Helsinki (days two and three)

Having woken up without frostbite et al, my travel buddies and I ventured into the deceptively inviting blue skies of Helsinki city centre in search of, well, something. anything, really. within five minutes, two things became very clear: 1. it was very, very, very cold. 2. it was very, very, very deserted. The immaculately cared for grids of streets were bereft of people, shops and eateries were closed and we, mistakenly, walked into an open coffee shop that turned out to be a church group social function filled with pasted on zombie-smiled men, women and children holding religious flyers and other paraphernalia.

which is probably the only reason I agreed to walk on a frozen sea in a pair of steve madden boots. Why i brought steve madden boots on a helsinki holiday is another question altogether, but i can safely say that said boots were far from waterproof and after seven minutes outside, the pain in my toes ceased. I was grateful but aware there would be repercussions later.
just another winter's day for this icefisherman




After our little walk, we struggled to decide between which of the two open, identical, sterile coffee shops we should sit in. Perhaps Robert and Wayne are feuding brothers and going into the 'wrong' one would start some kind of bloods v. crips style gang war. Probably not. We hemmed and hawwed for roughly nineteen seconds, consulted the menus and came to the realisation that the shops were exactly the same. It seems Robert's and Wayne's coffee learned something from the Starbucks school of business management and put their shops in direct competition of one another right next door.


From there, things the opposite of remarkable happened. So unremarkable, in fact, that I cannot remember.

Day three very much mimicked day two minus the excursion on the gulf of finland and the decision between Robert and Wayne. We walked for six minutes, ducked into a building, drank a hot beverage. Darren got ill, stopped talking. Rosa went for a walk, got lost. I read a book, got a sad call from america. we all sat in mutual misery in the hotel sauna welcoming the onset of sweat that signalled warmth and heat.
watching people fall in the city centre
excuse me?
Tuomiokirkko, Helsinki's biggest Lutheran Cathedral
like the rest of the Scandinavian churches i've seen, it's more beautiful from the outside. The inside was very plain and simple...totally contravenes the 'paving a way of gold towards heaven' practises of Catholic and Orthodox Cathedrals


it looks pretty, it really does
the highlight of three days in frozen hell

And on tuesday morning, we got to leave! We superstar ferried back to Tallinn, Estonia with only one minor glitch; the ferry got trapped in the ice 100 meters from the dock in estonia. No worries, after two hours of moving forward and backwards, the ice broke and we were free to explore the -19 degree delights of mainland eastern europe.