A few months, in the middle of exams – perhaps during a trip to IKEA – James, Emma, and I cooked up the idea that we might come to Finland (since that’s where Emma’s from), and it actually happened!
On Wednesday, James, Emma, and I got a flight at 10pm to Stockholm, where we had a seven and a half hour layover.
Instead of going crazy in the airport, we decided to take the bus into town and explore for a few hours. The only things open between 2 and 5 o’clock in the morning are over-priced 7-Elevens and one Burger King. We went to the Burger King to get some food and then we just walked around for a few hours.
Because it’s so far north, it was never really that dark, but by the time we were near old town, the sun was rising and the moon was setting and everything looked so beautiful, Naturally, I took a lot of pictures.
We didn’t do much other than walk around and watch the sun rise, but it was still so nice. I would love to go back someday!
After wandering around Stockholm, we went back to the airport and caught our flight to Helsinki, our actual destination.
That being said, we didn’t stay there long.
After we got to Emma’s house, we took showers, went to the grocery store, and tried to stay awake until at least 8, so our sleep schedules would be somewhat normal after being awake over 30 hours.
The next morning we woke up pretty early to go to Estonia! We took the 10:30 ferry to Tallinn to explore for the day.
I didn’t really have any expectations about Tallinn. Emma has been several times and had talked about it, so I asked to go. And James’ flatmate is Estonian and lives in Tallinn, so we met up with him and he showed us around.
We took it pretty easy and went to a few overlooks and the historical museum, but I was so pleasantly surprised at how beautiful the Old Town was. It looks very Polish to me, and it is preserved very well.
After walking around all day, we went to a Mexican restaurant near the harbor that Emma had been to before. We had a really nice meal and really enjoyed sitting down after a hot day walking around.
There’s actually a heat wave that’s going across Europe this week, so it was pretty warm. I even got sunburned a little bit, which was definitely not something I prepared for!
After dinner, we went back to the harbor to get on the ferry back to Helsinki. The sun set just as we were leaving Tallinn, so we sat outside on the deck and watched the sun set over the Baltic Sea and it proved to be the perfect ending to a really nice day.
Today is the 4th of July and we are celebrating by cooking an American meal. I won’t talk about it too much, because I’ll probably put up a post either today or tomorrow about it.
