Land of Reindeer, Huskies and Santa

Well Finland has been quite an exciting time for us so far, though not exactly how we expected.

We started in Helsinki. It’s a lovely, quite small, city with few tourist attractions other than generally walking around saying things like ‘well this is nice’.

Fortunately we were staying in Hotel Glo which was our favourite hotel of all time. Our room was REALLY cool but the main attraction was the extras you could get for free. One day we borrowed some Glo-bikes and cycled around the city but my favourite was the PS3 I managed to have brought to our room so I spent quite a while playing Ratchet & Clank. Aaah, games! I had to give it back when we checked out though :-(.

On our second day we visited Suomenlinna island, the ‘Fortress of Finland’ which could be listed alongside The Great Wall in an Epic Military Fails Top 10. It was built to protect Finland in 1748 (at the time under Swedish control) but the fort has almost no military advantage over the adjacent, unfortified, island which provides plenty of cover for boats from cannon fire leaving the fort with almost zero value as a naval stronghold. As we discovered more about the island things just got worse. The ‘fort’ has a very large and palatial mansion for the governor and extensive gardens which were regularly re-landscaped. Finally we discovered a sign next to a pond which finished off any fort credentials it may have had. Apparently the pond was originally supposed to be a moat but they got bored of digging it and made it into a pond instead.

One of the coolest things on the island was a WW2 U-Boat which was great. There were also some cool cannons which I was surprised they bothered to add (expecting they would have rejected them in favour of more flower beds).

We watched a large passenger ferry sail between the island and its very close neighbour while we were on the ‘battlements’ which was fun. We waved manically at the passengers who mainly looked disapprovingly at us. Not deterred by this we carried on and eventually had almost everyone on the back of the boat waving back at us!

Unsurprisingly, the fort was all but destroyed the first time it was actually attacked.

On our last day in Helsinki we took a tram around the city with a leaflet provided by the tourist information office as a guide. This was possibly the single most boring hour of my life and left us both with a deep inner void. It took us about a further hour to get over the boredom but finally we managed to drag ourselves into Fazer which is a bit like Betty’s tea room only more chocolate based. We had chocolate and ‘chocolate tea’ which perked us right up. It turns out Fazer chocolate is very, very tasty and well worth trying.

A sleeper train called the Santa Claus Express took us from Helsinki to Rovaniemi where we are now.

The town is almost empty at the moment. We’re not sure where everyone is but we know they aren’t in any of the cafes, restaurants, supermarkets or roads we’ve visited. One person we have seen is Santa though!

We visited ‘Santa Claus Village’ yesterday and met the big man himself. It didn’t, however, go quite as my childhood dreams of meeting Santa led me to expect.

Firstly, as it’s September, there’s no snow. I’m willing to accept that this is beyond his control. Also, probably for the same reason, there was hardly anyone there. This is also beyond his control and makes me think he isn’t fully appreciated. Santa is for life, not just for Christmas.

The things which were within Santa’s control however, were the large number of, not very good, souvenirs on sale. The large empty square in front of his office with loud tinny Christmas music being piped through a large speaker system which gave it the feel of some kind of low budget, Christmas themed, Day of the Triffids knockoff and the unexplained ‘house of horrors’ style corridor leading to his office (which we later discovered is supposed to be a magical clock that he uses to stop time while he delivers all the presents).

When we actually got in to see Santa he seemed displeased that I didn’t support a football team and was offended by Laura’s observation that he didn’t have many people visiting him that day, quickly pointing out that he’d actually already seen 200 people. I tried to make it up to him by thanking him for all the presents over the years to which he replied “yes, I remember” as if making a mental note to give us both a lump of coal this year. Santa then gestured to an, unusually large, elf who took a photo of all of us before Santa sent us on our way. The photographer elf then led us through a door to another oversized elf who showed us the photo and explained how it would cost us 50€. This was a surprisingly large cost and got me started on a train of thought that Santa was taking advantage of his status and that maybe the whole delivering presents to the whole world thing was just a front for his village where he extorts money from visitors. I’m still not sure it makes good business sense though. Instead of buying it, I took a photo of the photo of us and Santa on the screen outside and was promptly told off by an elf which was probably the highlight of the trip to the village.

After meeting Santa we went to his post office and sent some post cards. Laura also bought this advent calendar which pretty much sums up the whole experience:

Is that child on the sleigh laughing or crying?!?

Fortunately all this has been made up for by us visiting a really cool reindeer farm and several hundred very friendly husky dogs, some of whom took us along a trail in a husky powered quad bike.

Probably the most minor accolade for Rovaniemi is that it is home to THE NORTHERNMOST McDonald’s:

We also visited the Arktikum Museum here and really enjoyed it. It’s mostly about the geography of the area and the lifestyles of the indigenous population but there was also a small but pretty convincing section on how Finland was royally screwed over during WW2. Having been invaded by the Russians and promised help from the allies which never came they were forced to ally with the Germans for a brief time after single handedly defending themselves against the, much larger, Russian army before finally managing an agreement with the allies to fight the Germans (and surrender some of their land to the Russians). During this time most of the country seems to have been generally blown up.