Helsinki & Parainen

Time for my first stint of summer holidays, then! 10 days in Finland to look forward to. The plan was for me to head over and spend a few days on my own there, and Mathilde and our good friends Julie and Aurelien would then join me from Sunday for a week.

I arrived late Tuesday night at Helsinki airport, and took a taxi over to my dad's flat in the centre of Helsinki. I was planning to spend Wednesday in Helsinki, and then head over to our summer cottage in Parainen on Thursday. I scheduled in a lunch with Janne and Aki for Wednesday in Kallio. In spite of the rather cloudy-looking weather, I decided to walk to Kallio (Helsinki is such a great city for pedestrian exploration). We met up for a nice lunch at a place called Kolmonen. (on Kolmas Linja).

After the lunch, the weather conditions deteriorated, unfortunately, so I decided to seek refuge in a museum. After some pondering, I ended up going for the Military History museum, as it was quite conveniently located. Pretty interesting little place, traces Finlands rather short military history, including all the major conflicts, leading up to the peacekeeping activities Finland has been involved in the past few years.

As I got out of the museum, the weather got a bit better, so I decided to stroll around in Kruunuhaka for a bit. Unfortunately, things deteriorated rather quickly again, so I had to seek refuge in yet another museum, this time in the Bank of Finland museum. It's basically a museum that traces the history of, well, money, and various modes of payment and so forth. It was all quite interesting as it explained (or tried to) how modern finance works in the context of the European Union (quite relevant given ongoing events in the Euro Zone, I would say...). Kind of interesting, but I suppose finance just isn't my cup of tea...

The next day, I jumped on the bus and headed over to Turku, where my dad picked me up and took me to our summer cottage in Parainen. I spent a couple of chilled out days there, enjoying the sauna and the Finnish Summer Weather (= rain).

We also headed over to Estrid's place in Wepo, where we celebrated her birthday. So time to meet plenty of relatives again - some distant I see very rarely and some less distant. I do realize I start to appreciate these relatives meetups more and more as I get older - I guess living abroad might have something to do with it too.