Road Trip!
I just had my first Finnish Road Trip! I will start at the begining (as this makes more sense for telling a story)....
I have been wanting to go visit Helsinki for the last couple weeks. I never actually went through with it as something always seemed to come up. It became a standard joke with me and my friend Tinneke: I would always ask her "Want to come to Helsinki with me this weekend?!?" so often that it practically became a way of saying Hi.
But then when talking to Martin on MSN on Wednesday night I joked again that I wanted to go to Helsinki. I told the right person as he was driving down to pick up a friend at the airport and had room in his car. I couldn't say no. So me and another German Meike hitched a ride down with them. We were going to stay at Kim's (a girl we know from the summer language program) flat. Tinneke lives in Porri, not Tampere, and said she was busy with work so could not come.
Well once we told Anne (a girl who lives in Turku but is always in Tampere visiting us) that we were going to go there she said that she was going to. So she was going to driver her car to Helsinki and visit with us.
It was destined to be a great trip.
The drive down was uneventful, except that I realized after an hour that I had forgotten my camera, like always. I am just lucky that everyone else takes pictures. But when we got there we could not find Kim's flat at all. She had to walk to the train station and direct the car. As we were waiting I texted Tinneke a message saying "I am in Helsinki, too bad you can't come". It was supposed to just be a joke. But then she wrote back "Ahh.. I want to come...". I replied "well just get on the train and come, there is room."
We didn't think she would actually do it. But then we recieved a message saying "Okay, I literally ran to catch the bus, but I am on my way. I will be there around 8:15."
After wandering around the downtown looking for a place to eat then eating I found out that we had to go meet Judit at the train station as she had a couple of hours to kill before meeting one of her friends for the weekend. (apparantly you can't swing a cat in Finland with out hitting a handful of people you know) We then went to the bus station to pick up Tinneke. The busstation is really cool. It is in the bottom of a mall and is connected to the metro line and is in walking distance of the train station and the ferry terminals. So we got to see all of that (this sounds like nothing, and it really isnt, but I suck at sightseeing so this is about it)
We had Tinneke surprise Anne cause they are best friends and Anne didnt know she was comming so that was kind of cute. Then we went back to Kim's to drink and hang out. We had a calm night as the train schedule sucked to go out, we had all the booze we needed and didnt need to spend more. So we hung out inside playing games and chilling. Yes, this is not clubbing it up in some foreign European capital, but I would rather have a good time with good friends any day.
Next day we slept in and then decided to see the sights, well kinda. We really just wanted to see one thing that was touristy so we could say we accomplished something. The real goal was to find me a pair of shoes. As I need some. In the end seeing the sights was having coffee infront of a church. And the mission to buy shoes was a failure as they didnt have my size in the good pair.
But that is all irrelevent. The important event in Helsinki was Tinneke's Saga. Saturday morning started bad when she realized she could not find her wallet. It has her Identification Card (whichin Belgium doubles as a passport) as well as her EU drivers license, all her credit cards and everything else valuable. So we had to go back to the busstation to ask about it, they gave us some numbers for her to phone, which she did. But no luck. She had to have her parents cancel everything. Then as we were eating in the evening she suddenly she got a text message saying someone had found it. So we had to go back to the bus station to get it from the bus driver. In retrospect in sounds like nothing. But at the time it was quite the situation.
Anne had asked us if we wanted to go back to Turku with her instead of going back to Tampere when Martin went to the airport. We figured "why not?" so we ended up driving with her in the evening. It ended up taking us 30 minutes to find the road from Helsinki to Turku, so we got to have a very nice driving tour of the city and the downtown. Once we located it I found the road from Helsinki to Turku was not att all like I expected. It was a single lane, curvy with lots of hills most of the way. I thought there would be more of a highway than a country road on such a main road. When we arrived in Turku we got lost and turned around and it took us again a while to find Anne's flat.
There we just hung around, drank some Boli, then went to bed. Except my broken mobile decided to go off at 3AM. The next day was rather lazy. We said we were going to do one thing touristy, just because. So we went and had coffee on a boat in the river and walked around the central square. Turku is rather boring. The only excitement was when Anne accidently went the wrong way down a one way street, into oncoming traffic. But other than that, the city was tame.
Meike and I then took the train back to Tampere. Unfortunately, the train was full and we didn't have a seat, so instead we took turns buying tea and coffee and sat in the restaurant car the entire time.
It was a fun weekend. No crazy parties or mad drinking, just good times spent with good friends. The best kind of times.
