Kuusamo and Himmeli

It's getting quite cold here in Rovaniemi, -10 during the day and -15 in the evening. All anyone ever wants to do is eat and sleep, so there's been a good amount of both on the agenda. We went to Bull Bar and Simon tried to eat himself to death by ordering the 800g ribs, which he started at dinner and polished off for breakfast the next day. They even had a 3 kilo option! Delicious, delicious madness.

For a point of reference, compare the slab of meat with the size of Simon's leg under the table.

Adele photobombing my gigantic burger and mega fries.

I was determined to take Si to Nili, the most amazing Lappish food restuarant in town. They have a creamy wild mushroom soup that would seriously be included in my last meal request. It was immensely fun seeing his mind being blown by the delicious perfectly cooked reindeer!

About to head out into the freezing cold for some pre-dinner frozen puddle smashing.

All the interior design is done by the talented Irene, including these cute little bathroom signs!

We also continued our journey into Christmas spirit land by having a baking and Christmas movie night. We decorated delicious gingerbread cookies and drank hot punch and watched Love Actually while Simon fell asleep.

The weekend just past we went with an excellent bunch of people to Kuusamo for the Ruka Nordic ski jumping world cup. We took a giant van and stayed in a really cute wooden cabin with a fireplace, sauna, good kitchen and not nearly enough beds for seven people! Simon had his first ever sauna, his comment on the subject is "it hurt." I think it's just something you get used to!

This is our snowman, note his excellent hair and appreciation for Koff beer.

Us non-Europeans didn't really know what we were doing at the world cup, but luckily our resident ski jump expert Nadine was around to stop us accidentally walking up the competition skiing track and explain the appropriate words to yell at the competitors. It was really fun seeing how high and far they can fly through the air!

All rugged up and ready to watch, with the help of some mint liquor spiked hot chocolate.

For some insight into how freaking huge the jump was, the tiny speck you see is a person!

It would have been nice to stay for longer in our little cabin and have snowball fights and build snowmen every night, but we had to get back to Rovaniemi for our himmeli making lesson with Irene the next day. Himmeli is a traditional Finnish craft based on geometric diamond shapes made out of barley straw threaded together in amazing designs. The possibilities are basically endless, but it's pretty tricky to thread all the shapes together! I'll upload a picture of mine when it's finished, but here is one with the same kind of design that I didn't prepare earlier, just to assist my bad explanation.

http://andibelle.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/himmeli.jpg

Irene also made us delicious things to eat, we got to try bear sausage and it was amazing, so rich and smoky. I want more, but I couldn't find it at the supermarket today dammit. Simon gorged himself on blueberries to the amusement of all, lucky Irene has a whole giant freezer full of all the berries she picked earlier in the year. It'd be nice to come back here one year in the middle of summer and do berry and mushroom picking! Yum.

Me drinking beer out of my very own kuksa, expertly made by Irene's husband Ari.

I have to include a link to Irene and Ari's website, http://www.hornwork.fi/index.php/english because they are just the most talented craftspeople and the loveliest people you could imagine. I'd like to stay here and learn Lappish crafts until the end of time!

The Northern lights are getting a lot stronger, so hopefully we'll head out tonight and try to spot some good ones. It's almost St Petersburg time, so another blog shouldn't be far off, provided everything goes okay and no-one (Adele) creates an international incident!