Finland has been leading the list of the happiest countries in the world for years. For southerners like us, who have plenty of sun, sea, mountains, fertile lands, hot mineral springs and whatnot and still don’t consider ourselves very happy, this sounds crazy. Until you go north, where the crystal clear cold waters of Lake Saimaa reflect every cloud in the sky, people swim in them year-round, and the social life is hotter than any summer party, because it usually happens at a temperature of around 80-90 degrees – in the millions of saunas across the country.

We travel 4 hours by train north from Helsinki to reach Savonlinna. Savonlinna is a municipality of about 30,000 inhabitants, located in the middle of Lake Saimaa. How do you say in the middle of the lake? Lake Saimaa is the fourth largest lake in Europe, with a total area of 4279 sq. km. It is dotted with thousands of islands, some of them connected to each other and forming small towns, while others are completely wild and a rare species of seal basks on their shores. If you look at a map of Finland, the area looks like fine lace. In fact, Saimaa is just one of the many lakes in this part of Finland, which is why it is known as Lakeland.
The official number of islands in Saimaa is 13,710. It also has the longest coastline, as expected with these thousands of islands – 14,850 km.

Hot and cold
“The weather is very hot these days, very unusual. You can swim in the lake too. I swim all year round,” Veera from Savonlinna advises us, about the days in September when we are there. Indeed, even for us it is unusually warm – during the day it reaches 24-25 degrees and the jackets we have prepared turn out to be unnecessary (which only makes us happy). The water in the lake is 18-19 degrees – the maximum it can reach. For the locals, it is downright warm. From our hotel, which is on the shore, right next to one of Savonlinna’s beaches, in the morning and afternoon we see dozens of locals coming to swim, enjoying the unusually hot weather for them.

The previous evening, Veera and us (and over 20 other strangers until then) had been to a sauna. A traditional, smoky Finnish sauna. We, the foreigners, and our hosts often got into arguments about whether to pour more water on the hot stones or not. The water increases the humidity and the feeling of temperature, and the sauna feels much hotter. For the Finns, the more, the better. We occasionally wondered if we would end up with burns on our faces, but nothing like that happened. At the end, we all had super soft and supple skin.
The sauna for Finns is like a religion. The obligatory pleasure that you provide yourself at least 2-3 times a week in all seasons. It is quite common to invite unfamiliar business partners or other people with whom you have a business relationship to a sauna. The sauna combines perfectly with swimming in a cold lake, or the sea, depending on which part of Finland you are in. Our hosts tell us that they go to the sauna almost every day in the summer – we tend to believe them. Here it really is a wonderful end to the day.

During our stay in the country, we learned many interesting things about the local sauna culture and have written an entire article on the topic .
Savonlinna
In this part of Finland it is very difficult to determine which town or village you are in. The town of Savonlinna itself is situated on several islands connected by bridges. But within the municipality there are several other villages, which are also located on islands and everything is connected. And between the municipal centre and the peripheral villages is full of small scattered islands, mostly covered by forests. I don’t know if they all have names, it’s probably very difficult to come up with names for so many islands.

You can get to Savonlinna by train, but the most typical transport for this region is water. Almost everyone has boats, which in the seasons when the lake is not frozen, move between the islands. Often, a boat between the individual villages is faster than a car.
A curious fact is that Lake Saimaa is extremely clean, despite the heavy water traffic. You can seeup to 6 m depth. And the nature around is very clean as well. Indeed, Finland is an sparsely populated country. And even regional centres like Savonlinna are far more peaceful and unpopulated, compared to most other urban areas across Europe.

We also have a separate article about the city of Savonlinna and its attractions, which is worth reading.
Lusto Forest Museum
About 30 km from Savonlinna, on another island in Lake Saimaa, is the Finnish Forest Museum Lusto. Caring for nature and living in harmony with it is a national philosophy of Finns, especially those who live outside the big cities. The museum has interesting exhibitions of everything related to the forest – mushrooms, forest houses, plant and animal species, and even wood-cutting machines.




Our tour guide talks almost fanatically about nature and forests and it is clear that he is very dedicated to the topic. For us, the most interesting topic is the food that the forest provides and which is part of the daily life of the people in these areas. They are mainly mushrooms and berries, and rye is extremely popular among cereals. Various herbs also play a special role in life here. And a few decades ago, during bad years, birch bark was also used to make bread. This, of course, was not very good for the stomach, but in the absence of an alternative, such a practice also existed.
Food at Lake Saimaa
In Finland, there is a law that gives all residents and guests of the country, including tourists, the right to freely pick from the gifts of nature, including mushrooms, berries, nuts, herbs, flowers and anything else they find useful. This also includes fishing. Also, everyone has the right to walk, cycle or ski and stay for a short time (for example, a few days in a tent) anywhere where this is not prohibited (for example, it is not private property and is not agricultural land). Therefore, quite expectedly, the culinary traditions in the region are strongly tied to what the forest and the lake provide.


Muikku
The most famous product, and the one we like the most, is muikku. It is a small fish that lives in abundance in Lake Saimaa and is popular throughout Finland and beyond. In Bulgarian, the species is ripus, which is from the Trout family.
Muiku is usually served fried, rolled in rye flour, and is incredibly tasty. It’s time to put aside our prejudices against small fish. If you want to take Muiku home, you can buy one of the many types of canned Muiku, prepared in various ways.

