Riina & Dan

The centre of Helsinki is nice to just walk around (it’s small enough), particularly around the Senate square, the Lutheran Cathedral, Russian Orthodox church, market square, the Esplanade, etc. There’s also a beautiful fortress island “Suomenlinna” just  outside of Helsinki – you can catch a ferry there for the price of a bus ticket (or if you have a daily ticket it includes the ferry as it’s considered public transport for people who live on the island). But if the weather’s no good, it’s probably not worth going there as it’s very much an outdoorsy place.  A couple of stops on the tram out of the centre of Helsinki there’s also the Temppelinaukio church, which is carved in rock and simply humbling.

If you’re into Finnish design and arts and stuff, the Esplanade (leafy cobblestone street near the marina) is the place to go. You’ll find several Marimekko and Iittala stores there. Although you can also go to Stockmann (I believe one of the oldest department stores in Scandinavia) for your Finnish gear.

The museum of modern art “Kiasma” is usually well worth a visit too. It obviously depends on what they’re exhibiting at the time, but the building itself is quite spectacular.

You’ll be able to find heaps of decent restaurants in Helsinki, but one that I would recommend is Zetor. Their menu is inspired by traditional Finnish cookery and I have always enjoyed it immensely. The decor is a bit kitsch, but that only adds a bit of flavour to the experience! A nice spot for a drink is the Torni Hotel; the views from their little bar on top of the tower are great. You can get a panoramic view of Helsinki. Even the ladies’ toilets have a view!

If you have the time to venture out a little, I’d recommend going to see Porvoo, a historic little “old town” about an hour out of Helsinki. If you had a bit more time I’d recommend going to Lappeenranta or somewhere similar to see some of our beautiful lakes and forests.

Happy travels everyone!!

In the days before the plebs could read, those in power communicated their ideas in pictures. Here in the Duomo of Florence is such an example. Near the top are those who are in heaven. At the bottom are those in hell – if you look to the lower right you’ll see a couple of unlucky souls being sodomised by what appears to be some kind of burning shaft.

This must have a shocking effect on children or the uneducated. Being brought up to actually believe this would be terrifying.

I think it was Francis of Assisi ( I’ll have to check ) that said one of the pleasures of heaven was that you get to watch those in hell. Religion really brings out the best in humanity.

Driving a car around Italy has probably been more trouble than it’s worth. Once you get into the swing of driving in Italy it all becomes easier. We’ve seen plenty of funny sights. This one time, in Pisa, we were in a single lane road which had to give way and merge into another single lane road. The car directly behind us followed us as we merged into this other road. A car on the main road decided he didn’t want to let the other car in. They proceeded to drive next to each other refusing to admit the other in front. As our road merged with oncoming traffic, one car was forced to drive half in oncoming traffic, whilst the other had two wheels in the gravel. They each tried to get in front of the other – at one point the car half in oncoming traffic tried getting around us and had to break, and merge back into the single lane with the other car. When he finally got past us, the remaining car decided he had to over take the original car and sprinted off overtaking at speed.Italy has some of the greatest tunnels and bridges I’ve driven through. We often think our tunnels in Australia are massive engineering feats, but we must have driven through 20 – 30 tunnels between Pisa and Santa Margherita Ligure ranging in length from 100 meters ( like a bridge with a mountain on top ) to +2000 meters in length, with driving speeds up to 130km/h. They often popped out of mountains directly onto bridges across massive ravines, only to dive back into a mountain tunnel. Pretty cool. Trucks are always required to drive at 100km/h on the motorways, are are not allowed to overtake within tunnels. Pretty sensible and straightforward.We did a day trip from Santa Margherita Ligure to Cinque Terre and walked from the southern most town Riomaggiore to Vernazza. It took about 3 hours.It’s a great place to visit. Anyways, time to get off the internet. Ciao!

