It is currently 1:07 am and I do not know what it is up me and deciding to blog so late. Nevertheless, today started out as a rest day and I did not get up and going until about 1pm. I went to lunch with Chloe and after lunch, our day went from zero to one hundred really quickly. As we were exiting Cafe Esplanad, we were met with hundreds of people lining the streets right outside. We found a spot on the sidewalk to see what was going on, and we began to hear drums beating and upbeat music playing so we looked down the street. We saw vibrant colors, feather, floats, and more coming our way. Little did we know we were just on time to see the Samba Carnival!
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| Selfie during Carnival |
6:40 am I finally went to bed around four; I had no intentions on waking up two hours and forty minutes later. Well, here I am starting my notes for the day.
7:42am After reading my daily scripture, checking my social media accounts, and looking at the walls for a bit, I am going back to sleep. I will more than likely skip breakfast because I do not feel like getting up and I am still tired.
10:42am I am back awake after my on and off nap, and I am just going to continue to rest. I decided that I would just get up to go to lunch later on.
11:21am Some one knocked on our door a couple of times, but it is really hard to decipher whether it is your door or someone else's door in this hostel. Well, it turned out to be our door because a few seconds later, I heard a key in our lock-- it was the housekeeper. She asked if she could come in and clean and took about fifteen minutes to mop and wipe down the bathroom. We have not really used our kitchen area and we have kept our room super clean so there was not much for her to clean.
1:00 pm I started to get hungry and Chloe was hungry as well so I got up and started getting ready for the rest of the day.
2:51pm After I got ready, Chloe and I left the hostel and we decided to eat at Cafe Esplanad. We arrived at Cafe Esplanad and it was packed, there were very few seats. The restaurant was set up bakery/deli style where you selected your sandwich, salad, soup, or dessert, received it, payed for it, and then found a seat.
Chloe and I shared a salmon soup and a korvapuusti (cinnamon bun) which I have heard are the best in town. The cinnamon buns are the biggest in Helsinki. The soup was very hearty and had plenty of salmon and was seasoned better than the other Salmon soup that I had the other night. I could only eat a little of the cinnamon bun because I normally do not eat them and this one was huge. I got a bag to bring it back to the hostel. It took about twenty minutes for us to eat our meal.
3:20pm We left Cafe Esplanad and were headed to some stores, however when we started looking around the streets were filling up with hundreds and hundreds of people. It was crazy because there was so much going on in the restaurant, you could not even see or hear what was going on outside. We went to an empty space on the side walk and looked down the street and I saw feathers and bright colors from afar. We knew it was a parade of some sort, but we had not heard of any festivities going on this weekend. I tried to ask the man standing next to me but he did not speak English, he just motioned with his hand that something is coming.
3:35pm The beginning of the parade reached us and the energy was super high. We were looking at banners and the posters for any indication or clue about the parade. I searched up the word papagaio after seeing it on the first float and a parrot popped up on google. I assumed that it was a parade dealing with or celebrating parrots. I decided I would do my research later and just enjoy the parade.
The Carnival parade was amazing!!!!! The music, dancers, singers, volunteers, musicians, and the children who participated in the Carnival were great. Everyone was having so much fun and interacting with the crowd. People in the crowd were dancing and singing right along with them. The whole experience was breathtaking. From the first float to the last dancers, the Carnival was high-energy, engaging, and fun to watch for the whole two hours. The costumes were out of this world; I wanted to stay to the end just to see all of the neat ideas. They were super creative, bright, and included lots and lots of feathers. At one point, they played a song so long, I picked up on the words and I did not even know what I was singing.
After doing some research, Império do Papagaio is a Samba dancing school in Helsinki. They allow people in the Helsinki community the opportunity to learn authentic Brazilian carnival dancing and playing and in the end, they get a chance to participate in the big Carnival. They even invite other Samba schools from around Finland to participate as well and they are judged during the carnival parade for their performances and lyrics. Each year, each school is given a theme and must submit a costume idea and lyrics to a song to go along with their costumes.
5:13pm The parade ended and we went across the street to get a picture with some of the participants in the Carnival parade. We then went to a bookstore not to far from where we took the pictures. Chloe's brother wanted a specific Finnish book that had been translated to English so went to search for it. I started looking around the bookstore and we spent about thirty-five minutes in the bookstore.
We left the bookstore and headed back to Stockmann. We looked around extensively and saw every floor of Stockman. Stockmann is huge and has so, so, so many stores, boutiques, salons, cafes, and more. I window shopped and Chloe bought some shoes. It was cool going around looking at different Finnish clothes and the different designs of their clothes. We walked around Stockmann about an hour and a half. We left and headed to H&M where I bought a thicker jacket and a necklace.
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| Stockmann |
After H&M, we just walked around the city and found places to take cute pictures and had another photo shoot. We spent about forty-five minutes visiting some of our favorite places in the city such as Senate Square and South Harbor to take the photos we did not get to take during our tours.
We went back to Kamppi which is not too far from our hostel and looked for a spot for dinner. We took twenty minutes looking for different restaurants that we had not visited, but we did not want to spend a lot money. We ended up going to a spot across from Kamppi called Pizza and Kebab. I ordered a pizza for five euros and Chloe ordered a chicken pita. The pizza was pretty good and it was sizable for that price. We got it to go so that we could eat in the room. 
8:49pm We got back to the room and ate our food. I am not going to put a picture of the actual pizza because it looks weird. They put the pepperoni under the cheese and they folded it to get it to fit in the box so there is cheese missing in places. It looks a hot mess. The plan was to start on our blogs and emails for the day, but it did not go according to plan. Twenty minutes later, the other two girls in the program invited us to their room for a game night.
10:00pm We went down to their room and played multiple card games. We had a fun time and were happy to have a girls night!
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| Phase 10 Card Game |
12:02am We are back in the room and both Chloe and I are trying to finish our summaries of the day before bed.
Today was great and I cannot wait to see what adventures we go on tomorrow! Good Night..
