I found a new spinning bowl in Kokkola

This is Kokkola:

OK, so that's not the whole town in the photo, and there are people out in town even if that street happend to be almost empty the moment I took the photo. Kokkola (Karleby in Swedish) is a small town by the Gulf of Bothnia. Hubby and me go there once in a while just for fun. There's a lot of small, wooden houses, but also newer parts with tower buildings and shopping centres, factories, harbour.

Kokkola was an important tar centre for several centuries. Tar was used to preserve wooden boats and ships from rotting, but also as medicin. In my childhood wooden skies were tarred in the autumn. My daddy used to warm the tar so it run easily, and then he painted my skies with it. The smell was heavenly. The smell from a newly tarred boat is beyond description. To sleep in a boat slowly rolling...

We have a proverb that says "if sauna, vodka and tar won't help, the disease is fatal". The first two are easy to find, but tar is rare nowadays.

This time we went to the craft's centre and the shop:

I'm sorry, I was not allowed to take photos in the shop, so I can't show you the beautiful and nice things they sell, and I can't show you the looms and the ladies weaving. You can go to the Taito crafts centres in most towns in Finland and borrow a loom for a few weeks.

I can show you one thing though. I bought a beautiful raku bowl I thought would work well as a spinning bowl, and it does.

Only a few kilometres from Kokkola is another small town, Jakobstad (Pietarsaari in Finnish). We had coffee and cake in a cafe before we went home. Latte and chocolate cake for hubby and espresso and macaron for me.