Adventures in Finland: Turku

So this past weekend I took a trip down to Turku. I had been talking about going down forever, but things kept coming up for me, Michael or Toni. Those are my two friends that live there in Turku. We met on the facebook game Hobowars, and have been playing that, as well as a couple other facebook games, together for a couple years. So I took the overnight train down to Turku on Friday. It left at 8:00pm and arrived in Turku at right around 9am on Saturday. I bought a ticket for a sleeper car, which normally would be 100 euros, but with my student card (which cost me only 18 euros) I got a 50% discount, so that was awesome. I was in a cabin for 3 people, but was the only one for the first part of the trip. We didn't have to change trains or anything, but it made lots of stops on the way down to Turku. The other 2 guys in my cabin got on in Oulu, about 3 hours in, and that's when they started drinking. After I finished reading through The Giver, which is in my opinion the best book of all time, I went to sleep and slept pretty much the rest of the train ride. When I arrived in Turku, Toni picked me up and we went back to his and his girlfriends' place where they had offered to let me stay for the night. Toni and I decided to walk through the town along the river over to the other side of town where we could see the Castle of Turku.
The Castle was pretty impressive. I've heard it's not that much compared to many of the other castles in Europe, but seeing as the only castle I've ever seen before is the one in the Disney logo, it was very impressive. It was huge inside, took us a good 2 hours to walk through and see everything inside it. They had restored sections of it to be like it was in the medieval ages, during the renaissance, etc. so it was really cool to see the progression of the architecture and furniture and everything.
After that we walked back along the river to see the city center, and went to meet Michael and Maria (Toni's girlfriend) for lunch. I had an awesome burger. It was called a panini, but it was just a big burger with sliced filet mignon instead of ground beef. It was one of the best things I've had since I've been here in Finland. After lunch, we went over to see the big Cathedral in town. It was humongous, and very impressive. It and the castle were a couple of the only buildings to have survived all 5 or 6 fires that destroyed most of the city several times over the years. After that Toni and I went to a hockey game, TPS (Turun Palloseura, from Turku) against HPK (Hämeenlinnan Pallokerho, from Hämeenlinna) Naturally, we were cheering for TPS, and they won 3-1. It was a really crazy game. We could only get standing tickets, so it was tiring, but it was insane. The stadium's capacity is 12,000, and there were 11,820 people there. It was so loud, and there couldn't have been more than a couple hundred HPK fans, so the cheering for TPS and booing for HPK was awesome. After the game we went back to Toni's place, where Maria made dinner. She made Karelian Stew, and it was amazing. Especially since they had fresh homemade lingonberry jam made from berries picked at their summer cottage, which, surprisingly, goes amazingly well with the beef, pork, and lamb in the stew. The berries here are to die for. She also made a blueberry pie out of fresh berries. Best blueberries I've ever had. After that, we were all pretty tired, so we went to bed. I slept on the couch, which was actually pretty comfortable.
On Sunday Toni had to go to work all day, so Maria and I walked around town for like 4 or 5 hours just seeing the whole town and walking their dogs and just talking about Finland, and Turku and everything. After a while I went to meet Michael again, and we hung out for a little bit and had dinner, and then I left on the train back for Rovaniemi. It left at 9pm, and arrived here at 11:30 or so. I just rested the rest of the day, and then today I've been working all day.
So, picture time.

The Train Cabin