St. Patrick’s Day

As most people know, St Patrick’s day is a national day for the Irish, but it is celebrated all over the world. It’s one of the biggest holidays celebrated in restaurants and pubs: 13 million pints of Guinnes is said to be drank during the day all over the world! And we wanted to be a part of that.

It’s not that the holiday itself has a real meaning for us, and it is actually quite silly to celebrate such day here. But it’s a nice way to remind ourselves, that maybe the pub culture in Finland should change a bit. On St Patrick’s day the pubs feel British and Irish – people go have a pint with their friends after work, eat something and have a laugh. People are friendly and in a good mood, no intentions of getting dead drunk right away.. And also, with the green beers and ciders, hats and scarves, there’s this nice sense of community! There’s some magic to St Patrick’s day, and if you don’t think so, you’ve been in the wrong pub!

We visited O’Connell’s with some of our friends from school. The place was decorated with green colour and pictures of shamrocks. We were all offered a free scarf or a hat, but as we already had the hats from last year, we all took scarves. And as fun as it is, the green food colouring in the drinks makes them quite unappealing.. Magners didn’t taste half as good as it usually does!

Riikka continued with the theme later on, buying a nice chunk of Irish cheddar, Kerrygold’s Dubliner. Riikka has a weird obsession for matured cheddar cheeses, and will post more about that some other time..

Laura on the other hand continued her St. Patrick’s day celebrations at home with Bobby and a nice pork roast her boyfriend made.

I went to see Chicago the musical with friend of mine, and the show was great! Afterwards I went to celebrate more St. Patrick´s Day with some friends from school. First time in Ruby & Fellas, which is a new Irish Pub and Kitchen in Hämeenkatu. Very nice place, must definitely go there again! Maybe we should go to eat something, menu sounded delicious.. the drink list was a bit pricy though, but Guinnes was only 5e yesterday. There was some live music too! -Satu

The FIRST BIG ONE

17th May, afternoon at Armonkallio, Tampere, Finland.

Here we are, together at Satu’s place. We have just eaten. Actually, nowadays we don’t really do anything else but eat, drink and talk about food and what we are going to eat next. Food, food, food. The three things we love.

Today we got together to study and do some assignments for school. But somehow food got involved, wonder why.. Satu had prepared us a fairly simple, but delicious lunch! It started with an odd combination of vegetables, dip and coffee. Easy, good and cheap for us students. But I must say, coffee and celery is not a match made in heaven!

For the main course Satu cooked us some tomato soup with goat cheese and crispy bacon. It was delicious! Spicy, creamy, and bacony..

We all have an addiction to coffee, so we had large cups of coffee and some turkish yogurt and cloudberry jam for dessert. And tried to get some school work done. But ended up writing this blog.

Anyway, this is very special day for two reasons: first, today we are going to start writing our AWESOME blog. And second, today is the St. Patricks Day. That means, of course, that we are going to an Irish pub to enjoy some cold beers and ciders.