FINLAND (I): first week

I know that it is a bit late, but I am going to write about this absolutely amazing summer, which after Paris continues in Finland.

And I am going to start from the beginning. We arrived at the Helsinki-Vanta airport and Emma’s sister and almost-brother-in-law were there waiting for us, and I met her mother too. All her family were and has been and are being still really nice to me.

Helsinki from the air.

We spent the first week between Emma’s parents place and her sister’s place, because they were on holidays and just lend it to us: I know, really nice! I had my first sauna experience, my first swimming in the lake experience, and tasted the first Finnish beers (and missing the Belgian beers). We hang out with some of Emma’s friends and again, all of them were really nice to me! Sometimes the language barrier was there, but all of them speak amazing English, so no communication problems! We had one dinner with Anna (a Finnish girl) and her boyfriend Guifré (a Catalan guy friend of mine) and it was really nice too.

And now, less people and more Finland. The summer weather is great. They were telling me that the summer was nice and hot. Fortunately for the Finns, the meaning of “hot” summer is 27 degrees (maximum) and no humidity. Then the light thing, I have to explain it. The week when we reached Finland the sunset was approximately between 11 and 12 pm, and the sun was already rising again between 3 and 4 am! The first couple of nights I woke up for a minute thinking... “oh, I’m still sleepy and it’s already 11 or 12 am”, but no, it was only 4 in the morning! The sea is nice and it doesn’t smell bad (as de Mediterranean does) and it was sunny almost all the time.

Check the Helsinki sky! So sunny, no clouds, perfect temperature and humidity...

More amazing things: you can ride a bike inside of Helsinki and you can feel like in a forest! There are lots of trees, and everything is so spread and wide. It seems that the Finns don’t like each other and they respect a lot the vital space. And they don’t like to line at all, they are silent, and quite calm while driving. A different culture!

Riding a bike through Helsinki: the capital of Suomi, and feeling the nature, great.

Let’s talk about the sauna experience then! I am going to talk here about the electric one (which we were using at Emma’s parents place) and I am saving the natural one for the next post. For me sauna made no sense: I don’t need help to sweat! But I wasn’t sweating at all there, so... The point is not to sweat, or take care of the skin-thingies (I bet that it helps) as some non-Finnish-fake-saunas pretend to. The point is to enjoy it. Good company (I had the best one, Emma), cold beer, a shower between... you have to experience it to give your opinion! It is a bit scary to be inside of a room at 80 degrees and creating steam. The steam cools down the average temperature but is the thing that it makes you feel really hot and sometimes almost burning.

Helsinki is a nice city. It doesn’t feel like a huge metropolis because of the surface, the same happens with Espoo. I am going to use the same example that I have told to everybody. Comparing Finland and Catalonia we found Espoo and Sabadell, two cities with 200.000 habitants. But, Espoo has 528 squared kilometres of surface and Sabadell only 37! It can give you and idea about the “spread” thing that I am talking about. And in Spain we don’t have a huge population density, we are quite civilized.

The fortress of Suommelinna.

We visited Suommelinna as well. That is an island in front of Helsinki where we can find a fortress. This fortress has been used by the Russians against the Swedish and by the Sweds against the Russians too. It is related to the story of this country with its neighbours. Now it’s a touristy place and we had a really nice walk there, sunbathing a bit and having fun with the old canons.

We spent the next week at Hermanni’s summer cottage!