Helsinki

I went to Helsinki for the weekend and ate a lot of cake and drank my bodyweight in terrible coffee (the Finnish have the highest coffee intake per capita of any nation). It was dull and grey and disappointing when I got there, and I was staying in a hostel inside the 1952 Olympic Stadium, which didn't help since I despise anything Olympic. But on the second day there was a massive snow storm and everything became spectacularly beautiful, though cold. I was wearing extremely inappropriate shoes (check out www.hel-looks.com for confirmation), and I kept falling over in the middle of the street and getting horrible bruises, but the snow made me too happy to care. I went to lots of cool design museums and galleries, and touched a dead reindeer, and ate cloudberry jam, and drank mulled wine in little huts by the roadside. And once in a cafe a bunch of drunk skinheads harrassed me and chased my into the street trying to touch me and saying gross things in bad English.

I thought that was going to be the low point of the trip but then I got a ferry out to this little island fortress called Suomenlinna in the middle of a snow storm and got lost and actually though I was going to die. It was impossible to see more than twenty centimetres in front of you, it was freezing, and the island was total wilderness with no lights or buildings or people just huge piles of snow and crashing waves and rocks. I finally found one person who completely ignored me when I threw myself upon her asking for help, so I burst into tears and abandonnned myself to dying in a snow drift in front of an abandonned old hall. Luckily, it turned out to be the youth hostel, which was in darkness because I was their only guest (probably their only guest in years). It took me an hour to defrost my hands, and they're still a funny colour two weeks later.