Ice Hockey and Blood Sausages in Tampere

From Helsinki, we caught a train up to Tampere to catch up with our friend Eero who had only just finished his student placement in Rotorua and returned to Tampere himself. Tampere has been described as the Manchester of Finland, so we were pleaseantly surprised to find it a very interesting, pretty and lively city. Pretty much the first thing we did after Eero picked us up from the train station was take us for a mid-morning snack of blood sausage, lingonberries and a glass of milk from his local market. Mmm Finnish blood sausage was pretty good!
This is the sausage van....I was feeling more than a little apprehensive.... but my fears were ill-founded!


Eero took us on a fabulous whirlwind tour of Tampere - first stop up a viewing tower to look out over the town with its lakes and autumn leaves.
We saw a heaps of churches includuing this one where Eero was baptised
And this one - which I think was the cathedral but had some really interesting modern interior decorations
We also went to the Spy Museum which was terrific. Tampere seems tp specialise in random museums - they had a shoe museum and a museum of refridgeration too - we didn't go there....
Anyway, the Spy Museum was in this lovely old converted factory, along with lots of nice shops and restaurants.
In the evening - the highlight of our visit - we went to an ice hockey game! It was great - lots of biff (although no good punch ups). The only weird thing was that the crowd were really quiet - aside from one drunken guy who was shouting things at the ref, everyone else just clapped politely. And in the breaks, everyone left the stadium and walked around the outside for a bit of a chat and stretch of the legs.... Odd people the Finns =-)
And finally, this is Eero, looking mighty pleased with his day of tour-guiding....or is it just because he has a beer in front of him??