Snow and Chocolate in Helsinki!

Yes, SNOW has arrived in Helsinki!  
We were so lucky to have no snow until 2012!  But it is here and the Finns are thrilled!  It does brighten up the dark days!

Here is the view from one of our windows...this is a day care next door!

And yes, the kids play in the snow for recess!!!

We even had icicles form on our window.

One thing that is impressive is the snow removal here.  At least 

3 times a day the small snow plows come down our sidewalk to 

clear the snow. They are more concerned with sidewalks than 

streets since so many people walk everywhere!

We had snow on our enclosed deck--the flakes were so tiny and 

were blowing in every direction so that they made it through the cracks

Now on to a happier subject...CHOCOLATE!!!

The most famous candy here is made by 

Fazer candy is everywhere and really is delicious!  The office staff scheduled a tour of the factory for the five of them, us, and 6 missionaries!

Although we were very disappointed that we didn't get to actually tour the factory to see candy made and wrapped we did do a lot of eating.  There were bowls of candy in the waiting room and suckers were handed to us as we went in to view films telling about the history and making of the chocolates!

Paul is standing by a display of cocoa beans.  They claim there

 are 3 cups of milk in every milk chocolate bar:

This is a blown up version of the most famous chocolate bar...

We do love Fazer chocolate and eat it every day!!!

At the end of the tour we could help ourselves to all the samples we could eat.  It was fun to try many different flavors and choose our favorites!

This definitely was the most fun part of the tour!!!

We gathered some of our wrappers for this last shot:

There was a factory store there so of course, to be polite, we 

had to purchase several chocolate bars (bigger than these)!!!