Long Time no Japanese

I think the wonderful hostel I stayed in at Tampere is into segregation. The place occupies 5 floors with about 7 rooms each. I suspect more than half of the rooms are dorms with 4 bed. There are many hostels that separate male/female dormers. But this one....I think they like to group races together. I'm not kidding; I was in a mostly "Asian Room" for 2 nights. But no complaints because I had a great time here. I just had to point it out since I thought it was rather interesting.

So, as you can probably guess, I got grouped with a couple of Japanese girls. One girl quit her job and is studying English in Bath right now. The other girl is a Tsukuba student, in Finland for the summer studying Finnish. (FYI - Finnish is apparently one of the most difficult languages to learn) Funny story to this: She began studying Finnish while in high school because she was a huge fan of Moomin and wanted to be able to read the stories in the original language. When she went to Finland a few years ago (high school study abroad program), she learned that Moomin stories were written in Swedish. But, she's sticking with the Finnish! And seems pretty good at it too (not that I could tell, but she was having conversations with the locals).

It was great to be able to speak some Japanese :) I don't think I used it for over 3 months. Felt very self conscious about my Japanese pronunciation and stuff though...
And the best part....the girl made me onigiri and tamago yaki!!!!! Since she was going to be in Finland for the whole summer, she actually brought rice from Japan (is that legal?!). SOOOO NICE! But now that I've had it once, I crave for rice every single day... The conclusion - I'm definitely Japanese, no doubt about it.

My main reason for coming to Tampere was to check out the Moomin museum (no photos allowed inside so I only have this really crappy entrance). Not as big as I expected, but the illustrations and figures were so cute, I loved it : ) I can't stop wondering why these characters are popular only in Finland and in Japan...
I need to reread the books. They sold them at the museum for a whopping $16!!! I couldn't believe it! Especially since the back cover said $8... What a rip off.

There was a Lenin Museum in the city that I thought I'd check out as well, but in the end I decided against it - it looked a bit dodgy when I quickly peeked in. Oh, and the cathedral right in front of my hostel was surprisingly nice.
BTW, I learned from the other Japanese girl in my dorm that there's a Moomin amusement park in Finland as well! How the heck did I miss that?! (Probably because I am using an English guidebook; I should've looked into the Japanese one as well) I SOOOOO wanted to go, but I'd already booked my ferry to Estonia for the following day so I couldn't fit it in. Damn it.