hei hei and moi moi Helsinki- part one

Goodness, where did the time go? No sense in asking what day it is at the moment- the second day running I've been convinced it was the next day not the actual day, this means unfortunately another day at work tomorrow in which to prop my eyelids open and attempt to restart some experiments. Its only a 6 hour time difference to Finland, but I'm feeling pretty darned shattered at the moment.
So yes, I've spent the last week swanning around Helsinki and Tallinn under the pretence of a conference. I did actually attend the conference, though not as much as I was planning. Partly because I was enjoying myself sightseeing and partly because I was laid low with a migraine for one day. It was weird returning to a city that I had visited some 6 years previously as a fresh faced PhD student on another conference. This time at least I had some decent spending money and didn't cry at the prices of food or drink like last time. Still Helsinki is a pretty expensive city to spend time in.
My fears of being the departmental tour guide were laid to rest, when I saw everyone had their own copy of the same guide book- there must be only one for Scandinavia, they all had it, even the guy sitting next to me on the plane had the same book. I had about 5 minutes of awkwardness when I realised that the guy next to me was also going to the same conference, we exchanged pleasantaries and then thankfully proceeded to ignore each other for the next 9 and half hours or so.
Helsinki was gloriously cool with clear air and a cold wind. It was so nice to snuggle under the duvet and wake up not sweating as I have spent the summer doing. Its nice to be back in the motherland of the EU when I swanned through immigration waving my EU passport whilst 95% of the plane cued to get a stamp- fortunately the plague ridden immigration chappy evened up the odds at Kansai airport on the way back where it took him 3 times as long as anyone else to process our re-entry permits and there were only 5 of us, compared to the 20-30 visitors and 100's of Japanese.
Still,the clean fresh air of Scandinavia helped stave off the jet lag and tiredness, we checked into the very nice hotel in Helsinki-thank goodness for internet deals. I got a huge junior suite sized room all to myself. The only dissappointment was the bathroom, which was functional in that whole kinda soviet type of functional way. After quick freshen up we wrapped ourselves up and headed out into the cold Helsinki evening for some food. Its a really compact city so within a couple of minutes we were in the central harbour area.So we got our first taste (or re-taste for me) of Finnish cuisine.I had Chanterelle soup- which is an autumn speciality. It came with some really gorgeously nutty rye bread. We followed it up with some local sardine sized fish fried on a bed of mashed potatoes and a plate of smoked finnish delicacies, including reindeer. Unfortunately half way through trying those the tiredness kicked and all of a sudden everyone got really slow and tired so we had to skip out without finnishing.
Next day we headed to Tallinn, over in Estonia for a day. The planning us women had! Whilst all the guys from the department arrived the day before the start of the talks, we arrived the day before registration so we got an extra day of sightseeing in- much more logical ne!
I also went to Tallinn 6 years ago with some friends after the conference. We enjoyed that it was at least half the price of Helsinki and got pretty drunk on the honey vodka that came with out medievil themed dinner. this time we really only had time for a 3 hour non-stop walk around Tallinn before taking the boat back to Helsinki. Its nice to see it hasn't changed too much- a bit more English is spoken, but there were no signs of the drunken English stag parties I'd heard had kinda ruined it.Tallinn is still much cheaper than Helsinki and if you're ever in that area I really recommend a visit- its a really nice atmosphere, gorgeous old and quirky buildings. The only issue was trying to find a loo- I was getting pretty desperate, all the loos are superloos requiring 3 EEKs (Kroons), and of course I had no change. In the end we manage to find a cafe for a spot of lunch and a pit stop. It also allowed us to get away from the incredible noisy Spanish party who seem to stalk us around the sights. Seriously, it was a cacophony of noise from them - all talking at the same time, loudly. heading back to Helsinki, the sun came out and I ventured out on deck- a risky affair as the ship was a jet liner so was going at 63mph so it was like standing in a wind tunnel. But coming back through the islands of Helsinki it was really pretty. We got back to hotel to find the rest of our guys had checked in so into was a quick change into a suit to have dinner with crowd of other Japanese conference goers- where they caused chaos trying to order Japanese style in a Finnish restuarant, the dishes aren't really designed for sharing between multiple people, but we managed some how.

Part two continues later, when I've caught up on some more sleep....