Helsinki, Finland

September 2, 2009, Wednesday
Helsinki, Finland

We were up at the crack of dawn (5am) in order to get to the airport to catch our flight to Finland. It was pouring when we left the hotel and it rained all the way to the airport. We had a terrible time finding long term parking but we finally found it and got a parking spot right close to the bus pick-up station, so all was well and we arrived in plenty of time. They had no check in desk, only machines, in Swedish, to allow you to get your boarding pass. I fiddled around with the darned machine for a bit and finally figured it out and out popped two lovely boarding passes!! I was VERY pleased!

The flight over was smooth and fast. In fact, the pilot made the usual announcements about how long the flight would take and what the cruising altitude would band he said, “We will reach our cruising altitude of 29,000 feet and we will stay there for……one minute, and then we will land…..” Nobody else on the plane seemed to notice what he said but I thought it was hysterical. It truly was an up and down flight though. Only lasted about 45 minutes. When we landed, the weather was sunny and lovely and the whole day has been grand.

The airport is a long ways out from the city and so we took an airport bus in to the city and then a tram from the city center to our hotel. We really get along very well on public transportation and it certainly is an easy way to travel over here. Since we only had one small carry on bag, it was no problem to get on and off a bus and tram. Ad over here I’ve never seen so many people hauling suitcases around. It is almost hazardous to walk down the sidewalks because so many people and pulling suitcases. I’m just going to have to pay more attention at home to whether there are tons of people in our country pulling suitcases. It feels like the whole world is traveling!!

We walked around our hotel this afternoon. We are right on the shoreline and we can see the cruise terminal and some stacks of containers. There really isn’t very much around here though so tomorrow we will take the tram in to the city center and probably buy a pass on the hop on hop off bus. Those things work really well for us and we use them whenever we can.

I brought two small change purses and thought that would solve the varying currency problem. Silly me!! I have Euros, Danish Kroners, Swedish Kroners and now we may wind up with Finnish money, although we’ve been led to believe that we may be able to use euros here. Europe must have been a mess before the euro. I’m glad I didn’t travel over here then. I’m going nuts with 3 currencies and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been back when!!!

Our Internet is FREE here (not a common thing) but the connectivity is not very good and I can’t find anything better to pirate, so we’ll see if I can actually publish my blog or if I will need to stack them up. And probably phone calls won’t work well. To make phone calls you really need a pretty good connection. Ah well!!

About 3 this afternoon I decided that I would probably die if I didn’t get some ice cream, so we walked all over the place trying to find some and finally came back to the hotel and got some in the dining room. They have an Italian restaurant here and the menu looked decent so we will probably eat here tonight. Imagine going to Finland to eat Italian!! There is something wrong with this picture but I’m getting pretty tired of some of the weird food we have been getting so some nice pasta sounds pretty good right now!!

We have a very nice room here at the Radisson SAS (pronounced “sass” by the locals). And YES!!! I have a hairdryer!! I can hardly wait to use it and see a person I know looking back at me in the mirror!!