Smoked muiku is popular, preserved with salt and rapeseed oil. In fact, rapeseed oil is quite common here. Smoked muiku may surprise you because the aroma is strong, smoky, real wood smoke. It has nothing to do with the smoked sausages and fish that we are used to eating here.
Muiku from Lake Puruvesi

Puruveden muikku is a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) product, due to its excellent taste and purity. Puruveden is part of the Saimaa lake complex and is considered the cleanest part of the entire lake, with visibility at a depth of 6–10 meters.

If you want to buy an original local product, you can also look for products with the DOSaimaa label. This is the regional quality certificate.
During our trip to Finland, we also visited a muiku processing factory – Kerimaki Fish House, where they showed us the journey of the fish from the lake to restaurants and other processing facilities. They told us that they supply some of the most exquisite restaurants in Helsinki and export all over the world.


Here is the moment to add that it is difficult to learn so many details if you travel as a solo tourist. Our trip was in connection with a very nice project that Mimi is professionally involved with – SMEOrigin . Its goal is to support producers of regional foods with protected geographical indications and thus support the preservation of local flavors, which are a huge wealth and an asset for the economy. In connection with this project, we have also visited the Achaia Clauss Winery in Greece, the Messolonghi Lagoon and other places.
Mushrooms
Dozens of species of mushrooms can be found in the forests around Lake Saimaa. Some of them are very poisonous, others very tasty. At the market in Savonlinna we came across a great exhibition of mushrooms and a scale ranking them according to their edibility and taste. The problem with mushrooms is like with fish – you are not sure whether they are available in your country and whether they are the same or some other variety. That is why we bought a bag of dried mushrooms straight from there, of the ones that are considered the tastiest.




Forest fruits
We all love strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, but the selection of berries around Lake Saimaa doesn’t end there. In fact, other berries are more popular in the area, and they’re all known as superfoods.
Lingonberry (this is the English name that you will encounter on restaurant menus, at the market, and when speaking English to locals) is a lingonberry, the most common wild fruit in Finland. Wherever you go in the country, you will come across lingonberry jam or compote, or they will be put in some kind of sauce. They are also sold freely in the markets.

Cloudberry is a wild blackberry, orange in color. Locals swear by its beneficial properties. The fruit itself tastes… well, sour-bitter. In general, most of the fruits we tried had a sour taste. But even in these latitudes, you can’t expect a taste like fruits ripened in the southern sun.

In the markets you will see many more types of dark blue fruits like blueberries and blackcurrants and they all come from the forest in the summer. You can find them preserved in the form of jam, which is quite different from our jams. There the addition of sugar is very limited, so it is more sweet and sour.
Bread, rye and oats
The traditional cereals here are rye and oats. Rye bread is extremely popular. Another popular food is porridge – rye, oat or rye-oat. In every hotel for breakfast you will see a bowl of porridge, often at the market. We attended an organized local market of regional products and the municipality of Savonlinna had made sure to provide free porridge for all interested visitors. The queue was huge.

Lörtsy
Almost every region of the world we’ve been to has some traditional pastry product that everyone loves. Here it is Lörtsy. Lörtsy is something like a big fried doughnut stuffed with different things. The most popular is stuffed with minced meat. The surprise for us was that the filling is actually minced meat and rice. So, imagine a dough product, fried, stuffed with minced meat and rice. Fried like this, Lörtsy can be eaten directly or folded in half and onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard added. If you like pasta and that type of sandwich, you’ll probably like it.

Meat
If you are a fan of meat, not fish, you will find meat everywhere. Beef, pork, lamb. There are farms in the region for everything. We must admit that we do not like lamb, but we were delighted with the lamb from a local farm, prepared for us at one of the organized dinners of the project. The conclusion is: try everything! Especially if you are in a region with culinary traditions so far from yours.
The seals of Saimaa
One of the lake’s most beloved, but also most mysterious inhabitants, is the Saimaa seal. It is a rare species of ringed seal, one of the few seals that live in fresh water. Its cousins from the same family inhabit the Arctic Ocean, but this one is lake-dwelling and very special. This species (Pusa hispida saimensis or Saimaannorppa) is found only in Lake Saimaa. The story goes that after the last ice age, the population of these seals was separated from the others. Thus, the Saimaa seals lived for over 9,500 years in isolation, developing into a separate subspecies. Today, their population is only about 400 individuals, and local authorities and conservationists are doing everything in their power to protect them and help them reproduce.

To catch a glimpse of a Saimaa seal is a stroke of luck, and some of our group managed to do so during our boat trip on the lake. But, as we said, the seal is mystical, and by the time the rest of us turned around and looked, it had already disappeared.


Useful: how to communicate with locals in Finland
To our great surprise, a large part of Finns speak English, even those in the countryside and villages. And it is quite natural for them to answer you in this language if you ask them something. Most will not be surprised even for a moment. So, although the local language is extremely strange, communicating with everyone in Finland is easy and pleasant.
And what about the Finns? The first and strongest impression is that they are extremely calm people. They seem very patient and generally sociable. They may not rush to kiss you, as we do in southern countries, but they are extremely friendly. After visiting there, we have almost given up looking for the “cold people” that we have only heard myths about.

