France, England, Belgium, Copenhagen & Helsinki

Our last full day in Helsinki. I feel I am very ready to come home. The day started out cold but clear, and we headed out to try breakfast at a lovely old cafe in the centre of Esplanadi Park, called 'Kapelli' because it was a former chapel. As it turned out, it was the kind of place that relies more on location and reputation than excellence in food. They really do not understand the art of a good breakfast here! On the way back to the hotel, we visited an indoor Christmas market - held in a former town hall - which was actually very interesting. It was an arty-crafty kind of place with each stall manned by the person who actually made the items, so we saw a different range of things to the usual fare. I told myself only to buy something that I would actually use, and I only had 10 euro on me anyway, so I came out with nothing. But, while we were inside, it had started to snow. It's amazing the difference it makes to the look of a city with snow falling! The slushy muddy s...

We had breakfast bright and early in the hotel restaurant this morning and caught a taxi in the dark to the Harbour to catch our ferry to Tallinn. The ferry didn't leave until 10.30am, but we had to be there an hour before it left and the harbour was a half-hour drive away from our hotel. These ferries are enormous boats - multistorey with one whole floor acting as a duty-free department store, another as a food hall, with lots of different restaurants and then spaces for people just to hang out, including lounges. There are five decks set aside for cars and trucks. Embarking and disembarking all ran like a well-oiled machine, which I suppose is what you would expect considering these ferries go back and forth several times a day, every day of the year. Our lounge was quite full on the way over, but we nabbed a comfy seat, checked out the rather uninteresting snacks and then took a tour around the boat to see what was on offer. Apparently the boat can fit 2,800 people, so there wer...

Another quiet day in Helsinki. (I think we may have planned a few too many days here!) It was raining a little, but not enough to make walking around unpleasant. After breakfast at a cafe, we visited the Ateneum Art Museum to see the Modern Gothic Exhibition. It was a lovely exhibition, in spite of being full of primary school children on an excursion. (One of them asked Jim where a certain painting was because he thought he was an attendant. He first spoke in Finnish and then smoothly switched to English when Jim didn't understand. They are amazing!) Here are some of my favourite paintings. The first one was voted Finland's national painting. Hugo Simberg: A Wounded Angel Arnold Bocklin: Self Portrait with the Devil Marianne Stokes: Death & the Maiden After the Museum, we did a bit of shopping and then had lunch of pho at a Vietnamese restaurant. The pho was good but the spring rolls we ordered were like nothing I have ever seen. They were enormous and made of a strange pa...

Woke to a lovely Helsinki day, a clear sky and no snow. We both felt a little under the weather, very tired and lethargic. I wonder if it's a hangover from whatever Jim had in Copenhagen? We headed out for breakfast at the Old Market Hall. I think the Copenhagen Market is much better. This one seems to be 90% reindeer and fish and very Finnish food. I suppose it's hard to criticise a country for selling traditional food, but it would have been nice to have some alternatives.  We had what we thought would be a fairly ordinary breakfast - coffee and scrambled eggs & avocado for Jim, and a poached egg with hummus and toast and avocado for me. Jim got served scrambled eggs in a bowl with a scoop of avocado on top. He had to pay extra to get toast. Mine was cold toast, cold hummus, cold avocado and a warm poached egg, all on top of each other. A very odd experience. From there, we strolled along the harbour, looking at all the ferries and seeing where the water in various little...

When we woke this morning, it was actually snowing. Amazing! Just light delicate snowflakes but still, it was pretty impressive. We had coffee at a nearby cafe and then headed off to meet our tour guide for our Helsinki Food Tour. Our guide was Lara, a very softly spoken Russian woman. Very sweet, but not really the right personality for a tour guide as she was very serious and a little shy.  Still, she took us round the city and gave us a bit of history as well as getting us to try a lot of traditional Finnish food that we otherwise wouldn't have tried. (Some good and some not so good!) We started off in the Old Market Hall at one of the food stalls. It's a lovely covered market with lots of seating for customers, so we will definitely come back. Salmon on Rye Bread, Shrimp in Mayonnaise and Pickled Herring - it wasn't smoked salmon. I think it might have been raw, or maybe lightly cured. The bread was heavy and dull and I wasn't too keen on this. The shrimp was perfec...

Today was a day of travel. Fortunately, Jim woke up feeling almost 100%, which was a great relief! We had to check out at 11am and I made Jim take the Metro to the airport, even though he was leaning towards taking a taxi. It was very easy, and took up a bit of time, which we needed to do. Even so, we got to the airport by noon and our flight didn't leave until 3pm, so there was a lot of sitting around - and no lounge to sit in! The flight was very straightforward but the plane was full of tall athletic young men with 'International Floorball Federation' t-shirts and gold medals hanging around their necks. Something told us they had won a big competition of some kind. 😄 We fell about laughing though, when one of the players came on board with an enormous gold cup in his arms. As the plane came in to land, we saw huge piles of snow everywhere. It looks like Helsinki is going to be a whole lot colder than Copenhagen! When we came off the plane, we discovered a whole lot of n...