Kooky Kerimaki

This is my first trip since I arrived in Lappeenranta. One day, my friend Vlad who loves traveling suggest to make a short trip to Kerimaki to see the biggest wooden church in the world. Kerimaki itself is not far from Lappeenranta, only about 3 hour trip using train. We went on Saturday morning and gathered at train station by 9:00 AM.

As soon as we arrived at the Kerimaki train station, we opened the maps to find the route to the Kerimaki Church which is said to be the biggest wooden church. Unfortunately, the church is too far away from the train station, so it is not possible for us to walk there. It started snowing and wet, so we tried to find any sign of bus stop. However, the Kerimaki station itself is quite small and there is no guard inside the train office, so we left clueless. Desperate to find any sign of life (read:people), suddenly an old man was approaching to us with his giant white dog -which looked pretty much like a fox. We hurried asked him for the direction to the Kerimaki Church, but the answer was disappointing: the bus is not run in Saturday, so we need to get a car to go there. 

Run out of solution, now our only hope was to call the tour guide from the church and asked him if he could pick us up. So we waited and waited and again waited for the guy. It was almost one hour since we got off the train, and since then we stood outside in the middle of heavy snowing. When the guy finally came with his car, we were so happy but yet there was still another problem: his car was too small to carry six of us. There is only 4 seats (1 driver and 3 passengers) on the car but we were six people. So we tried as hard as possible to squeeze our body to fill the seat. One person sat on the front with driver and the other four sat on the back - looked just like sardines in the can. Unable to move any further, my friend Vlad decided to wait for other friend who was still driving on the way to Kerimaki. 

The guy from the church was so kind, he was telling us the history of Kerimaki city along the trip. He even stopped for a couple minutes to let us enjoy the view while he was telling the background story. He sounded so vibrant every time he told us the story of his hometown Kerimaki. We could feel his passion in his voice even though sometimes we did not understand his English quite well. After about 20 minutes driving, we arrived at the church. The building was big and the wall was painted bright yellow with white ornament. From the entrance, we could see that the building was divided into two parts: the bigger part for summer church and the smaller part for winter church. Apart from its size, the only difference between the two was whether it had a heater or not. Apparently the summer church was so cold like a refrigerator. Couldn't stand the temperature, we decided to stay on the winter church a bit longer.We stayed here for about one hour before we went to our next destination: Savolinna castle.

On the way to Kerimaki

Summer Church

Winter Church

Outside view of the church