Friday, 5 October, 2018 – Weather – All over the place as we travel
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At this point I would like to say a bit about the Food in Finland. The food has been rubbished by Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi when they said that Finnish Food and British food are the most boring in the world. A funny thing happened when a Finn company Kotipizza won an international prize for its Pizza Berlusconi, defeating Italian pizzas in the contest.

Pizza Berlusconi is Kotipizza’s product name for a pizza of smoked reindeer, with tomato, cheese, chanterelle mushrooms and red onion.

Kotipizza named the pizza after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in their summer 2008 ad campaign and menu. Berlusconi had caused a minor diplomatic incident in 2005, when he said that he had had to “endure” Finnish cuisine, and joked disparagingly about Finns eating “marinated reindeer”. Although marinated reindeer is a common dish in Lapland, in the rest of Finland the meat is traditionally stewed or dried.

Any way, we are up relatively early and leaving for Helsinki around 11:00. Julie goes out to the food court to get her breakfast.

By the usual 3-1 vote, we start the walk to the train station very early, before Noon. We sit around in uncomfortable, crowded seats in the train station.

The trip takes 2 1/2 hours. The weather changes dramatically at least 8 time along the way. When we arrive in Helsinki, the ground is wet but it is not raining much.

Our host had indicated that we should catch a taxi from the station to the apartment. We picked a medium sized cab and the driver did a remarkable job of cubic close packing to fit everything in. When we get to the apartment, we receive a message that our Host was travelling and we would be met by a delightful young girl, Riika. The door was chocked open when we arrive and Riika arrives shortly after and we go up to the apartment.

She shows us around and after she departs, I take a couple of photos.

We had not had much to eat today so send Julie out to scout around. In the mean time, I throw Ryan out of a spot at the kitchen table to do my work. Outside is a dog park. There are a lot of dogs within and of course a little yapper was chasing them all around.

When we go in, the owner says that they are very busy but eventually we will have food and wine. His Son the cook comes in from outside – he was smoking.

They were quite interesting and gave us some good pieces of advice.

After another long day, it is off to bed

Monday, 1 October, 2018 – Nice Looking Day
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Apologies, but several of the aspects I assigned to yesterday, actually happened today. For example, we started the Hop on Hop Off tour today. However, I am not going to go back and change yesterday’s Post so please tolerate the sequential inaccuracy.

We have the buffet breakfast and them Julie goes up to the roof top and jumps into the pool. As promised, I follow her up with the camera.

We then decided to go on the Hop On/Bus tour and Julie got tickets from the front desk.

She told us the bus would leave in 10 minutes, which we know means 25 minutes. Even after that timeframe, they still did not leave – apparently they were waiting and waiting for another group to arrive. Finally, we got on the road.

Here is where a lot of the stuff from yesterday about the Old Town etc. would be plugged in. We went on all the way around which was a different route than shown on the map, presumably because of all the road construction.

I went back to the Hotel room for napping and Blogging while Julie went out prancing. Some of her photos along the way.

After she came back, we decided we would go back to the store where she got our picnic stuff yesterday. Ryan had got a smoked pork hock and that sounded like a good idea.

Sadly, there were no Ham Hocks available today, a large group of road workers were in the area and they and snaffled them all. So I go for another alternative:

We ate there in the food all with the road workers next to us. Julie had Smoked Salmon and a salad again. I did not finish all of the ribs so we took them with us. It was back to the Hotel to have some more red wine and drift off to sleep.