Helsinki

Appropriately, I sit in a café with a cup of coffee writing this, my first*, blog post. I say appropriately as the Finns consume more coffee per capita than any other nation in the world (Katie’s colleague opined that it must be due to self-medication to deal with the long dark winters). Our trip began last week with the shortest 9 hour flight I have ever taken – it went by quickly and before we knew it, we were in Paris waiting for our connecting flight to Helsinki. (One side benefit of having to follow my wife around the world was earning status on Delta. The status has allowed me to book exit row seating – which was a godsend for my long legs.) We arrived in Helsinki on Friday afternoon and Katie and I explored the city that weekend before her training started.

Helsinki is a small compact city which made the site seeing quite easy – what has not made the site seeing so easy are the layers of ice and water on the sidewalks. For some reason most buildings do not remove that from their sidewalks, and the city’s solution is to throw down small rocks to help you gain traction. It was a bit odd at first, but after a fall free weekend that must be some reason to that madness.

Katie and I packed in a lot in those days going to museums, visiting markets, exploring the City on self-guided walking tours, and taking the ferry to Suomenlinna – the City’s Maritime Fortress. Helsinki is a great starting point for our trip as English is widely spoken, the City is small and intimate, and we can get our “traveling to foreign land” legs under us. In addition, we learned a lot about the history of the region, a history I was very ignorant of before coming here. For example, did you know that Helsinki was considered Axis-Lite? While they didn’t fight alongside the Nazis, they did receive arms for allowing the Nazis to move through Finland to occupy Norway. Due to this assistance, as war reparations Finland lost a large portion of Karelia to Russia.

(notice all the ice in the bay)

(KTP keeping her eye out for the pesky Russians)

One downside to this trip is traveling during the tourist offseason. Time and time again I have been thwarted as many museums, parks, and tourist sites are closed for repairs or to change exhibitions. This has been frustrating, and hopefully we don’t run into that issue in such a major way again.

We are off this afternoon to Joensuu as part of Katie’s training. The trip is about 440 kilometers and about halfway from Helsinki to the Arctic Circle. By looking at maps, I am guessing that it will look a lot like northern Minnesota - plentiful lakes amid the pine/spruce trees. We come back on Friday, and then head to St. Petersburg on Saturday.

* As this is my first post, there are still some blogger.com nuances I need to figure out. One are pictures and possibly appropriate sizing - so please bear with me.