Finland for the First time

Helsinki, Finland

7th November 2006

This morning, Norris and I woke up at 7:30, given this is 5:30am in the UK and it’s my second day here, I think I deserve a medal for pulling that off. We went to Club 26 to do some swimming and sit in the sauna. It was quiet relaxing and the view of the old town from the private sauna is amazing.

Afterword we tried to go and eat at a Russian restaurant by our office but there were closed. We then decided to buy food from Rimi Market instead. Norris said I spoke Estonian quiet well when I ordered my food. I felt quiet proud to hear that, it reminded me when I finally was making headway with the German language back in 2003. A lot of native-born western Canadians don’t speak second languages so it’s a little more special for us than it would be for Europeans or others who normally would be expected to speak second languages.

After that, Norris drove me to the seaport where I caught a boat to Finland. The woman at the passport control got really upset and began speaking in a loud voice at her college when she was going over my passport. I’ve been through so many boarder controls, immigration offices and interrogations in my life that nothing scares me now but I was really curious as to what she was on about.

It turns out that since all but 3 pages in my passport are now covered in stamps and she was mad that boarder guards at Tallinn airport stamp pages at random rather that in some sort of order. I had 7 stamps for Estonia in my passport there that I had collected in the past 12 months and it made it difficult for her to calculate how long I had been in the country. After a few minutes she let me through.

I had an incident a few weeks ago when I was trying to leave Germany. The boarder guard said to me “There are like 100 stamps in here! I’m just going to ask some questions from you and assume you’ll tell me the truth. How long have you been in this country?”

The boat ride to Finland was beautiful and exciting but everything was really expensive and everyone was giving me angry stares (I assume it was because of the German military jacket and sniper’s gloves I was wearing). It’s a total mind-fuck to go from one of the cheapest countries in Europe to one of the most expensive in 90 minutes.

Helsinki was pretty boring. It was nice to wonder around for about an hour but I didn’t have any friends to hang out with there nor did I know of any activities to do since I didn’t get a chance to research Finland before going. I ate the same meal at Hesburger in Helsinki that I did in Tallinn, the only difference was in Tallinn it cost about €2.80 and in Helsinki it was €7.50. I went to a market where there were selling bear-skin hats and I really wanted one but they were €80 and I didn’t have enough money.

I just about kissed the ground when I got back to Tallinn. I feel as though it is my home and I am lost when I am not there.