Night of arts in Helsinki - food for body and soul

Team event with my colleagues happened to be on the same day as the Night of the Arts. The topic of our event could not be more suitable: it started with the food for the soul by visiting the Taidekoti Kirpilä and was crowned with the superb food for the body at Chef&Sommelier.

Taidekoti Kirpilä is actually a little museum in an apartment. In 1988 the owner of the exposed collection died and in his testament left all his art items to the Finnish Cultural Foundation with the only condition: he wanted the collection to be available for public. Now his home is transformed into museum and is open for visiting twice a week. 

Mostly collection represents paintings of Finnish artists, for their admirers this place is a must-see. I did not dare taking pictures of those pieces of art, they should be seen with your own eyes.Overall the collection counts about 350 paintings. But apart from the paintings, there were some sculptures and interesting interior objects, like the ones below. 

We had a guided tour, so had the pleasure to hear the stories of some pieces. Like the one about the monkey statue: whenever guests would ask the collector where his portrait or sculpture was, he would point to this guy :) 

Next stop in our Night of the Arts was little restaurant, that got a Michelin star, Chef&Sommelier. The dining room is really small, tables need to be booked weeeeeeeeeeell in advance, but this was a real experience! For that night I forgot about the diet and just ENJOYED every single bite. 

The menu contains only a few items and from the names you would never know what is the food that you get, you only get to choose the ingredients you want. The ingredients change all the time, as the fruits or vegetable get ripe. Menu is updated every couple of weeks.  The concept is to choose from 3 to 9 courses. The Chef has some land close by Helsinki, where he grows lot of the vegetables and herbs himself. Other ingredients have all their stories, that Chef tells when the food is served.  It feels like you just came to see your good friends, who are happy to make best food for you from the best available ingredients and accompany it by the best drink they got in their cellar. There are no waiters, Chef and Sommelier do all by themselves. 

Sommelier has a great collection of wines, that he orders from all aver the world, so no chance to find them in Alko :( He can help you pick fantastic combination of drinks to your food. 

Of course the bread is also "homemade", as well as butter. 

 The Chef likes to treat his guests with some little surprises :) 

This "bonus" was called "parsley and beetroot". 

 Pike perch and herbs.

 Mushrooms and roots.

 Lamb and tomatoes.

 One more surprise from the Chef: orange sorbet. 

 Cheese plate

 Fennel and apple. 

 And one more surprise: cauliflower and licorice ice-cream.

This meal was all about Art. Both food and service were exceeding any expectations. I am sure this place will be revisited many many many times. The prices are not really cheap, but the whole experience was worth every cent of it! 

Prangli - Juhannus with friends

We started the summer holiday on the Midsummer eve and the destination was Estonian island Prangli, where we headed on a rainy evening with a couple of friends. The arrival was quite late at night, so we did not see much of the place. Luckily two more boats from our yacht club were there before us. Big thanks to their crews for helping out with mooring! :) Approaching the harbour in the darkness was a bit exciting, there were only two illuminated leading lines. Also the depth was to keep an eye on: rather close to the coast it is still about 100m, but then suddenly it becomes quite shallow, with lots of underwater and water level rocks. Good advice was to stay away from the coast line as long as you get the leading lines aligned and only then get closer to the island and enter the harbour.  

The day after we went exploring the place and it turned out to be great:  

All the yards in this summer village were particularly accurate and well taken care of. At the same time, many have preserved old traditions and original state of the houses. I was surprised to see that most of the houses have names :) 

The mooring is free of charge, so were not surprised there were not so many services there, for example there is no showers or WC, only outhouse. Though to our surprise, shore power was free as well as WLAN.   

One fisherman was selling fresh fish right in the harbour. We got a nice fresh cod purchased. Luckily one of our friends knew how to clean the fish and helped me out with this :) 

We opted for grilling it, but it was not a big success, as you can see below :) Cod is very moist fish and falls into pieces whenever you try to turn it or otherwise touch it. Maybe (not to say absolutely! :) ) grilling was not the best way to cook it. Obviously for 4 adults that was not enough, but it was fun to buy and prepare it anyway :) 

There is awesome sauna in the island. It is located not really close to the harbour, so the owner offers great service by providing transportation at agreed time with the truck below. That was a fun ride! :)

Sauna price includes grill, woods for it, and transportation. 

