Category Archives: Crazy Chinese People

Visiting Kammi-Kylä

Last year summer my parents in law were visiting us for the first time in Finland. The main reason behind it was that they could attend our “big” wedding in Finland and see where we currently live. As we had a whole month with them we tried to show them as much as possible without straining our financial situation too much. In a previous post I wrote about their first visit on a strawberry farm, well now I will write about their first visit in a truly weird place.

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Welcome to Finland

This place is located near our summer cottage in Nummijärvi which is near the city of Kauhajoki. I guess these names mean nothing to you but anyways I wrote them down  just as some reference if you ever get interested and want to visit there. So as I mentioned this site is near the cottage my parents own and we were there for a few days prior to our wedding. We wanted to show my parents in law more than just the beautiful nature there and the idea of visiting that weird place came just at the right time. We only had a 20 min car ride through forests and swamps till we arrived.

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One of the many Saunas

First of all the whole place is located within a swamp and the owner of this particular place had some years back the idea to build on his own several buildings in this swamp. I think all materials except the windows and some water drains are natural materials found all over his property.

After many years of building he had created a little village for himself, including several sauna buildings, a building for parties and dances and a little swamp spa. Swamp Spa? Oh yes, it is hard to describe but I have uploaded a picture with a part of it. Basically it is a circular trench with a little island in the middle on which can be found a few benches and a fireplace. The trench itself can be used to swim around. Did I mention already this whole thing is located in the middle of a swamp? This means that you swim in the swamp when you feel like it.  You got to remember that there are some fancy spa’s worldwide where you have to pay a hefty sum to take a swamp mud bath so this “free” version has its own positive aspects.

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The Swamp Spa

Sadly I just don’t have the words to describe this place in its entire beauty and weirdness. It is just one of these places you have to visit to get to know its value.

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look at that craftsmanship

My parents in law were also fairly impressed by this place but they said they would never go to swim there, fair enough, I don’t know if I would do it either without the sauna being on!

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View from the 2nd floor

 

 

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Fine details everywhere

 

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What wonderful and weird buildings here are

 

Here are some picture and a very short description in English and hereyoucan find everything more described in Finnish. Also here the official website of the Lake and, yet again, a Finnish description.

Strawberries

Visiting a strawberry farm was the very first activity we did together with my parents in law when they were visiting us in Finland last summer. Okay, not really the very first activity as this was most likely getting home from the airport…

Strawberry
A big red one

Anyways, why visiting a strawberry farm? There are actually two reasons for this. One, my wife always wanted to visit one and handpick herself strawberries (she loves strawberries) and second, my parents in law could not imagine picking berries themselves and eating them without some very thorough cleaning. Especially the second part seemed to be an impossible task for my father in law due to his OCD. Nothing is ever clean enough for him except he cleaned it himself three times.
But imagine our surprise when he went and started picking up strawberries without gloves and ate them without any cleaning. When my wife asked about it he just shrugged his shoulders and said “It is so much cleaner here than in China” and continued collecting more strawberries. No further information given by him but he looked relaxed while  walking those fields and searching for the biggest and reddest berry yet. All my wife managed to say about it was “I don’t believe what I am seeing” and stared at her father.

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The family evaluating the strawberries

Besides being busy with collecting and eating strawberries my parents in law were also surprised that there were so many people in the fields instead of just buying the berries from the supermarket. According to mom in law there wouldn’t be many people in China going to the countryside to spent hours on a field picking some strawberries and then paying for them. Later on my wife told me that her parents had never done anything like this before so I guess it was a nice first day in Finland for them.

On a side note: I did not collect even a single strawberry as I was more content filming everything and furthermore my father in law seemed to overcome parts of his OCD as he even touched one of our rabbits, he has not touched a single animal in a long long time.

Christmas and New Year celebrations

The Christmas madness is over. Just kidding, there was no madness involved for us this year. We had some peaceful days of doing barely anything besides relaxing. Only on the 24th we made some Christmas cookies again as I had finished the last batch some time earlier once again.

So did we follow-up on our Christmas celebration plan? Certainly not. We skipped the whole music part of the plan due to our laziness and I guess we cut on some edges on the other points as well…besides all of that mother nature didn’t like us and gave us only rain the entire time.

Because my wife sometimes loves to make food, we had a great Christmas dinner and afterwards exchanged our gifts (yes, I managed to buy something fairly useful for her). On the other celebration days we visited some Chinese friends, had hot pot 火锅 and they played some 6 hours of mahjong 麻将(I was pushed to the living room to watch TV as I have no idea about the game).

Now it is just trying to figure out what we will do on New Year except of watching “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”. Maybe we celebrate with some friends or maybe alone, we shall see…

This was it for this year, I hope everyone had a great year or at least managed fine. I bet many of you have once again New Year’s resolutions and barely anyone will stick to it (But I will!).

I wish you all a Happy New Year and see you as lively as ever in 2014!