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"Finland. Finland. Finland. A country where I’d quite like to be, etc, etc..."

Helsinki

 

After a surprisingly good night’s sleep on a bunk bed in a shoebox, it was up & out of the ferry to see what Helsinki had to offer (although I think staying up until 3am to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics may have helped – especially watching 204 countries walking around a running track).


With the Monty Python Finland song permanently on loop in my head, I was hoping for the following:


Pony trekking, camping, watching TV, eating breakfast, dinner or snack lunch in the hall. Mountains so lofty and tree tops so tall.


Well, I think we ticked off only 2 of those, and watching TV and eating dinner could of course be done anywhere (although we did actually see some ponies in the ubiquitous Scandinavian square with a fountain. Didn’t see a hall where we could eat a snack lunch though).


Helsinki is very cool, much like how impressive all Scandinavian cities have been (Stockholm probably takes the cake though). It is surprisingly small however, and hiring some bikes meant we kind of saw the city in about an hour, and were then a little twiddling our thumbs for the next few hours. But, it was the World Design Festival, so there were a few bits on, and they’d definitely built some new museums & buildings in preparation – although they had their fair share of pretty cool looking old buildings already – the main train station was amazing looking.


We started to flag a little later on, so it was time to watch some of the Olympics. Unfortunately, swimming and men’s gymnastics only helped the tiredness, so we had to skip on Club Vatican and the Chinese restaurant’s Karaoke night. However tempted we may have been.

Day 13

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