Back on Pacific Time?

Friday we did the tourist thing in Helsinki -- bus tours in the city and a boat tour through the archipelago. We were eating lunch at the harborside market when we saw the google camera so we might end up on street view.  That was right after a military band paraded by, though we never figured out what the occasion was or whether it was a daily event for the benefit of tourists.  We sampled the Finnish strawberries which were tasty but alas, weren't quite up to the standards of the Norwegian ones earlier in the trip.  For dinner we went to a restaurant specializing in garlic....a fine meal, but we were surprised by the beverage that accompanied the check.  Each of us received a shot glass containing a dark green liquid that was a bit thicker than a pulpy orange juice. Before tasting it we wondered if it was mouthwash to remove or at least reduce garlic breath; after tasting we agreed it did taste rather like Scope. But no, we didn't ask what it was.

Our last day in Finland we decided we'd done enough touring.  So we decided to buy all-day transit tickets and explore random areas of town by caching.  We'd do a long walk and find a few caches, then take the tram somewhere else and repeat the process.  All went as planned until our final stop....we got off the tram and found the last 2 caches (one took us to a place with a "cage" holding a large statue of a bat) and returned to the tram stop. We waited and waited but the tram didn't arrive.  Seems that the Helsinki City Marathon was happening and there was a lovely sign in (only) Finnish explaining that the tram wouldn't be coming for the next several hours because of the race.  Granted, we were being lazy and wanting to take the tram ~600 meters to the stop next to the hotel, but after a long hot day of walking somewhere between 10 and 15 km, another 600 meters wasn't our first choice.  On the positive side, while walking back to the hotel we saw some of the elite runners near the finish, including the first-place woman. 

Yesterday was a loooooooooooong day.  Woke up at 3:30am Finland time (10 hours ahead of PDT) to be ready for a 6:35am flight from Helsinki to Amsterdam, then the non-stop from Amsterdam to Portland.  We were on the ground and through customs by noon.  After getting home we started digging our way out of our mail -- snail, e-, and voice -- and hope to have pictures posted in the near future. We both stayed up past 9pm then crashed long and hard and seem to be more or less on Pacific time today.  Tomorrow M goes back to work (J is still on sabbatical through Labor Day).

What a great trip!  Wonderful places to see and experience, a great chance to connect with some locals, truly a change of pace from the usual 40+ hour work week.  That said, it's wonderful to be back home, sleeping in our bed (without a crack in the middle), using our shower (and unheated towel racks), having a more varied wardrobe with a washer/dryer available, computers for each of us, and the other luxuries of home. And it's convenient to have the "units" we're used to -- feet and miles, Fahrenheit, dollars, etc.

And with that, the kiwis' 2011 Scandinavian expedition comes to a close.