It is not every day that a country celebrates its 200th birthday. Boston.com shared a beautiful set of pictures of the parades and main events, but I wanted to give you my impressions from the ground as we were lucky enough to be there.
We spent two weeks in Mexico on holiday. We didn’t have any plans for travelling around the country as the main goals were to participate in certain social occasions: we attended a wedding, birthdays, the Mexican Independence Bicentennial and even the birth of my niece. Even so, we managed to slip away for a couple of nights to Ixtapan de la Sal, a small spa town not far away from Mexico City.
Was in Istanbul, Kayseri & Ankara to see through the project that has brought me to Turkey. Since we were over a week here we had some time to see some of the sights, which was more than welcome. A big thanks to my colleagues and business partners for making the project a success and the stay enjoyable.
We spent 2 weeks in July in China. Our route took us to Beijing where we stayed a few days, then we took an overnight train to Chongqing from where we boarded a ferry through the Yangtze River and the 3 Gorges to Yichang. After sleeping there the night we took another train to Shanghai, where we stayed 4 days before returning back to Finland via Beijing. It was quite a route as you can appreciate in the map below (we spent 60 hours in trains).
It was very interesting as an experience, the sights are amazing, generally very safe, the people are usually kind and I thoroughly enjoyed the food. However, we were more than once assaulted by culture shock. China is not renowned for being one of the cleanest places on earth and the crowds, while expected, are not nearly as polite as in Japan or even Mexico. However, as usual, the story is better told in pictures and videos (the rest are found in my Flickr stream as before).
Spent some time in Turkey for work. It was quite a quick visit, but was still able to see more than just Istanbul this time. The rest of the pictures are here.
After being asked a couple of times what is there to see in Helsinki, I decided to write this guide using a previous post about Brussels for guidance.
Helsinki, at the northeastern corner of the continent, can be easily missed when touring Europe. While it is not the largest, nor the most cosmopolitan city of the Nordic countries, it definitely holds its own with a very interesting position and history between Western Europe and Russia. It is a medium-sized city between the forests and the seas with very marked seasonal changes. The majority language is Finnish, Swedish is spoken by a minority and almost everybody has a working knowledge of English. Other languages such as French, German, Spanish or Russian might not be as widely understood, but you might get lucky.
When to arrive?
Plan well according to the weather. Helsinki is 60 °N (as far north as Alaska) even if the climate is milder, so if you want to see snow you might get lucky in January-February, whereas June-July will be the highest part of summer.
How to arrive?
From the airport to the city
Quite easy. Local route 615 takes you from the airport to downtown (4 EUR), while Finnair also runs a bus service (5.90 EUR). A taxi ride to downtown will be approximately 30 EUR.
Transport within the city
Helsinki has one and a half metro lines, buses, trains & trams. I would recommend buying a 1-7 day travel card or if you plan to visit a lot of museums and sights, a Helsinki card which has those included.
Accomodation
If you’re on a budget, check the hostels from the Finnish Hostel Organization. Otherwise, budget hotels like Omenahotelli are a safe bet. If you’ve got more leeway, international chains like Radisson, Holiday Inn and Finland’s very own Sokos Hotels have some very good locations in town.
Basic tourist information
Preparing yourself
What to see?
Basics
Further away
Within 3 hours of the city centre
Where to eat, drink & shop in Helsinki?
Eat
Drink
Shop
Important to know
References
You can also check my pictures about Helsinki in Flickr.
As many have experienced this past week, I don’t think that it would be as rosy as Mr. Alain de Botton remarks. Our world is humongously interconnected as you can see in the TED talk below (from TEDx Volcano, an impromptu event created by speakers stranded in London due to the recent contingency).
Severing links, however temporarily, is extremely painful in both personal and economic terms. You can ask the 7 million stranded passengers for their opinions if you think otherwise. Many of them have been using social media tools to somehow cope with the situation, as Teemu Arina explains.
The past few days have looked quite a bit like a teaser of what a world without oil would be. Hopefully it serves as a wake-up call to us all.
We were lucky enough to have spent a couple of days of the Easter weekend in Riga, capital of Latvia. The city has a great collection of Jugendstil (German Art Noveau) buildings from the 1930’s and it was very nice to walk in its cobbled streets, even if the weather was not much better than Finland. It was very interesting to see how much investment has come from the Nordic countries, with a large amount of Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian companies present in the country and a partly-renovated airport that looks decidedly similar to those of Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm & Helsinki with its use of wood, glass and iron.
The country has a long history of foreign occupations from Germany, Sweden and Russia, so a visit to its museums is definitely recommended to get some background information on the way the country came to be what it is. Furthermore, it currently tries to recover from the after-effects of the global financial crisis, when it’s economy pretty much collapsed. Not surprisingly, travelling here is relatively cheap, but due to inflation consumer prices are almost at Scandinavian levels.
The break was very welcome indeed and I’m happy to have crossed out the last of the Baltic countries I was missing.
Spent a few days in Turkey for work so didn’t have that much time to visit the city. I was able to take a couple of good shots, though.
