A visit to Finnish magical wonderland of Tampere, day 1

As we're having a second child somewhat soon, we decided to leave our current child to my family and leave for a trip alone with my wife. Any reason to leave your children is a valid reason! We decided to head to Tampere, as it's one of the larger and nicer cities in Finland. That means we could actually find something fun and interesting there. The other option would have been to choose the closest city and just sleep in a hotel without doing anything special.

That would have been wonderful too.

But this is the day 1 of our trip. I wanted to take some photos, as I've been trying to get better with the manual focus. Not all the photos have been taken with manual focus, but some. Partially because the AF-motor of one lens has broken down. I wish I had money to buy new lenses...

We visited "Tallipiha", an old stable area in Tampere. The area is now in use for small businesses, mostly doing handcrafts and such. The shops are usually run by the business owners, but even up to 4 different small business owners might be sharing one building/room, as the buildings are usually only 1-2 rooms. The business owners have agreed on shifts who are working in the shop, which is selling goods of all 4. This way they do not need to hire anyone to run the shop.

Convenient.

I hope I explained that in an understandable way. But if you didn't understand, it's ok. Let me know and I'll draw a picture.

But yes, Tallipiha was built sometime in 1800's, but were fixed by Tampere city in 2000's.

Also pleace notice, this is not the entire city of Tampere.

Outside of a few shops, one shop on the left and a cafeteria on the right.

This is the entrance to the shop on the left. You can see plenty of scarves on sale.

Not all goods are made by the shop owners, for example there was a lot of Mole-themed goods. I hope Mole is Mole in English, as in Finnish the character is called "Myyrä" and it's a very loved character, created by Zdeněk Miler.

Christmas cards, both Finnish design and international ones. You might see some less Finnish characters on the left...

We came in a bit bad time, as some of the smaller stores were closed. They have a special Christmas market during December, but only on specific days and times. But the stalls were there.

I had to take a lot of pictures showing only some products, as I didn't want to take photos of people. But this one shop had a lot of nature-themed items, my favorites were the pinecone and leaf -themed earrings. Not really my style, but maybe I should have bought a pair?

I'm not even sure what all is for sale. Maybe all of this? I love how the stores aren't only about trying to get as much stuff on the shelves, but make sure the store looks cozy.

SHEEP!

JUST LOOK AT IT!

THEY HAVE SHEEP!

There was a third one too and I was scratching it for a good while. Too bad I couldn't take a photo of myself scratching the sheep. I had lost my wife at this point, as she was actually checking out some goods.

And I was hidden far away, scratching some sheep.

They were awesome. Smelled a bit funny, just like me.

Also, they had a donkey and pony outside. They were the reason I had to stop scratching the sheep, as I heard the lady say "I'll fetch the pony and donkey now". I'm not a runner, but at this point I had to run.

The lady was quick in her moves, got a good grip of the donkey&pony real fast and started to walk them inside. I tried to run ahead of them, but as I bent down to take some photos, the donkey was already next to my face.

I should practice running more, so I could have got a decent photo of them. Well, at least you can see the photo of donkey's ass.

Here you go. Enjoy.

Just behind the doors, you can see where the sheep are resting.

Back to stores. We quickly visited a chocolate store, but it was so full of people I didn't even think about taking photos there. Maybe I'm too careful, but I'm trying to make sure nobody ends up in a photo unless they are OK with it. I did ask if photography is OK in the stores, every time we entered a new shop.

Also there was a group of people taking photos in the area, as they had a trip from a local photography course. It felt weird walking around with the camera, as 20+ people with cameras were already running around, taking artistic photos of trees and shit.

BUT LOOK AT THIS. Furniture shop!

Super nice looking furniture to a dollhouse. I wanted to buy some and pretend that I'm a giant.

They were quite expensive though. Some were nicer than the actual furniture I have owned.

We visited the cafe. Most cafe's in Finland are super boring in a way, but this seemed nice enough. Sweet and salty options. We ended up having some caramel cheesecake, which was nice. Typically the options are extremely similar and limited in almost all cafe's in Finland. Dry "pulla" (bun/baked roll, according to google) with some variation. Pulla with cinnamon, pulla with butter, pulla with raisins.

So caramel cheesecake is a piece of heaven.

As most people suddenly left, I had a chance to take a photo of how the cafe looked like. Very simplistic style, but it is very fitting to the general atmosphere. They lack of colors is not due to low light in photo, but it's actually very grey.

As we left Tallipiha, we were very exhausted. I was confused by the red person in the window of cafe, but it turned out to be a doll with a santa costume. Hopefully.

Might be a creepy midget too.

But I'll be returning for day 2, just as soon as I have the energy to go through the photos.