Finland

Like I said in the post about Tallinn and Stockholm, Emma is from Finland, so we decided to all go to Finland to hang out for about a week. In my last post, I talked about our 4th of July celebrations in Finland, and now I'm going to actually say what we did in Finland!


The day after 4th of July, Emma's friends from high school came over and we hung out all afternoon and evening. We didn't really do anything else that day.

The next day was our day in Helsinki. We drove into the center and saw what Emma and her best friend Tilda thought we needed to see. We didn't go to any museums or anything super touristy. Instead, Emma and Tilda pointed out things and told us about their histories. We walked around and saw some of the cool things in the center.

We saw churches.

We saw water and boats.

We went to the market by the harbor and wandered around there for a while.

And of course there were many shenanigans.

Probably the most important stop was the Fazer cafe. Emma introduced me to Fazer chocolate a long time ago, and I will maintain forever that it is the best chocolate in the world. It is the only chocolate in the world made with real milk instead of milk powder, which is the secret to Finnish chocolate. Anyway, we went to the cafe. I didn't even get chocolate! I ended up getting a cinnamon bun, which was so good, but I almost cried at how expensive it was (like everything in Finland is).

After the cafe, we went to another church. This one is underground and its walls are made of boulders. The long window is roughly at ground level. It's a very cool church.

After we got back we didn't do much else other than binge watch a show on Netflix called Sense8, which we were obsessed with the whole time we were on this trip.

The next day we recovered from staying up late and hung out, not doing much, until we got ready for dinner. Tilda's sister works for a chain of restaurants that are really nice, so she let us use her employee discount and we all went to a really nice dinner that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford.

And then after dinner, we went to a bar and talked for a long time, which was really nice. I would like to note that James didn't drink any of that wine, he's just naturally that weird.

The next day, we made a trip to Porvoo, which is an old town to the east of Finland. We walked around a 13th-century church and wandered around the old fort, of which there is nothing left. We also wandered around the town a little bit and then we headed back to Emma's house.

The last day we had in Finland, we had some shopping and errands to do, and we had to do laundry and clean the house. We had an 6:30 flight, so we kept that in mind. I packed and tried to get a few hours of sleep, but it turns out Emma and James stayed up watching Eurovision all night.

I'm back in Edinburgh now and actually the day after I got back, I started my new job, which I will try to write about that and all the stuff I've been up to since I've been back. It's been really nice getting back into old habits and being back in Scotland! So, thanks for reading!