Helsinki, Finland

If it’s convenient, listen to this song whilst you read this entry. Cheers!

My final port of call in Europe was Finland, the country where I want to be pony trekking or camping, or just watching TV. Through various wranglings and much bureaucratic hoop-jumping I had managed to obtain a Russian visa, to commence the 23rd of this month, which meant I had a week to hole up in the capital, Helsinki, reached by a two hour ferry crossing from Tallinn.

Helsinki turned out to be just as fruitful for meeting great people as Tallinn had been. The hostel was a revolving door of quality characters. I spent many long hours chatting to an American guy called Ricky, who was a very spiritual chap who had been travelling for years and years and ultimately wanted to become, er, a Benedictine monk. With me being a complete polar opposite to him – a deeply skeptical bugger who wasn’t superstitious in the slightest and who followed the way of science – he was curious about my mindset, and we had many friendly exchanges on the topic of religion, psychic powers, aliens and the like.

Amongst the others, I met a chap from Chile called Carlos, who was a great laugh; a friendly American girl called Robin (“as in Batman and Robin” – her words, not mine); a Korean girl who had met a Finnish guy once on holiday and had been so enamoured with him that she decided to track him down and leave for Finland to meet him without telling her parents beforehand, just leaving a note for them (is that a rabbit on the stove?); as well as a friendly girl called Tash who was taking a break from studying archaeology just outside Moscow on an ERASMUS year abroad. She was about to move to St. Petersburg for her final semester in Russia, so we swapped details and decided to link up again in a week’s time when I’d crossed into the Motherland.

Perhaps the most welcome face I saw was that of Petri, a Finn who I had met back on my first trip in 2005 whilst on an outing to the Great Wall of China. We’d met up again in Hong Kong a week later for a few beers, and had stayed in touch since on and off. Petri had settled back in Helsinki and was living with his girlfriend and working in an architect’s office. One evening he took me out to see Helsinki’s nightlife with a few others. Starting out at some kind of fashion cafe where one of the group’s Finnish rockstar boyfriends worked as a waiter (all very bizarre), we ended up at a pleasantly dingy establishment where the Helsinki student architects and designers liked to hang out, and I saw some characters there that were as crazy as the beer prices (five pound pints, anyone?). Still, I was very fond of the slice of Helsinki life that I had seen, from the unique train station design to its typically soft-spoken, introspective people quietly going about their lives.

My meander eastwards through Europe had finally come to an end; staring me in the face was the unknown expanse of Russia, six thousand miles of backwards-R’s, vodka, rubles and trains, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I’d had it easy so far, travelling over familiar European ground where budget travellers were accommodated for and could happily be understood in English. That wasn’t going to be the case in deepest darkest Siberia.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t pooing my pants a little at the prospect.