Trip

15/9/2002 Helsinki, Finland
(Phill) Phew!

15/9/2002 Helsinki, Finland
(Phill)

Phew! Okay, made it back to Helsinki in one piece. Spent the past few days traveling south in Finland
. I took trains through Oulu, Tampere and Turku again. Basically there´s a bit of a beds shortage in this country right now since most of the hostels are closed for winter so we had to hop on a train last night to Turku just for a bed. No biggie though, my railpass means that all the trains are free and the more I use it the more I feel it was good value. :)

Tampere was decent, I actually saw two worthwhile museums: The Lenin Museum and The Spy Museum. Obviously the Spy Museum was my favorite, lots of spying gadgets and stories. I even discovered that my credit cards all have cool things on them when flashed under a black light, although the Bank Of Scotland card was by far the best....

Back in Helsinki to meet up with John and Lindha tomorrow. They fly in from Texas at 10pm tomorrow night. I´m still not sure if they managed to get their Russian Visa´s so my passport is still at the Russian Embassy awaiting pickup. If they haven’t got their and don’t want to splash out the $75 for a fasttrack visa then I´ll go and try and get my money back from the embassy. If that’s the case we can hop on a ferry to Estonia and Latvia which wouldn´t exactly be bad.

It´s strange to think that in two weeks I´ll be in Africa
! I still have things to do though, need to buy a sleeping bag (the whole month is in tents..) and hope that the few pages in my passport are enough for all the visas I need. The company says I require at least 12 free pages and I barely have 4! I swear my passport has gone from this orderly thing with few stamps to a crazy stamp over previous stamp policy. These border guys just stamp away like crazy sometimes!

My tiny wee backpack is also getting emptier and emptier as clothes wear out and I give away books. My MP3 player is still dead but I´ll take care of that in London. Umm, yeah, if you haven’t noticed I´m bored today! Met a cool Canadian that I hung out with in Turku and I´ll likely see him since he lives near the town I´m visiting in December (Edmonton, Canada). Actually I´m thinking more and more about snow, it´s pretty cold here today but I really want some snow. I´m thinking Canada in the middle of December ought to provide that! Hopefully I can find an Iceland Air flight so that I can get a few days in Iceland (one of the few countries I really felt I *had* to visit this year). I met some lovely Icelandic girls in Greece who offered to entertain me.

Yeah, okay, back to work (for you, not me! :)