Helsinki, Finland

September 3, 2009, Thursday
Helsinki, Finland

Last night’s dinner was absolutely to die for!! It was just delicious and so attractive. I may stop losing weight if this kind of food keeps appearing in front of me!!

We got up early this morning and breakfast was the best since we left home! Ah food!! I LOVE good food! So after feeding my face, we hopped on the tram and went downtown to try to find the hop on hop off bus. What a joke! We kept getting different directions and we walked all over hell’s half acre before we FINALLY found a square that was obviously VERY important. Sure enough, right out in front of the church on the square was our hop on hop off bus!! By that time, we had traveled half the city and had seen many of the things that we again saw in the bus tour.

I did run in to a Marimeko Store and it was fantastic!! Don found a bench and sat down and I just went NUTS!! The salesgirl told me that I would get over $50 back if I gave her my passport number. Wouldn’t you just know that I didn‘t have the darned thing with me so I cut a deal with her. She is holding my stuff for me and tomorrow I’ll go back with my passport and get my VAT form completed. This was the best of all possible worlds for me because I really didn’t want to haul all my purchases around with me all day!!

It is wonderful to again have a hair dryer!! We actually have two of them in this room…one for each hand, I guess!

There really isn’t a whole lot to see here in Finland. There aren’t very many people and there aren’t very many things that have happened here, so we saw things like the Olympic stadium that was built in 1940 but not used until 1952 (because of WWII) and the statue honoring Sibelius. They do have a church that was built completely IN the rock hill and it is quite amazing. It reminded us of Coby Pedy in Australia.

Tomorrow the plan is to walk up and down the pedestrian mall and to get to the open air market. Not a huge day, so we’ll undoubtedly get a lot of reading done!!