Europe 2018: Part 2
Sunday, 25 March 2018 19:50![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iguana
I spent just two full days in Helsinki before catching a ferry to Tallinn for the last stop of my holiday; we visited Suomenlinna and Nuuksio National Park which was breathtakingly beautiful.
Helsinki and Suomenlinna
We made it about 20 minutes out from Amsterdam to Helsinki before the pilot decided that maybe flying without flushable toilets wasn't such a good idea (they had expected the faulty pumps to not be an issue once the air pressure outside the plane was low enough) and so I landed at Schiphol twice that day before making it to Helsinki Airport rather later than expected.
Emily and Tim met me at Helsinki's main railway station and we went for a rather late but delicious dinner at a traditional restaurant near our hotel. Other "food" of note on this part of the trip included Salmiakki from a pick-and-mix shop, which, now I have looked it up on Wikipedia, which redirects to "Salty Liquorice", I really should have known to avoid! I have never liked liquorice and making it salty does not help!
Anyway, as far as Helsinki goes, I didn't spend much time in the city itself. On the first full day there we visited Suomenlinna, an old fortress island a short ferry trip away.
There were lots of tunnels and bunkers to explore too!
We made it about 20 minutes out from Amsterdam to Helsinki before the pilot decided that maybe flying without flushable toilets wasn't such a good idea (they had expected the faulty pumps to not be an issue once the air pressure outside the plane was low enough) and so I landed at Schiphol twice that day before making it to Helsinki Airport rather later than expected.
Emily and Tim met me at Helsinki's main railway station and we went for a rather late but delicious dinner at a traditional restaurant near our hotel. Other "food" of note on this part of the trip included Salmiakki from a pick-and-mix shop, which, now I have looked it up on Wikipedia, which redirects to "Salty Liquorice", I really should have known to avoid! I have never liked liquorice and making it salty does not help!
Anyway, as far as Helsinki goes, I didn't spend much time in the city itself. On the first full day there we visited Suomenlinna, an old fortress island a short ferry trip away.
There were lots of tunnels and bunkers to explore too!
Nuuksio National Park
The next day we visited Nuuksio National Park which was absolutely stunning.
But first, let's address the big chilly elephant in the room: the temperature.
It was cold. Really cold. I don't have any recordings for Helsinki but Estonia a couple of days later was below 15°C and this felt about the same. I had been packing for about -5°C, which normal cold weather gear can cope with, but I spotted the forecast just before leaving for Switzerland and somehow managed to add all of the clothes I'd bought for Kiruna (part 1, part 2) into my rucksack too. While in Kiruna four layers was usually overkill, this winter they were about the minimum you could get away with if you were going to be standing still for any amount of time.
Water vapour froze in my nostrils when I breathed in, which made me giggle.
As it was colder than Kiruna had been last winter, I got to do a few things that I hadn't managed to do within the Arctic Circle.
Something else I had never seen before was the sparkling of the snow on the ground: multicoloured pinpricks of refracted sunlight scattered beside the pathways. My camera didn't pick it up very well until I deliberately defocussed the lens to make the pinpricks bigger:
I also ate frozen droplets of water, having plucked them from where they formed on pine needles. They tasted very much of pine.
The next day we visited Nuuksio National Park which was absolutely stunning.
But first, let's address the big chilly elephant in the room: the temperature.
It was cold. Really cold. I don't have any recordings for Helsinki but Estonia a couple of days later was below 15°C and this felt about the same. I had been packing for about -5°C, which normal cold weather gear can cope with, but I spotted the forecast just before leaving for Switzerland and somehow managed to add all of the clothes I'd bought for Kiruna (part 1, part 2) into my rucksack too. While in Kiruna four layers was usually overkill, this winter they were about the minimum you could get away with if you were going to be standing still for any amount of time.
Water vapour froze in my nostrils when I breathed in, which made me giggle.
As it was colder than Kiruna had been last winter, I got to do a few things that I hadn't managed to do within the Arctic Circle.
Something else I had never seen before was the sparkling of the snow on the ground: multicoloured pinpricks of refracted sunlight scattered beside the pathways. My camera didn't pick it up very well until I deliberately defocussed the lens to make the pinpricks bigger:
I also ate frozen droplets of water, having plucked them from where they formed on pine needles. They tasted very much of pine.
