anti-breakfast-landia

Cora and I decided to spend a day driving to Abo (Turku), the former capital of Finland, and check out what was there. This was decided in true-Forsten-fashion (typiskt Forsten) at 1am as we went to sleep after a perfect Sauna and moon-gazing evening. In a daze we decided that catching the 7:20 ferry was a good idea and that 40 minutes from the house would be giving ourselves more than enough time. Turns out you make the ferry by approximately 30 seconds if you give yourself 40 minutes, so we made it, but not by much and with gravel spinning out from under our tires as we rounded the curves on the road from the Marina. The drive was stunning after that and we even saw the sun again! Lush green fields, some livestock, simple red and white or yellow and white farmhouses. One person was pushing it and painted theirs mustard. I assume they are fined for such audacious behavior.

We arrived in Abo at 9:30, starving. We wandered around the marketplace as it opened and then the town and discovered that Finnish people don't believe in breakfast, only dessert with coffee. This does not bode well for the wheat-intolerant likes of Cora, or the sugar sensitive likes of me. Oddly, we found a stand in the Abo Salu Hallen (which means long narrow building with 2 lines of stalls not unlike an indoor market, containing everything from fresh meat to souvenirs to African food-stuffs) that was fully dedicated to gluten-free pastries. We bought a bag full of gummy, somewhat edible stuff that sustained us in anti-breakfast-landia.

From there we hit Abo Slott, the renovated castle which was really cool, very much like a labyrinth, and left our legs quivering from all the stairs. Their gift shop is not as cool as expected, but the castle was.


The coolest part of Abo/Turku by far was the apothecary museum. It looks small but as you wind through the old house there is some pretty awesome stuff including a locked poison (Venena) cabinet complete with old arsenic, morphine, and other serious drugs. Only the Apothecary has the key. Once a year a pharmacist will come and use the old instruments to make old medicine recipes. One of the women who worked there was so helpful and friendly, she seemed somewhat desperate for interaction at first and kind of creepy following me around from room to room until she started explaining things. "What looks like a drawing here is really embroidery made from the hair of the woman who made it for her parents. This one for her father, and this for her mother." She lead us into a few more rooms, speaking almost perfect English and showing us around, making jokes and pointing out the bleeding calendar where you can look up where to bleed someone from (the knee, the elbow) depending on the current astrological calendar. Unbeknownst to us, after talking to Cora for a bit about herbs, she found a book for Cora to look up the root we have soaking in schnapps out on the island, wrote down the name of the book and the latin name of the root, then chased us down in the inner courtyard to give it too us. What made this seemingly creepy behavior completely endearing was her round smiling face and that sense that this anthropology student just wanted some one to talk to under the age of 70, the seeming average of the patrons here. All in all, it was the highlight of Abo.


Distillers, herb room and grinding table in the herb room. Every proper apothecary had an herb room and garden.