I thought we did it in record time too. We ventured there to find the fat, statue policeman (name = Toripoliis) in market square. Lonely Planet says that he is located in one of the liveliest market squares in Finland, Kauppatori. I have to say it wasn’t exactly what you would call lively on a Saturday morning around 10:30/11 or so on Saturday. But we had our picture made with him. He was quite excited to see two beautiful, foreign, young women at his side (I'll put Eva's picture on here later). For whatever reason, the Policemen here are actually well liked and well known here (I'm not exactuly sure why, but I'll ask Janika and see if she knows). We then venture to his right and find an indoor market place – this is where we saw more of the “liveliness” Lonely Planet was talking about.
We enter the red and white wooden building and the scent of fish and seafood smacked us in the face. At first a little repulsive, but then you get used to it after you see all the varieties of seafood delicately decorated. Both of us bought some salmon (I told her not to pronounce the L, in a nice way though). It was already precooked so when we eventually made it back to the flat we didn’t have to cook it in the oven or the stove (of course these stupid people still haven’t come to fix our stove top so we couldn’t have used it anyway). But I digress, and then we make our rounds to the other parts of the indoor market place. I don’t know why, but I have been a’cravin’ some dessert type food ever since I got here. I don’t know if I’m not getting enough nutrients in some area of my diet and therefore I have a HUGE sweet tooth . . . I really dunno. Anyhow, it took ALL of me to restrain myself from buying all the different sweets they had. I would tantalize your taste buds with comprehensive, exhaustive depiction of those sweets, but the names are in Finnish and I haven’t tasted them yet. SOOO, once I do some more exercising and haven’t already downed some sweets the previous day, I will make ya’ll wish you were here to enjoy the cuisine of Suomi hedelmät or jälkiruoka ( Finnish desserts)! However, I did break down and buy pulla, which is a type of pastry that I think we have back home. Completely worth my mooollaaa . . . flaky type breading, ever so sugary sweetness, with a center oh, so provocative and gooey . . . . . . . . Okay so the inside stuff of the pulla is called marmalade. Maybe I’ve just been out of the loop for the past 20 and half years, but what is freakin’ marmalade?? Sure I had heard of the word before I came to Europe, but these people talk about it like it is everyday language. Somebody said that it was a type of jelly/jam which I kinda saw for myself to be true. I mean I may have heard of it in one of the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingles Wilder, but even then I am guessing if I had even heard of the word in those books. Oh as a side note . . . this girl from Denmark, Igna, said that she has read The Little House on the Prairie books and Anne of Green Gables books!! Simply fantastic if you ask me :) Those two sets of series are among my faves.
Alrighty, so enough about all that . . . I am going to go now, but until next time moi, moi!!