Helsinki

(September 23 & 24)

So we made it back to Helsinki and the saga of parting from our faithful Clio continued. We had a few near misses with one charity and a former work colleague, but it wasn't meant to be so the Finnish Government "kindly" took it off our hands for free! We were given this tip off by a nice lady at the British Embassy who had come up against the same problem. Customs just give you a piece of paper and that's it! So here's us with the clio in our last moments together:




As it took us quite a while failing to give the car to anyone charitable, and then running around finding a customs person who actually knew the correct procedure, we didn't end up doing anything touristy in Helsinki. The buildings were very pretty though:




We went down a street museum which had what the "street furniture" was in different decades from 1800 on, but that didn't make for good photos.

Here's Ben completing the Finnish leg of his drinking challenge though:

As Finland wasn't on the original itinerary, we had to find out the drink ourselves. It turns out not to be Finlandia, but Kossu, and even better a liquorice version of Kossu called Salmari. It tastes just like chewing on a stick of liquorice. The barman, intrigued by our story also gave us a shot of a version the kids are all drinking these days: Fisu. It tastes exactly like chewing on a Fisherman's Friend sweet. Weird.

(we're currently in Moscow in mid-twenties sunshine. Our heavy coats we brought are all a bit much...)