July 12, 2006
Tropical Finland
We spent 2 weeks in the mökki and it happened to rain only once! This is extremely unusual - most of Finland has been enjoying temperatures reaching +30C degrees (max +32,4C!!!). I was expecting a chilly and short summer (the kind that you blink and miss it), but it seems that this weather is here to stay. Excellent!
Ain't this smoked salmon a beauty?!? We're completely absorbed with life in the mökki, time just flies. There's so much to do, - doing the dishes, watering the herbs and strawberries, scraping the paint and painting this and that again, chopping wood, carrying water, cooking, doing dishes again, heating up sauna and going to sauna... Days just go one by one... And its mid-July already!
We went to visit Helena and Rainer, Kaj's sister's family and Kim, Kaj's brother, dropped by...
...on his bike. Kim fixed this bike and custom made some parts. Amazing. When I look at Kaj's family, I can't help, but be surprised, how all these extremely different people managed to come out from the same childhood home, same parents... :) Kaj proved his handy skills and made a new moskito net "systemi" for the window in the mökki... :)
Besides visiting Helena, we also received some visitors in the cottage. Erik from Copenhagen with his family dropped by. The top visitor, of course, was little Mikkel. Obviously Erik and Stine have a strong man growing in the family, you should have seen how 2 year old Mikkel was banging a piece of wood (that weighs maybe 5kg!!!)
This is smoke sauna built by Rainer. We didn't have it this time, but we had pleasure to enjoy it last time. There's no chimney in the sauna and all the smoke just goes inside (is it so?) And when its hot enough, you have to let all the smoke out and then go in, throw water on hot rocks and enjoy it. The coolest thing about smoke sauna is that you get "smoked" yourself - the skin and the hair smell nicely afterwards!!! We read somewhere that in the old days people were actually living in saunas (exactly this kind of chimney-less ones!)
Posted by gkligyte at July 12, 2006 01:47 PM