Kuopio, the world’s tummy button

So it’s 2020 and due to unforeseen circumstances, this was NOT the summer of MY EPIC ROADTRIP ACROSS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Instead, it was my summer of smaller roadtrips around my home country of Finland, and the revelation came to me rather late that travel around Finland still counts as travel and thus is travelblog-worthy, right? So, expect an autumn of summery Finland entries.

Here’s the first entry to my series of TRAVEL IN FINLAND 2020 (the one previous entry, from 2016 winter Lapland, you can find here) starting with KUOPIO (also, this is the first in series of 50 SHADES OF PURPLE HAIR 2020).

One of my favourite summer towns in Finland is Kuopio. Why? I’m not sure. Well, partly because my good friend Nina lives there, and also due to the fact I haven’t really travelled massively extensively around Finland. But still, I loved Kuopio in the summer of 2016, so I expected to love it in the summer of 2020.

To start off with a fun landmark – Kuopio has an adorable market square with a yellow market hall, and a statue of a boy called Veljmies and a statue of a girl called Siskotyttö (it’s fun because Veljmies comes from the legit Finnish names Veli and Mies, which also translate as Brother and Man respectively. “Sisko” is a legit girl’s name meaning Sister, but “Tyttö”, ‘girl’, is not a legit name at least to my knowledge). On The Biggest Day of the Finnish Year, Labour day aka Vappu aka the first of May aka THE DAY WHEN WINTER ENDS SUMMER SORT OF BEGINS EVEN THO IT MAY STILL SNOW IN JUNE, the statues are adorned with graduation hats, along with all of Finland that owns them.

Kuopio is compact and adorable, and you can easily walk from quaint streets surrounded by wooden houses, to a stunning church with a newly gardened garden, to the centre, to the harbour. I now realise maybe part of the charm is indeed the oldieworldieness of it all, which comes from the fact that the biggest shopping places are situated outside of the centre. It’s a pro, obviously, for a wandering tourist in yearning for aesthetic and touristic pleasure, but a con, as Nina told me, for the centre which is losing more and more of its services.

Alas, but it was all lovely.

Kuopio market square is the central place to be, and it also boasts itself as being the central place of the world to be. “Kuopion tori on mualiman napa” is a slangy translation of “Kuopio market is the tummy button of the world.” Ambitious or realistic, it is for you to decide.

Because of the plight of 2020 Kuopio too, like Helsinki, has a big outdoor terrace at its market square, in addition to the normal ones that come out every summer. We sampled the little stall on wheels from my favourite place from previous visits, the Mummola café (“Mummola” translating as “the place one’s grandma lives at”, making it a highly adorabs name yes). Mummola café are famed for their waffles which we sampled, and I also got the last coffee of the machine.

In summer 2016 I achieved all Kuopio dreams (tbh there weren’t a huge amount before my visit) except flying in a seaplane, an idea too spontaneous (and featuring a me too un-wealthy) to have been executed in 2016. Whereas in 2020 there was a minimum requirement of three passengers. So alas, maybe next summer we’ll find a third friend to join us spending exorbitant prices for fifteen minutes of whizzing around in the air (AH WHAT BLISS, in the meantime we’ll just watch Presets//Fall on repeat innit).

We went on no seaplane, but we went on the water in any case. (In Finnish the word for seaplane is “vesitaso” which translates as “water level”, so one could argue we went on a kind of VESITASO anyways.) A nice little ferry ride, one and a half hours, around the Kuopio archipelago. The wind flapped thru my hair and precariously around my skirt as I admired the beautiful peaceful waterside life of Kuopio while slurping on a delicious Kingis-ice cream.

Oh, and a last tour of the market square where we spotted jackdaws at afternoon coffee. And had a disappointly dry wannabe-korvapuusti and a MOUTH-WATERINGLY DIVINE peanut butter something cake at the Cafe Salacavala, before a final tourist photo.

A charming visit, ending with a charming sit in the “Ekstra” class of the train which I learnt only afterwards wasn’t an elongation of the restaurant car, but a luxury area you pay at least nine extra euros to be able to have the honour of sitting in…

Ah well, ignorance is bliss.

Bye for now, and remember:

Our adventure has only just started, tis definitely not finnished 😉

Emzy

xxx