I have been wanting to go visit Helsinki for the last couple weeks. I never actually went through with it as something always seemed to come up. It became a standard joke with me and my friend Tinneke: I would always ask her "Want to come to Helsinki with me this weekend?!?" so often that it practically became a way of saying Hi.
But then when talking to Martin on MSN on Wednesday night I joked again that I wanted to go to Helsinki. I told the right person as he was driving down to pick up a friend at the airport and had room in his car. I couldn't say no. So me and another German Meike hitched a ride down with them. We were going to stay at Kim's (a girl we know from the summer language program) flat. Tinneke lives in Porri, not Tampere, and said she was busy with work so could not come.
Well once we told Anne (a girl who lives in Turku but is always in Tampere visiting us) that we were going to go there she said that she was going to. So she was going to driver her car to Helsinki and visit with us.
It was destined to be a great trip.
The drive down was uneventful, except that I realized after an hour that I had forgotten my camera, like always. I am just lucky that everyone else takes pictures. But when we got there we could not find Kim's flat at all. She had to walk to the train station and direct the car. As we were waiting I texted Tinneke a message saying "I am in Helsinki, too bad you can't come". It was supposed to just be a joke. But then she wrote back "Ahh.. I want to come...". I replied "well just get on the train and come, there is room."
We didn't think she would actually do it. But then we recieved a message saying "Okay, I literally ran to catch the bus, but I am on my way. I will be there around 8:15."
After wandering around the downtown looking for a place to eat then eating I found out that we had to go meet Judit at the train station as she had a couple of hours to kill before meeting one of her friends for the weekend. (apparantly you can't swing a cat in Finland with out hitting a handful of people you know) We then went to the bus station to pick up Tinneke. The busstation is really cool. It is in the bottom of a mall and is connected to the metro line and is in walking distance of the train station and the ferry terminals. So we got to see all of that (this sounds like nothing, and it really isnt, but I suck at sightseeing so this is about it)
We had Tinneke surprise Anne cause they are best friends and Anne didnt know she was comming so that was kind of cute. Then we went back to Kim's to drink and hang out. We had a calm night as the train schedule sucked to go out, we had all the booze we needed and didnt need to spend more. So we hung out inside playing games and chilling. Yes, this is not clubbing it up in some foreign European capital, but I would rather have a good time with good friends any day.
Next day we slept in and then decided to see the sights, well kinda. We really just wanted to see one thing that was touristy so we could say we accomplished something. The real goal was to find me a pair of shoes. As I need some. In the end seeing the sights was having coffee infront of a church. And the mission to buy shoes was a failure as they didnt have my size in the good pair.
But that is all irrelevent. The important event in Helsinki was Tinneke's Saga. Saturday morning started bad when she realized she could not find her wallet. It has her Identification Card (whichin Belgium doubles as a passport) as well as her EU drivers license, all her credit cards and everything else valuable. So we had to go back to the busstation to ask about it, they gave us some numbers for her to phone, which she did. But no luck. She had to have her parents cancel everything. Then as we were eating in the evening she suddenly she got a text message saying someone had found it. So we had to go back to the bus station to get it from the bus driver. In retrospect in sounds like nothing. But at the time it was quite the situation.
Anne had asked us if we wanted to go back to Turku with her instead of going back to Tampere when Martin went to the airport. We figured "why not?" so we ended up driving with her in the evening. It ended up taking us 30 minutes to find the road from Helsinki to Turku, so we got to have a very nice driving tour of the city and the downtown. Once we located it I found the road from Helsinki to Turku was not att all like I expected. It was a single lane, curvy with lots of hills most of the way. I thought there would be more of a highway than a country road on such a main road. When we arrived in Turku we got lost and turned around and it took us again a while to find Anne's flat.
There we just hung around, drank some Boli, then went to bed. Except my broken mobile decided to go off at 3AM. The next day was rather lazy. We said we were going to do one thing touristy, just because. So we went and had coffee on a boat in the river and walked around the central square. Turku is rather boring. The only excitement was when Anne accidently went the wrong way down a one way street, into oncoming traffic. But other than that, the city was tame.
Meike and I then took the train back to Tampere. Unfortunately, the train was full and we didn't have a seat, so instead we took turns buying tea and coffee and sat in the restaurant car the entire time.
It was a fun weekend. No crazy parties or mad drinking, just good times spent with good friends. The best kind of times.
posted by Jesse A at 6:59 AM
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