Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Where can we buy a shot glass?

After a few days focusing on being cachers, we turned back into being tourists today.  We're in Savonlinna, Finland, which is in southeastern Finland, not terribly far from Russia.  Last night we got here and walked around a bit.  Today we started with a quick trip to the outside market across the street from the hotel where we bought provisions (ie, green peas and strawberries) for later.  Then we visited Olavinlinna (our first castle of the trip) and took a nearly-private boat ride on Lake Saimaa.  Although we saw lots of islands, we didn't notice any recursive ones (ie, island on a lake within an island on a lake).  The lake is impressively large, and apparently it's possible to take a week-long cruise on it.  It's very pretty, though our pictures on this cloudy day probably don't present it at its best.  The islands typically aren't particularly tall, and the vegetation may be dense forest, marsh, lichen-covered rocks and/or a combination.  Some islands were just big enough for a couple of trees; others quite large.  We only saw a couple that had any buildings on them.

Once we were back on Savonlinna's island, we tasted lörtsy...a local pastry that's shaped a bit like a piece of pita bread folded over, and tastes a bit like a jelly donut (well, the sweet ones do....we didn't try a savory one).  The strawberry one was tasty enough that I might just have to try another flavor tomorrow.....and along with the previously purchased provisions made a tasty lunch. We'd love to provide an accurate pronunciation for lörtsy but it contains at least one sound not used in English.  For the French speakers in the crowd the first syllable is almost but not quite pronounced "leur" and for everyone else the first syllable sort of rhymes with the first syllable in "purple" and the second syllable is the same as the second syllable of "pizza". 

We decided we should get a shot glass from Savonlinna.  It's an interesting town, and there probably aren't many shot glasses from here in Oregon.  So we went to the souvenir shop that the tourist brochure mentioned.  No such luck, nor did we find anything else there to bring home.  We decided to walk along the lake toward the tourist information ....making a quick detour into a chocolate shop for some tasty hand-made truffles.  The tourist info suggested 3 places, including the one we'd just visited.  So we went to #2 (no luck) and then #3 (still no luck)....probably walked a couple of kilometers on our unsuccessful quest.  We've never seen a town so reticent to hawk any wares!  Maybe tomorrow's wanderings will yield bounty, and if not we would expect to find some sort of Finnish shot glass in Helsinki.

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