Day 22: Diving into Rauma's Museums + Soukainen Dairy Farm

Today morning, Marja and I skimmed through the Tourist Guides of Rauma, and we discovered that most of the museums in Old Rauma were free for children under the age of 18! I wanted to take advantage of this learning opportunity, so we planned out a route that would cover all the major museums, which started from the Kirsti Museum and ended at the Marsela Museum.

She dropped off Camilla and I at our first destination-- Kirstimuseo, which was once the house of a peasant sea man. 

Kirsti Museum. What a quaint little house!

China dogs on the window sill! When a sailor was at sea, these dogs would be turned outwards facing the street, indicating that their master was away.

We had our own private tour guide! She was very sweet and knowledgeable. 

After musing over the artifacts for about an hour, we went to the Old Town Hall in the middle of Rauma, which housed the second museum, Raumamuseo. Raumamuseo mainly delineated the history and unique structure of Rauma century by century ever since the 1400s, when Swedes had first founded the town.

In the museum's gift shop, I found an amazing authentically ancient pen that came with an ink jar! I bought one pen that came with a blue ink jar and another pen that came with a green ink jar for 6 euros each.

Old Town Hall--again!

Camilla thoughtfully staring at a museum exhibit

In front of the Marela Museum

It was fascinating to witness the juxtaposition between the Marela Museum, which was once an opulent mansion of a wealthy sailor and the Kirsti Museum, which was once the humble abode of a peasant sailor. 

Marela Museum. The fireplaces and chandeliers were absolutely stunning.

After coming back home, I tested out my new pen and ink jar!

A note I wrote using the cool pen I bought at the Raumamuseo!

The style of the pen and ink jar is reminiscent of the writing tools Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson used to craft their important documents!!!

At 4 in the afternoon, Camilla received a call from her friend Suvi (whom I had met at the summer cottage) inviting us to tour her family's huge dairy farm! I had never seen cows up close before, so this was the perfect opportunity to do so.

Suvi's dad monitors the dairy cows from his study via a cow camera. 

The cow milking machine. If you look closely, you can see the utters being attached to suction cups. 

What I totally did not expect was for the milking process to be so technologically revolutionized. Going into the barn, I was expecting to see farm workers sitting on an upside-down rusty pail, squeezing streams of milk from a cow's utter into another bucket. What I saw at the Soukainen farm completely dispelled every preconceived notion I had about dairy farming. It's a highly quantitative process, with robots operating from algorithms and births and period calendars (girls will understand this) calculated down to the very day. Every single cow was tracked from an app on his iPhone and from there he could check the cow's health. 

The entire milking process is mechanized, so little physical labor is required of the Soukainen family. The gates leading from each cow's pen to the robot milking station is perfectly timed so that at 10 minute intervals, another gate will unlock automatically and the cow will walk itself out to be milked. There are sensors that detect where each utter is located, and then suction cups attach themselves to each utter, eventually pumping out the milk. The pipes which the milk goes through after being pumped out from the dairy cows converge into a single tank, where temperature is accurately regulated and percentage fat/protein is discerned. 

                                                

The highly technological process that Suvi's dad uses to organize and keep track of the milk each cow produces. The red indicates that the gate has been unlocked, and the yellow indicates gates that are ready to be unlocked for the milking process to commence. Each cow is milked by a machine, which I attached a picture of above. 

Me with the Soukainen family's hundreds of cows! They smell funny, but you get used to the earthy scent.

More cows. They are feeding on hay.

Me with Suvi and her sister Armi! Suvi is one of Camilla's best friends, and her family owns the entire dairy farm.

"Tervetuloa" means "welcome" in Finnish!

Suvi's family has a village and street named after them!

The view from Suvi's backyard--how breathtaking.