France, England, Belgium, Copenhagen & Helsinki

We woke late and had a leisurely breakfast and are now just hanging about waiting to check out and go to the airport.  The first day in weeks I haven't worn long johns. Yay! I'm looking forward to coming home to sunshine and long days. The plan is to take my travel sickness medication and not eat much, if at all, on the flight and hope that I manage to get home without feeling sick. Let's see how it goes! P.S. It worked well, and I felt fine.

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...

An odd day. We woke up to clear skies - and probably the best weather we've had since we arrived in Copenhagen. But Jim also woke up feeling sick - somewhere between the flu and gastro. He was convinced it was the food at the fish and chip place last night. We went out for a walk and some breakfast, to see if that would make him feel better, but it definitely didn't and he didn't want to eat anything. (It didn't stop me having a coffee and something called a Christmas Focaccia, which was stuffed with salami and cheese and pickled cabbage. The bread also, was a strange red colour - presumably festive food colouring.) Jim came back to the room for a sleep and I headed out to stroll around the area. There are lots of streets and directions we haven't explored, as we are usually heading towards the Metro.  There is a fabulous church tower near the apartment with a wonderful spiral staircase which I've been wanting to climb so I thought that would be a perfect thing ...

Another rather miserable day with on-again/off-again drizzle, but we didn't let it stop us and headed off to visit Christianborg Palace - the former home of the Danish royal family and now the seat of parliament. It was quite an impressive place. They made us put on little disposable shoe covers before we were allowed into the hallowed halls. (I suspect they were tired of cleaning Copenhagen mud off the fancy carpets.) There was lots of interesting history about Queen Margrethe II and how she abdicated in January this year in favour of Frederik (and our Mary).  One of the best rooms was the Tapestry Hall - filled with maybe a dozen enormous tapestries made in honour of the Queen's 50th birthday (in the year 2000). They showed lots of scenes from Danish history, up until the present day - including showing Queen Margrethe as Eve giving her husband, the Prince Consort, an apple. (Not sure what that was about!) Anyway, I spent a pleasant half hour looking at the details in all the...

We had breakfast at the same local bakery this morning before heading off to Copenhagen Central Station on the Metro. It was a bit of a miserable day today - light rain. Cold is okay, but rain is not nice! We were hoping for better weather in Sweden. At Copenhagen Central, we bought tickets for Malmo (only $38 return) and easily found our station. The trip took about 30 minutes and we went over the spectacular Oresund Bridge and through the Oresund Tunnel. Quite amazing! (obviously not my photo) When we reached Malmo, we found it was also raining - and just as miserable as in Copenhagen. We wandered around through some rather nice city squares and looked at buildings, had a coffee at a coffee house, and were pondering what to do next, when the rain finally decided to stop. We discovered that Malmo also has a Market Hall, so we walked along the river to find it and had a rather nice pizza at one of the stalls. We felt after this that we had seen enough of Malmo and caught the train back...

We had breakfast at a local bakery today - just a coffee and a pastry and a bottle of water (and it came to $40!) We didn't want to eat too much because of our food tour at 10.30am. We used the Metro again to get back into the city to meet our guide - an effervescent, charming Italian girl with bright red hair, called Sonia. She was originally from Naples, but her family now live in Calabria. She was the perfect tour guide - vivacious, chatty, enthusiastic, and able to give an outsider's view of Danish life.  The social welfare and healthcare system is exemplary, as you would expect. Even the homeless (of which there are very few) are all documented and supported. Prisons have strong rehabilitation programs and it is quite hard to get sent to prison, as they are quite relaxed about drugs and alcohol. Everyone is very law abiding and they do not think defensively at all. They will leave their phones on the table while they go off to the toilet in a restaurant - and they will eve...

We had breakfast in the bar this morning. In spite of the good reviews, it was very simple - not many options and very simply presented. I had bread, butter and cheese, which was very tasty, but not very exciting. Jim had scrambled eggs, which was just a small plate of scrambled eggs with some black bread. We think we might try elsewhere for breakfast in future. After that, we rugged up for our first real venture out into the Copenhagen Winter. We were very proud of ourselves because we negotiated the Danish Metro system, (incredibly easy), and headed off into the centre of town. Our first stop was the Rosenborg Palace - former home of the Royal family. It was quite a modest palace, with small rooms but, of course, lavishly decorated. It was only spoiled by the fact that the lighting was incredibly dim. I suppose it was to protect all the furniture and tapestries etc, but it did make reading the guide leaflet almost impossible and taking photos wasn't much better. I resolved to loo...