No, they did not kill the seal to decorate the wall. It died in the fisherman's nets :( 

Right next to sauna there is a summer cottage for rent, that is fully preserved from the old times :)

Sauna should be booked separately. It was absolutely great! We enjoyed it for 2 hours, grilled some sausages, had transportation included, and price was ridiculously small for the service, it turned out to be only 5€ / person, as there were 9 of us (3 boats crews). Highly recommend this place! 

Apart from the unusual sauna, Prangli was known for the Must Luuk restaurant. Now the owner has closed it and has opened a new one on the sea shore named  RootS. Very nice cozy modern place. No one of us tried food there, we only had some desserts and drinks, so cannot say anything about the menu, but location is very nice. 

Restaurant windows overlook the harbour. Also they are facing west, it was a great place to admire sunsets in a nice company with a good drink :) And the place was rather popular with the locals, there were surprisingly many people late in the evening. 

We were lucky enough to have rather clear sky to enjoy the sunsets :) 

In good company and new great location time was flying, but we had the whole holiday ahead, that seemed to be plenty of time :) 

Summer holiday '14

Oh sweet memories! It is the 4th week that I am back to the city and to work. The whole trip we made during the summer vacations seems to be a dream now. Only pictures and miles on the tools remind it was real :) In this post I would like to write about the summer holiday overall, while in the following ones I will tell more in detailes about the harbours we visited.

Once upon a time... :) On the 19th of June we left Helsinki and headed to Estonian northern coast. The crossing was done on a chilly rainy evening, with almost no wind...

 The weather during our stay there was not summery at all: 3 layers of clothes, hats, scarves and gloves were must have when sailing. At times it was sunny too, though it would rain every day and temperatures were not very high. We were laughing about having "autumn holiday" instead of summer holiday. During our visit to Estonia in about 1 week time we visited the following harbours: Prangli, Tallinn, Naissaar, Lohusalu and Dirham.

Upon our return to Finland the weather got warmer and better, the crossing of Finnish gulf was on a totally windless day, so 8 hour motor trip seemed endless! The first Finnish harbour we visited was Hanko. And no matter many people critisize it for being a noisy place, crowded and too expensive, I still love visiting it each time we go towards the west! This year we decided not to rush towards Sweden, as we normally do whenever we head to west, but to spend some time in the Archipelago of Turku instead.

So the route continued to Högsåra, Helsingholmen, Brännskär, Västerön, Nauvo and Iniö. In some of the places we spent more than 1 day for weather reasons or just for pleasure, since there was no rush anywhere and we had all the time to enjoy. Hot weather has established starting from Hanko and now we could really talk about the awesome Finnish summer.

And though we did not plan it originally, winds took us to Åland :) We chose the upper route on the way towards west and lower route to return, so the places we went to happened to be Lappo, Seglinge, Kastelholmen, Mariehamn, Sandvik and Verkan.

There my holiday was over :( while my other H continued with a different crew to home harbour via Helsingholmen, Rosala, Hanko, Modermagan and Lähteelä.

I was pleased to notice that out of the 18 harbours, which we visited during the 3 weeks of my holiday, 13 were new to me. Pleasant thing to remark is also the fact that we did not have any major issues with the boat. Small leakage of sweet hot water was fixed during the holiday. One more thing I am proud to mention is that my personal leaning and strong wind tolerance has increased :)

         Some statistics:          

Miles: 586

Days: 24 (30 for H)

Harbours: 18, out of which 13 were new
Parking days because of the weather: 2

Nights on anchor: 2

Boat issues: 1

Backs burnt: 1, mine

Lips burnt: 1. Yes, me again! Yes, I had the SPF 30 lip balm! I am just good at it! :)

Beer: 2 *24 boxes, one of which was Lidskoe (made in Belarus :) )

Cider: 1*24 box. Of course Somersby :)

Slowly returning from holiday

It has been a long while since the last post! While having this tropical weather I am really not willing to spend time with the laptop at home. This is what I have been doing instead :)

While official vacation has been over for two weeks already, I am still gradually returning back to normal routine due to incredibly sunny days, which we are lucky to enjoy in Finland this summer. Going to the boat almost every day after work keeps preserving the taste of all what  was seen and done during the vacation: we finally went to explore some of the northern shore of Estonia (there will be a separate post on the harbours and other observations), had a dipper dive in the Turku Archipelago, re-visited Åland's favourite places...

Time spent with dear friends turned into "pearls to be added to the necklace of memories" (quoting one of them :) )  

And now pulling myself together to go through over 1000 pictures to select the ones worth telling about.  

To be continued in the nearest days, when the weather gets worse and I will dare to face the reality and spend an evening with the laptop :D