Journey home and closing words

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After four weeks, five countries and 13 cities (correct numbers depending whether or not you want to count Vilnius, Lithuania in), we are back home, in Otaniemi, Espoo.

Journey home was a long day of traveling in a bus from Vilnius to Tallinn, and a ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki. Even though this took all day, I would still say it was a nicer way to travel home compared to simply hopping on a plane. It's always nice to sit in a vehicle and stare at the passing landscapes. Plus somehow that gave us a chance to orient ourselves better towards returning to Finland again.

Looking back to our Black Sea Adventure 2012, the overall feeling is that we really saw a lot. A lot of places that were rather different from each other. First islamic culture and lifestyle in Turkey, those great rocky views in Cappadocia, then Bucharest which was quite typical "Eastern block" capital, Transilvania where we could imagine being in Germany, Moldova with it's totally non-touristic athmosphere, next Ukraine where some of the past Tsar glamour could be seen and last but not least Minsk and Vilnius. Compared to our last longer trip around Mediterranean, our destinations in 2012 where much more varying and thus perhaps this trip became more interesting.

Another dominating thought about the Black Sea Adventure is the discovery that our images of these places before the trip are now pretty much thrown into the trash bin. We were expecting to see quite a lot of poverty, run down cities, stray dogs, beggars, pick pockets, horse carriages etc. Instead we found some cool cities with plenty of culture, entertainment and shopping to offer, perhaps with a Soviet twist on the outlook, but still 😊, well-kept cute old towns, and very friendly people. It was NOT that different from Western Europe after all 😊 Seems we will need to leave Europe next time to find something truly different.

Thanks for reading the blog and stay tuned for continuation sometime in the future!

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