We woke nice and early and checked out of our hotel after breakfast. The hotel was actually in the terminal, so getting to our flight was extremely easy and not stressful at all. A good decision to come here a day early, I think. We flew Scandinavian Airlines and it was only a 1:40 minute flight to Copenhagen. It felt almost like taking a domestic flight because we only had to show our passport once, just as we boarded. Jim had ordered a car to meet us at the airport, which was nice and luxurious. Our hotel is called 'Kanalhuset' - or 'Canal House' because it is right next to the water. It is a rather strange arrangement -  because the front door is very unassuming and it looks just like a set of apartments. There was even a list of names beside bells, so we assumed that people live here as well as hotel guests.  It turns out that the apartments are given people's names - not numbers. We're in H. Anderson - who has a name and a bell! Our first issue was finding ...

We had a surprisingly nice breakfast at our hotel, and then decided to do a bit of sightseeing. We walked to the Reims Notre Dame Cathedral and were quite amazed. It is so tall! The ceilings were incredibly high! Quite impressive. We had an enjoyable walk around peering into all the side chapels and looking at the stained glass windows. They have a set of Marc Chagall windows here - which are always interesting. My favourite thing was probably the list of French kings that have been crowned here up on the wall. March Chagall windows After the Cathedral, we checked out and headed off to Paris Airport to return our hire car. It served us well on our tour around France, England and Belgium - but now it's time for the Scandinavian part of our holiday. We are staying in a nice hotel in the airport because our flight leaves at 11am tomorrow and we thought this would be less stressful. We have a great view of the airfield from our window! We had a nice lunch at the hotel restaurant (Frenc...

After another lovely breakfast and a leisurely packing up, we set off for Reims in France, with a small detour to visit Waterloo. It's literally 12km from Brussels! According to Trip Advisor, the best thing to do in Waterloo was to visit the Wellington Museum, so we did. It was a small museum in a former inn where the Duke of Wellington set up his headquarters. It was very nicely set out and was pretty interesting, but a bit unsatisfying as it concentrated on Wellington and not Napoleon. And it was also in the Waterloo high street and nowhere near the battlefield.  We thought we'd have a quick look to see if you could actually visit the battlefield and, of course you could. And the site has a museum and Visitor's Centre and a glorious lion monument set up on an artificial hill. So we headed off there - about 5km down the road. (We should have gone there to start with.) It was rather sobering to look around at the fields and think what terrible fighting took place here - wit...

Today was an extremely lazy day. We had a lavish breakfast at the hotel - as we expected. There were pastries, lots of different types of bread, crepes, waffles, hot food, dolmathes, fruit, a whole honeycomb, cheese, ham, salami, and more.... We took it slowly and enjoyed ourselves. We initially were going to hop on a tram and go out to the European Parliament Visitor's Centre, but we thought we might walk around the local shops first. Jim was looking for a coat, which he didn't find, but we did find a gorgeous homeware shop and I bought a cat apron - so it wasn't a total waste of time. We also found a beautiful newsagent-type place, where I bought myself a couple of notebooks and a new glasses case with lemurs on it, so I did well out of the shopping trip! After that, it began to rain so we went back to the room. This is why we like to have nice rooms, because we often spend a bit of time in them! We went out for lunch a bit later at a local pizza place, but were a bit dis...

As breakfast wasn't included in this hotel, we ventured out into the chilly dark streets around 7.30am to find a cafe. It turns out nothing opens until 8am, so we wandered around for a while until a nice looking cafe opened its doors. We had a very good breakfast for much less than it would have cost us to eat in the hotel. I had mini pancakes with fruit (including grapes and pomegranate) and Jim had scrambled eggs with avocado and smoked salmon. Before we left Ghent, we decided to visit the famous Gravensteen Castle - which was only 5 minutes from our hotel, smack back in the middle of the city. It was an amazing looking place from the outside - and had obviously been extensively restored. Inside, it was a bit disappointing as the rooms were all empty, except for anachronistic Christmas decorations. It spoiled the atmosphere really. After a fairly speedy tour around the Castle, we walked back to the hotel, packed up and then headed off for an hour drive to Brussels. Brussels is en...

