Back to Helsinki

Time to head back to Helsinki. Check out the snowy/icy taxiway. Who said it wasn't cold up here in Joensuu? It's at about the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska I found out. It must be just as cold up there I imagine. Luckily the plane didn't go careening of the tarmack and lifted off no problem. It's got to be one of those "they do it all the time so it's no big deal" things, unlike drivers in SC who freak when they see a snowflake. The flight was uneventful except for my ear block. Usually the Valsalva maneuver clears them up ok, but I got a bit of a cold up in Joensuu that must have prevented the ear from clearing properly. It finally popped in the airport. I thought I was going to go half-deaf for the rest of the day.

Finland has some nice scenery from the air. I think I was told thousands of lakes, but I forget the count, maybe 80,000? The pic at left shows Joensuu, on the left side of the image. The right image shows us a bit further and closer to Helsinki and sunset.

Once in Helsinki (50 min flight) I took the bus from the airport to the train station in the city center. It's a bit cheaper (5€ instead of the 35€ or so for a taxi). The only trouble with this savings is that I then had to hunt around on foot for the hotel. I had a small map but had actually overestimated the distance to the street I was looking for from the train station. And I'd forgotten that the street signs in European cities such as this one are on building corners intead of street sign poles. So I kept looking up for street signs and getting confused by these informative direction arrows (this far to the train station and the like). Eventually I had to double back to the train station to find that the street in the pic to the right is the one I should have stayed on in the first place instead of going beyond it.

Here's my hotel room in Helsinki. The other problem I had with finding the hotel is with their hotel names. There seem to be only two kinds of hotels: Scandic and Sokos. And then they differentiate based on street or district or something. So there's Scandic hotel something and Scandic hotel Marski (the one I'm in). There's also a bunch of Sokos hotel this and Sokos hotel that. Time to head out for some pub grub.