I Want To Believe

---

Rob Writes:

There wasn’t a lot of excitement the day prior to this jaunt. It had been my work Christmas night out on the Friday night, and despite only having drank ½ a pint of lemonade and a couple of shots of spring water (honest) I was extremely ill the following day. Don’t know what happened. In hindsight this worked out in my favour. I never slept much Friday night and spent most of Saturday morning heaving into the lavatory. But what finished me off was trying to fix Tina’s mums (Jean) WiFi on Saturday afternoon.

Where is this going? Well, we had to be at Edinburgh airport for 4am on Sunday morning, which meant getting up at 2:30am. The carnage detailed above allowed me to sleep like a baby from 9pm on the Saturday night, meaning I was quite fresh at the ungodly hour at which we had to rise. Every cloud and all that. Tina didn’t sleep at all. Serves her right for not being very nice to me when I was throwing up.

Edinburgh airport was Edinburgh airport. Nothing to report. The flight to Lapland was exactly what you would expect it to be at this time of year. Full of screaming children, which I accept, it is what it is. Guess you also must accept being kicked in the side by the little tyke playing up on Daddy’s knee next to me. Whatever. At least I didn’t get vomited on, but if I did, it is what it is, whatever. No problem. The flight took 2 and a half hours. We arrived at Rovaniemi airport at about 11am. It is two hours ahead here. The airport was not busy at all, and we were out in minutes and onto a bus conveniently parked right outside the door, heading for the town centre of Rovaniemi. The bus cost €8 each for what was a 10-minute drive, quite pricey, but seeing Santa ain’t cheap, so it seems. A taxi would have been €40… lol.

It was very snowy. Surprise. The whole place looks lovely and certainly puts you in the mood for Christmas. Everywhere you look is decorated in some way, trees, lights… Christmas everywhere! It wasn’t that cold either. Minus single figures anyway. I’ve brought too many clothes but better safe than sorry I suppose. Door to door this was dead easy, no problem at all. I’ve had more stressful trips on the subway to St Enoch. The bus from the airport practically dropped us off outside the AirBNB we were staying in too.

In typical AirBnB fashion it was time to try and obtain the key from the lock box nailed to the fencepost outside. We were in the Arctic Zone, my hands were freezing, the box was a bit frozen up, and I was struggling to muster up the dexterity to spin the code lock while Tina was shouting out numbers. By the time I’d finished I felt like I’d earnt my 5-seconds in the Dome. We were in. The apartment was alright. Think of a lock-in in Ikea that costs you £250 a night. Can’t complain, it’s expensive to see Santa. It is what it is. At least the elevator was exciting. It was just big enough to get two people in, had no door inside, so you saw the floors flying past as you went up, and was violent. The plaque inside suggested a build date of 1961. Cool. Every time I got out with all my extremities I was buzzin’.

After we dumped our stuff, we went for a walk about Rovaniemi. We were right next to the town centre, but I think this would be classed as a village, it’s very small, which is very convenient. The first thing we did was pick up our cold weather gear we had hired. It was about £100 for both of us, for 4 days, that included waterproof ski jacket, trousers, boots & gloves. I’m glad we did this. I think the clothes I brought would have been fine, but the ski stuff was just dead easy to throw on and were warm and cosy, very insulating against the snow too. We then quickly nipped back home and put the rental gear on. We went down the main street, Pekankatu, having a look at the few Christmas market stalls that were there, taking photos as we went. We then went and had a walk up the partly frozen river (Kemijoki). As we were going, we were stopping at all the restaurants to see what food there was and having a look at all the shops. It’s very expensive to eat when you come and see Santa it seems. It is what it is.

After our little walk we went back to the apartment for a snooze before dinner. Tina needed to catch up on some beauty sleep, I think. She was becoming an angry elf.

It was soon dinner time. It was a struggle to find somewhere open on a Sunday, even in this international tourist destination. We eventually settled on the Arctic Restaurant and had the 4-course set menu (Tastes of Light menu at only €64 each, it is what it is). It was a decision of survival. We couldn’t carry on in the cold looking for anywhere else, we would have certainly frozen to death trying. The food was very good. The courses were creamy crayfish soup, smoked reindeer (Rudolph, I hope) & porcini mushroom mousse, arctic char and finally crème brulée with blueberry ice cream. Yum, yum.

We had noticed there wasn’t a lot of loo roll in the apartment, so we took some from the restaurant. Naughty.

I messed up on the first night. I’m loving the X-Files at the moment, so I thought I’d stream an episode to the TV using the 5GB of roaming data I had on my phone. I was budgeting 500-750MB of data for this. Turns out streaming an episode of X-files in HD (should have changed it to low quality) is about 2GB. Oops. Totally worth it though. That didn’t stop me entirety. I think I used 4.99 GB of data on X-files and the rest on looking up the bus timetable. After the X-files we went to bed. The End.

---