Vappu

Vappu (May 1) is a big holiday here. We would call it May Day in English. 

The celebration actually starts on the day before on April 30 (vappuaattona, or May day eve). 

Of course we had to celebrate so we planned a vappu lunch on Monday at the office.

Everyone contributed something. We brought potato salad. I wasn't sure just what Finnish potato salad was like, 

so I googled it and found several recipes that were different from each other. I decided to try two of them. 

I have no idea if they are even authentic Finnish recipes, but that is what we took. 

Others brought riisipiirakkas (also known as karjalanpiirakka), munavoita (egg butter), makkara (sausage), 

sima (traditional drink made with yeast like homemade rootbeer), 

pomac (Mormon champagne) and tippaleipä (like funnel cake).

This is a picture of some tippaleipä that we bought later in the week when it was on sale.

In Helsinki the celebrations begin when the students gather to wash the Havis Amanda statue 

at the Kauppatori (market square) and then place a student cap on her head. We decided to close the office a bit early and go watch the festivities. We bought day passes for the train (also good for the trolley and buses), and rode on the train from the Leppävaara train station near our apartment to the main station in Helsinki.

Main Helsinki train station

We walked to the tram stop and took a tram as close as we could to the Kauppatori. 

Usually there is a stop at the Kauppatori, but they weren't using those because of the celebrations there. 

Here is a picture of Helsinki and the people near the tram stop.

I forgot to get a picture of the tram, so this is a picture I took from the car window on a different day.

Walking from the tram stop to the Kauppatori

We found it interesting to see everyone in their colored jumpsuits. The colors are for different fields of study, and the patches are earned. (One of the assistants told me that they are earned from drinking contests.) Pretty much everyone we saw had a drink in their hand. Here are a few of the pictures with some of the different colors of jumpsuits.

 

We saw an interesting patch on one girl's jumpsuit.

When we first arrived at the Kauppatori they were still washing the statue. 

We were able to get almost a front line (although distant) viewing spot. 

We were cold! We had our gloves and earmuffs on. 

We thought that the students washing the statue were probably freezing! 

Many people have different hair color and are wearing head bands with things like cat ears, hats, or horns. 

We laughed when we saw the horns and wondered what people would think if we were wearing those with our name tags.

The celebration also involves lots and lots of balloons.

What Elder Shurtz thought were some bleachers filled with people turned out to be the tram stop shelter 

filled with people trying to get a better view.

 Sister Airto found a tram stop behind us that was empty and she went and sat on the bench under the shelter. 

Elder Shurtz deciced to go over and keep her company while we waited for the placing of the hat on the statue. 

As more and more people kept coming, some of them climbed up on the tram stop shelter.

 Before the capping of the statue, Sister Potter went over to sit by Sister Airto and Elder Shurtz came 

to stand by Sister Romberg and I to watch. It got so crowded behind us. 

I was glad that we had some space in front of us and I didn't realize just how crowded it was until it was about over.

Shortly before 6:00 another team of students was hoisted by crane over by the statue and 

they passed her hat around and placed a scarf around her neck and then finally they had a countdown 

and placed her hat on her head. The crowd was cheering and waving their hats. 

There were smoke machines and suds machines and even people in the water of the fountain.

The next day Sister Airto showed us on her phone that she and Sister Potter had made it on the Helsinki news.

I read that there were 80,000 people there. I knew there were a lot of people, but I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration. What I didn't realize was that on the other side of the statue there is a long park area that was filled with people. When I saw the video, I thought that maybe there were that many people there. Here is a link to the video from the news. (It is long, but you can look through it and get a bit of an idea of just what it was like.) 

Now, you might be thinking that this was a crazy place for missionaries to go and maybe it wasn't appropriate for us to be here. Well, young missionaries are certainly not allowed to go, but we actually had the mission President's approval. Sister Airto had told us that offices close on Vappu and that banks and government and most businesses are all closed on that day. The Sello mall near our apartment was closed! We asked President Aura if it would be appropriate to close the mission office on Vappu and he said absolutely, you should close it and go to Helsinki and see some Finnish culture! He even told the missionaries, "Yesterday and today you have notices that Finns can be festive and outgoing. At least once a year"

We did close the office on Tues. but we had to go to the office to help the two sister missionaries who are trying to get their residency permits extended to the end of their missions. (It was their p-day and the day that they are on the computer and have access to their email.) In the afternoon, Elder Shurtz was anxious to get his money's worth from the train day pass that we purchased on Monday. We took the train to Helisinki again. We ended up back at the Kauppatori. 

(The tram was stopping there now that the statue was not the center of attention.) 

We stopped at a booth in the market and got some baked salmon with vegetables and potatoes. It was delicious!

Licorice is a big thing here. The Finns love their licorice! We had seen stands with all sorts of flavors of licorice. 

We decided to buy some. We should have taken a picture of the licorice stand display, but we didn't think to do that. 

Here is the licorice that we bought. I got persikka (peach) and Elder Shurtz got sitruuna (lemon). 

Mine is all peach, but his is black intertwined with lemon. They are good!

The store was having a sale on icecream bars, so Elder Shurtz walked over and bought us some for a treat.

They have yummy icecream here. It is a very nice creamy texture and not quite so sweet as in the USA.

It has rained several times this week. It often seems to rain in the night. When we go walking after it has rained, we find it interesting that instead of the walkways having lots of earthworms like we see in Utah, they are filled with snails instead.

The sweet Sisters in our ward brought us cookies. They are great missionaries. 

We have had the opportunity to go teach with them several times.

Saturday was a busy day. We were trying to get our laundry done and apartment cleaned. 

We went grocery shopping with Sister Potter because she and others in the office are doing the food for our zone conference. We met her at the store at 8:40, bought food, took it to her house, realized that most of it needed to go to the office. We dropped the food off at the office just in time to make it to a teaching appointment.  

There was a Stake activity that we were hoping to go to it in time to join in on a walk through the woods, but the Sisters needed someone to go with them to teach. After the teaching appointment, we dropped them off at their apartment and then went straight to the park, so we were in our missionary clothes.

A few weeks ago, we had a picture of a park in the blog and someone asked if those were giant angry birds at the park. They are, it is actually called Leppävaaran angry birds puisto. This activity was also at an angry birds park, 

but this time it was in Oitaa angry birds puisto. 

 We visited with the Lehtinens who are now serving as part-time service missionaries working with missionary housing and inspections. We had some grilled makkara (Finnish sausage). 

There is a lake at the park. (In Finland, there are 187,888 official lakes.) There was also a chance for those who wanted to go to the sauna and take a dip in the lake. We didn't choose to do those things. 

It was a  kaunis päivä (beautiful day), but still a bit chilly. 

Brother Lehtinen told me it was a typical Finnish spring - warm sun, cold air.

We noticed how amazingly green the grass was compared to last week.

16:32 hours of daylight now here, and 14:09 in Provo.