Koskipuisto & Tampella

 

Koskipuisto & Tampella

Immediately across Hameensilta bridge from Keskustori is Koskipuisto.  

Koski means rapids, like the Tammerkoski.  Puisto means park.  Koskipuisto is probably the most distant neighborhood that we regularly visit.  You can technically walk there from Amuri, but it’s a bit of a hike.  But we find ourselves tramming there pretty regularly for a few different reasons.

The first is this awesome park that the kids call “frog” park. 

It has several different play areas, including a mock city and tug boat, as well as a more advanced climber for Milo.  It also has a tire swing that Oscar is ridiculously cute in.  It is one of our most visited parks.

Right next to frog park is a beautiful stretch of green right along the rapids with benches and vibrant red flowers.  

You can see both Hameensilta bridge and Finlayson in the distance. 

Just north of Koskipuisto is Tampella, an industrial area very similar to Finlayson, which is just across the river.  It’s also home to our second museum, Vapriikki.  It’s really like six museums wrapped into one.  And it’s free on Friday afternoons, so that’s where we go most Fridays.

It has a Postal Museum with a history of Finland’s postal service with an exhibit of stamps from all over the world,

and a VR headset that lets you pretend to be a delivery driver. 

There’s a radio museum (including a recording space to host your own podcast).  The top floor is the Finnish Hockey Hall of Fame.  They have all of the trophies, and old jerseys (including our team, Ilves).  

They also have a goal you can practice shooting on and a VR game where you play goalkeeper.  

The kids liked them.  Unfortunately they are often dominated by thirty year old men who take them very seriously.  There’s a museum dedicated to the Finlayson factory, with a history of its evolution.  

It has a great scale model of one of the buildings, and when you look in the windows you see both little models and also moving holographic projections.  The kids love it.

The main attractions though are the Natural History Museum (Oscar’s favorite) and the Finnish Gaming Museum (Milo’s).  The Natural History Museum is very interactive with lots of taxidermied animals, and exhibits on the ecosystems and flora and fauna of the region.  Finns really love creating scenes that are sort of like dioramas with painstaking attention to detail, and the museum is filled with them.  They are pretty cool, and Oscar gets pretty excited about them.

The gaming museum is super cool.  It covers mostly video games, but also board games and tabletop games.  

There's even a section devoted to individual Finns dungeons and dragons campaigns. 

I guess you can afford to focus on things like that when you have such a small population.  There’s a focus on Finnish designed games, of which there have been a surprising amount.  They have an arcade, and also stations to play games scattered around.  

But the coolest part are that they have these rooms that are decorated and appointed with the same furniture and décor of the era that the featured game console came from, and you can play it right there.  For me it was kind of like walking through my life – playing Atari in a room that looked like my grandparents living room; 

playing Nintendo on a desk under my bunk bed; 

a standup trial sega console in a video game store 

or playstation in a college basement.  

I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but it all felt very wholesome and nostalgic.  Those are the reasons that Vapriikki is one of our favorites.

Actually, scratch that.  It was the snacks and the gift shop.  Because despite Vapriikki being as cool as it was, those were the two things our kids talked about the most.

Our favorite Koskipuisto stop has been Pella’s Café.  It’s right next to the tram stop on the Hameenkatu, and the perfect start to a day (or for a Fika break after playing at frog park).  They have a gorgeous breakfast buffet…but we haven’t tried it because it’s 35 euro a pop for adults, and they charge kids depending on their age.  

So we usually just settle for a cappuccino and a pastry.  The cappuccinos come with complimentary chocolate.  

They have lovely Korvapuusti (cinnamon rolls) for the grownups, 

and the kids love their brownie cookies.  

They also have the most adorable logo in Tampere. 

On occasion we have felt adventurous enough to walk all the way home from Vapriikki.  On that day we got caught in a massive rainstorm.  You can tell how much the kids loved it.

That’s Koskipuisto, one of our favorite stops in all of Tampere. 

Hei Hei