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...)

Turku

(September 21-22)
Turku was once the capital of Finland, under Swedish rule. When the Russians took over in 1808, they put their provincial capital at Helsinki. Finland was never a country until this century, but somehow still managed to keep its identity.

So the main thing to see there is the castle:



The castle would appear to have been fairly rubbish, because although Finland stayed Swedish for several hundred years, it was always getting conquered. It's surprisingly big on the inside compared with how it looks from the outside. It had us busy for several hours despite the fact very little of the explanations were in English. Finland's second language is Swedish, so there was no chance of us understanding any of that either!

Hence, there was lots of cool stuff like this very old fresco, but what with our lack of Finnish or Swedish we can't tell you anything about it ;0)


And here's Saint Martin watching over Charlton Athletic's fortunes. He was apparently a 4th century French bishop with a penchant for helping beggars who was for some reason very popular in Finland:


We popped into a Viking Festival they nicely put on for us. The Reindeer was yummy! But we'd just learnt in the museum the potatoes it came with weren't at all traditional.


Our first night was in a hostel that was nothing special, but they had no room for us the 2nd night and we ended up at a great B&B. They even have their own "Hotel Inspector", here investigating Joanna's pack:


We caught up with a family friend of the MacKenzies. Tiina came out to see us even though she had a poorly foot and gave us a good rundown of Finnish culture and history. She still can't believe we made it to Turku before Ma and Pa Mackenzie. We put them to shame!


And lastly, some of Finland's beautiful autumn colours - they were gorgeous all over the country: