Moomins and things

So last week, I flew to Finland. It had been over 7 months since my last visit, and I was beyond ecstatic to spend 6 days gorging myself with Karelian pies, blueberry soup, salmiakki and my mum's cooking and baking.

Usually when I go to Finland, I don't really look forward to it that much, besides the prospect of seeing my friends. I do it out of necessity, a sense of duty: I need to see my family, because I know they miss me. I never seem to miss them. I know this sounds cruel. It's not that I dislike my family, I just tend to be quite busy with my own life, and content to see them when I go back twice a year. But this summer, I've really missed Finland, and Helsinki in particular. It was obviously nice to see my family, and I missed my friends, but what I really missed was my home country.

I set roots in the UK pretty much immediately when I moved to Aberdeen. I never had any intentions of moving back to Finland, and UK felt like home. Or home enough (I think it's complicated word). My needs for all things Finnish were satisfied with my biannual visits. This time however, I felt absolute joy at going back.

I didn't take time to blog while I was away, since I only had 6 days to spend with my friends and family and my schedule was packed. But I took a lot of photos with my brand-new iPhone 5S, so I thought I'd share those with you. Some were posted on my Instagram (here, if you're interested!) already, so you might have seen them already.

I went to Tove Jansson art exhibition at Ateneum. It would have been her 100th birthday this year, and there are events all over the world to commemorate her. I'm a massive Moomin fan, and I absolutely love her illustrations and artwork, so it was an incredibly inspiring visit for me. I wish I'd had a notebook to do sketches, as no photos were allowed. I did buy this tote bag as a little souvenier though!

I also managed to get my hands on the Finnish edition of The Hobbit, illustrated by Tove Jansson. So happy. I'm a big Tolkien fan as well, so it was lovely to finally get this edition. Even if I prefer the books in English. ;)

I also visited the Moomin mug exhibition at Arabia Gallery. As a Moomin mug collector, I was quite excited about this, despite it literally just being a room filled with mugs. ;) 

I managed restrain myself and only bought a single Moomin mug and two candleholders at the Arabia-Iittala shop. And they were all on sale too! The Moomin mug and the red candleholder (which is called Kivi, aka 'stone', by the way) were both half price or under so definitely bargains, and the blueish Kivi was a dye-experiment outside the normal colour charts so it was only 6 euros (the blue shades are normally about 15 euros each at full price).

As three out of seven in my group of friends from high school celebrated birthdays in August (myself included), we decided to go and have some cake. At Kakkugalleria's cake buffet. That's right, a cake buffet. We all managed about 6 slices (we shared some, thus the photos of more than 6 slices).
Cake > Lunch. Considering that I had just visited a cafe at a nearby department store where a slice of cheesecake was 8eur a piece, the 11.90eur we paid for the buffet (including a massive cup of tea or coffee) was a downright bargain!

Apart from adding more homeware to my collection and indulging my Moomin obsession, I also filled my suitcase with tea from all my favourite tea shops (but the best one will always be théhuone, pictured above), a lot of yarn, ryebread and Finnish confectionary. You know, the important stuff.

Sorry for the very text heavy post, I hope it wasn't too boring!

Until next time,
Jenni