We woke to pretty cold and miserable weather. We had a good breakfast again. Our host is Belgian, but obviously of African origin. She's not much of a talker - but always dresses immaculately. Today she was attired in a silver-grey pantsuit, with statement jewellery, fancy nails and beautiful makeup. Quite an image as she silently serves you breakfast! We headed out to the Groening Museum after breakfast. It's a small museum of Flemish art, with some absolutely beautiful paintings. I took lots of photos to use as desktop backgrounds. One of my favourites was 'Death and the Miser' Jan Provoost. Certainly memorable! After the museum, we headed back to our B&B to check out and drive on to Ghent. It was only an hour drive and this time it was all accomplished without incident. This hotel actually has a place to park your car while checking in. A luxury! The hotel is on a canal, and our room has a river view, which is lovely. Ghent is similar to Bruges, in that there are...

The breakfast was excellent this morning! No waffles - but delicious croissants, bread, cheese, ham, fruit, freshly-squeezed orange juice and scrambled eggs if we wanted. The breakfast room was beautifully decorated. In fact, the whole place has been decorated with a cottage-core theme and you can tell everything is high quality. We realised that it actually is a B&B, because the owner and her family live upstairs, but there is not much interaction and it has the feel of a hotel, rather than someone's home. After breakfast, we set out to visit City Hall and its accompanying museum. The building is a beautiful example of gothic architecture and the walls and ceiling of the hall are absolutely covered with coats of arms, murals, gilding and rosettes. Very impressive. There was also an audiovisual display of the history of Bruges, which was surprisingly interesting. It involved the building of lots of canals and then having them silt up again - over and over for centuries! When we...

We left Canterbury bright and early this morning to head to Dover for our ferry. We were so early, in fact, that they let us get on an earlier boat - which meant we literally drove straight on board, without any queuing at all. Wonderful! It was a smooth and luxurious passage, travelling in the lounge, and we disembarked without incident at Calais. We headed straight off to Bruges - but decided to do a slight detour and visit Dunkirk on the way. We stopped at the curiously named 1940 Operation Dynamo Museum, which was fascinating. It was full to the brim of WWII artefacts - uniforms, weapons, medals, ration tins, diaries, photographs and more. It was really interesting, especially considering I was a bit vague to begin with about what actually happened at Dunkirk (which I learned is really spelled 'Dunquerque'). After about an hour wandering around the museum, we left and headed off to Bruges. The drive was relatively straightforward until, of course, we got near our hotel in t...

We woke to blue skies this morning, so decided to go and visit the famous White Cliffs of Dover.  We drove to the National Trust Visitor's Centre and then had a lovely walk along the cliffs to a glorious lookout point. We had a moment of excitement on encountering a herd of cows in one fenced-in section of the path. They are brought in on a regular basis to keep the grass down. They also bring with them a lot of cow manure, so we had to keep our eyes down - rather than on the view. They were also a little alarming at close quarters! After our walk, we sat among the other pensioners at the Visitor's Centre drinking tea and eating scones with jam and cream. Very pleasant! Our timing was excellent, because the sky began to cloud over on our drive back to Canterbury. Our next stop was a visit to the Canterbury Roman Museum, which is located over the ruins of a Roman townhouse - with a lovely mosaic floor. It was quite a simple museum, but with lots of exhibits that they encouraged ...

You won't be surprised to hear, Barb, that we went to an Italian restaurant last night for dinner - although perhaps that's allowable in the UK. It was called 'Il Posticino' and was very good. (Actually, this morning we were talking to an Italian staff member at the hotel and she recommended it as one of the three best Italian restaurants in Canterbury, so we struck lucky.) We weren't particularly hungry after our lunch on the ferry, so we shared a baked polenta entree and then each had pici with a pork ragu for mains. Nice and al dente! We had an 'interesting' night in our hotel. We realised it is sandwiched between two nightclubs that play loud music until the small hours. (Jim booked it without reading any reviews. A big mistake!) The only good thing is they're only open late on Fridays and Saturdays, so we should be fine for the rest of our stay. Jim also realised that he booked an 'accessible room' - which explains the disability supports in...