Heading for the Baltic

25 August 2018

It’s very civilised to wake up in an airport hotel, clean your teeth, and then zip up your luggage and walk out into the check-in hall. Have breakfast, get on the plane. No bleary-eyed wake up at 4am with a double alarm clock for safety, no last minute “did we forget anything?” for the first sleepy couple of hours of getting to the airport in the cold, damp, pre-dawn morning. No extra hour floating around the departure lounge because of the fudge factor you have to put into the journey to the airport. I could get used to this!

We left at 9ish and; due to two hours difference, arrived in Helsinki around 2. It was also very unusual to leave the UK in warm sunshine and arrive on holiday under leaden clouds. It’s normally the other way around. Still, it was warm enough at the end of August for a light jacket – even though Helsinki is north of John O’Groats! The plan for this trip is simple: start in Helsinki and then head south, exploring the three Baltic states by car and flying home from Vilnius.

Helsinki appears to be a fairly new and handsome city, with nothing much older than the nineteenth century still standing. The unique architectural elements here seem to be the decorative reliefs that adorn buildings ranging from faux-renaissance through art nouveau to neoclassical. The reliefs are simple, usually nature-inspired, sometimes abstract, sometimes plain cute. Owls are a favourite. One street on our circular walk around the old town was absolutely packed with them.

Dinner was down by part of one of the harbours (being a jumble of islands and peninsulas, Helsinki has lots of bits of harbour) and we had to linger over a glass of wine and some cheese at a nearby wine bar until we could get a table at 9:30. It was worth the wait, the food at Shelter was modern, gutsy and had brave flavours – steak tartare with lovage oil and sour cherries was absolutely brilliant.

Of course, having eaten too much and too late we then had a pretty tawdry nights sleep. Not really improved by a fire alarm at 1:30am that got everyone out of the hotel and onto the street outside. Interesting mixture of the conscientious/panicked still in their PJs with bed hair and a coat, and those who assumed it was a false alarm and seem to have done their whole morning routine, preferring potential immolation to the thought of being seen in public without their ‘stick on.

It was indeed a false alarm.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2018 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Finland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.