10/07/08 - Music and all that Jazz.

I (Marea) have with us a fairly good collection of the standard classical repertoire and as we travel, so continues our musical education with context. We are sitting down after dinner listening to Sebelius' Finlandia. In Norway I made Kerryn and Daniel listen the Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite and here, Sibelius is Finland's most famous musician (after Lordi, the Eurovision song contest winner, of course;-).
On another musical note we have arrived in the town of Hämeenlinna on the first day of the Linna Jazz festival. We arrived in the town centre about 1700 to some awesome sounds and happily found a spot to sunbathe and enjoy the music. When that finished, we drove to a camping spot (by another little marina) then took an early evening walk along the lake front, past the medieval castle into the town, being seranaded along the way by jazz from a cruising boat. On the way back we stopped for a beer in the evening sun, listening to some more jazz sounds coming across the water.
This blog is a little backwards but it ended so pleasantly and after the last few weeks of very average weather today's sunny 18° was a very welcome change.
So to goback to this morning we drove to the city of Tampere and cooked up French Toast with a view of one of the city's lakes. Tampere is sandwiched between two of the area's three thousand lakes and after breakfast we took a walk up the "tallest ice age ridge in the world" which is between the two lakes. After all our flat forest walking recently, the climb up, then 140 steps to the top of the viewing tower was a bit of a struggle!
Tampere was a beautiful city, although it is nicknamed the Manchester of Finland due to its industrial roots. After we had walked around trying in vain to find the tourist information, we gave up and simple enjoyed the stroll and the people watching.

After a swim and some sunbathing we headed to Hämeenlinna where as this 'upside down' blog mentions at the start - we got caught up in the city's mood for a bit of summer jazz!!