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Published: August 17th 2019
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Never been there , never done that and now it was time to see what it looks like.
Finland, oh yes ,the land of a thousand lakes, most you don’t see because of all the trees.
Fun fact here though, Sweden has about 40000 more lakes than Finland which goes to show who the braggarts are, yes yes they did make the Nokia 3210
Finland once a Swedish colony and a neighbouring country has yet to have had the pleasure of my presence.
A hole in my working schedule got me two weeks off and off I took, to Stockholm and then the ferry to Turkku.
The ferry is one of those big floating buses/bricks with too many staircases and corridors, a bit of a maze.
I spent some time on the rear deck watching the departure and thence the voyage through the archipelago outside Stockholm, a truly beautiful place, but it got colder than a witch’s tit and I went for dinner and thence to my state room, well, a room representative of a very small state, I slept rather well.
So here I am ,in Savonlinna, in the middle of the ”lake
district" staying in an old hospital converted into a students home and a hotel in the summer.
A bit of a walkabout in Savonlinna makes me yet again realise that a second knee transplant is up and coming.
Savonlinna is called Nyslott on Google maps but it’s not to be found on the sat nav, a bit of confusion later and some help from a fellow traveller we found out the change of names, they are changing names of cities in South Africa as well and equally confusing.
Tomorrow I’ll head to Helsingfors aka Helsinki, hopefully no alternative names for the Finnish capital or God knows where I’ll end up.
Once in Helsingfors after some quarrel with the GPS I got another small room with a very narrow bed
, I'm afraid that I'll fall out of the bed if and when I turn over in my sleep .
The girl in the reception said that there was not much to see in Helsinki and half an hour would be more than enough, so I wandered around for 4 hours admiring the non existing sights and conversed with some of the indigenous in a pub.
Ah yes, language wise I might as well be on the moon, or in China, I don't understand a word, fuck all to be exact, so back to English, Finland is part of the Nordic countries but not of Scandinavia, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are Germanic languages, Finnish not so much.
The sightseeing over and done with time for dinner, that was sort of edible and a bit more but not by much.
Bedtime and tomorrow Estonia, a country like its Baltic fellows has been invaded and under foreign rule by just about everyone, by the way all the Baltic countries speak weird.
Tallin is chock a block with hordes of tourists, me one of them, but the again the old town is nice.
I like old houses and churches and towers and cobble stones and statues and just to wander around.
So that is what I did and after a while I did what any and every sensible person would do, I sat down and had a beer and watched people, a past time high on the top ten list of nice things to do whilst having a brew or two, or maybe three,
after three things tend to get a bit out of focus.
Anyway the old part of Tallin is nice.
So far not one nice meal!
From Tallin to Tartu to Pärnu, the rain that started in Estonia kept on, in scattered showers meaning they are closely concentrated above and along my route.
Tartu is quaint but not quaint enough to stay. Tartu once hosted a major Evil Empire bomber base, so secret that they removed the city from the maps.
I got to Pärnu after some not very scattered showers and a nice thunderclap that made me think about some new underwear.
A bit of a walkabout and some fermented joy and then bed time. Of course all the clouds disappeared and the evening was quite lovely but cool.
Riga, here I come, quite a lovely morning in Pärnu but that soon got sorted as it started to piss down, and when it pisses down it gets cold-ish.
If you use your heated grips the gloves start to leak as the Goretex allows the vapour to go from the warmest to the coldest ,
Sooo, cold dry hands or warm wet
ones?
Riga is lovely lots of old nice buildings, but walking around in the rain in bad gear is not so much fun, and when stuff you love turns into a chore....
It's supposed to ease up.
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