After travelling
nearly all day via Hamburg we arrived in Helsinki at 6pm –
(2 hours ahead of London time). We decided to eat and play at
the casino in our hotel the Ramada President. For dinner we
had Rudolph and he wasn’t too bad, a bit like bacon. A
black Russian drink here is Kahula and Vodka, nothing else,
nice though. Gavin wanted to be a local so he drank Finlanda
Vodka neat with a glass of water on the side. We ventured to
the Roulette wheel and not too long later Gavin had lost his
initial stake. The slot machine held no further joy so we went
back upstairs to sleep.
23/12
The ground
is a bit snowy but it didn’t snow today. I wasn’t
actually too cold initially. We decided just to wander and see
what we found. The shops and layout reminded me of Hong Kong.
We found a market square that sold flowers vegetable and fish.
It was quite cold by the sea. Further wandering lead us to the
Uspensky Orthodox Cathedral, built in 1868. It was quite Adams
Family looking but the inside was filled with beautiful floor
to ceiling paintings. It was very peaceful and warm. We had
seen a lot of pictures of the main cathedral, St Nicholas, in
Senate Square and as it was quite tall we could follow the dome
top as the wise men followed the star. The area in front of
it was all whitish. The actual Cathedral looked big from the
outside but was smaller than I expected inside. Again it was
peaceful and warm. Our adventure for the day involved taking
a ferry to the Suomenlinna Sueaborg Fortress. It is the biggest
sea fortress in Scandinavia founded in 1748. The purpose of
the fortress was to curb Russian expansion. Sueaborg is the
Swedish name for Finland, as it was originally part of Sweden.
During the Finnish civil war it served as a prison.
It is now
listed as a Unesco World Heritage site. It was very deserted
and being so close to Christmas everything bar a dairy was closed.
We walked the whole length of the island very gingerly, as it
was extremely icy. It was very old fashioned with many guns
remaining put. It seemed untamed and we hardly saw any other
people. We saw a large submarine. Windy was definitely my description
of the weather here. It was freezing and we were both ready
for home. Unfortunately the main quay was at the other end about
30 minutes away. So off we trudged. Once back on the mainland
we went through an indoor market hall. This made more sense
to me than having one of these stalls outside. While making
our way back to the hotel we stopped off for a Big Mac and McFish,
well how could we not? I thought it was much better than UK
McDonalds – more like NZ Fillet o’ fish. So I’m
now contemplating a 5.15 start tomorrow morning, that’s
3,15am London time. Oh my God!
The tops
of my legs are still quite cold even though we’ve been
back for at least an hour. We still have to go out for dinner
again.
Well we
never made it back out instead we tried out our luck at the
casino again. We both played Roulette and Gavin did heaps better.
I went quite well for a while, but enviably we lost it all.
The slot machines also went well for a while.
24/12
We got up
at 4.55 and sleepily got on our flight to Rovaniemi.
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