We like to think that we learn from our mistakes, so before heading out of Florence and towards Pisa we actually asked the tourist info point for directions out of town. The friendly girl at the tourist office made it sound really easy and drew the route on a map with a pink highlighter for us. We asked for a second opinion at our hotel, and lucky we did, as there was a one-way street the girl was going to have us driving up against. Equipped with this revised route plan we managed to drive out of town without the detours we’ve gotten so used to (we only had to drive around ONE round-about twice due to missing the right exit the first time around, but that hardly counts as a detour anymore.

Getting to Pisa was easy enough, but once again we were faced with the old problem of millions of one-way streets inside the city. I was manically trying to navigate us towards the leaning tower, but ended up getting us further and further away. We finally managed to find a park near the tourist info point, so I thought I’d run in and get some directions. There was a note on the door saying “right back”, so I waited around for some 5-10 minutes, and saw about 15 tourists come past and keep walking after seeing the note. I decided I wasn’t going to wait either. We headed north of the central station and hoped for the best. After driving around for a while we suddenly saw the tower poke out from between some buildings!! Yay! We drove through a market place full of tourists ( with some Italian arrogance we’ve picked up ) and found a park in the shade only a stone’s throw from the tower. We were obviously in luck.

After seeing the tower (it’s still leaning) we  headed back on the Autostrade and north of Pisa. We continued past La Spezia, Cinque Terre and exited the Autostrade at Rapallo to drive into Santa Margherita Ligure. We had booked 2 nights accommodation at Hotel Mediterraneo, which was recommended to us by Jaana and Jasse. The hotel’s director was an Italian gentleman, but it was run by his very energetic Finnish wife, who spoke as fast in Italian as she did in English, Finnish, German, French, Spanish…. etc. It was a beautiful spot and for our 130 euros per night we got a spacious room on the top floor, en-suite bathroom, balcony with a view of the surrounding mountains and free parking in the garden.

Santa Margherita Ligure turned out to be a great base for a day-trip to Cinque Terre with the train taking us there in less than an hour.

Cinque Terre was great but we’ll have to write about it some other time, as we’re running out of time at the “internet point” (Italians love the word “point”, apparently).

Florence is such a great place. Clean, well maintained and beautiful with plenty of places to eat and drink. We were just thinking what a wonderful place it was when the waiter we’d asked to take a photo of us dropped our little camera on the slate floor. The lens looked to be on a weird angle. The photo looked like this:

It wasn’t able to focus anymore. Turning it off and on just gave a message along the lines of “Lens error – please restart camera.”. This really put us in a foul mood. When we got back to the hotel and called the insurance company, they said we should buy a new camera, and they’ll reimburse us the value of the old one provided we’ve got a receipt for the old camera. Problem is, this camera is already an insurance provided camera we got for loosing the previous one. Sitting around wondering what to do I tried popping the lens back into place one more time. The amount of force required is really substantial. It didn’t pop back into place, it cracked back into place. Seems to work fine, albeit with a bit of crunching and whiring as it moves in and out.

Takes quite good night photos:

The hotel we stayed at in Florence was excellent. Right in the center, friendly and not too pricy ( as we’ve come to discover ).

Next stop is Santa Margherita Ligure – just past Cinque Terre where we stayed at Hotel Mediterraneo.

We’ve travelled quite a bit since the last update. We found a great place to eat in Trastevere – on the East side of the main road away from the tourists. Nice little place we found during our second walking tour of Rome.

To leave Rome we hired a Lancia Ypsilon and then headed to Florence. We incorrectly assumed there would be a road map in the car, and had to make do with the A4 sized, over photocopied version they provided at Avis. The directions were clear enough “Take this road to the ring road, then get onto the A1.” but the execution was lacking. It took us almost 2 hours to get out of town and onto the A1, going round and round in circles. At one point we found ourselves on an amazing bridge, two lanes only in one direction, flying over the top of some enourmous train yards and back into central Rome. First time driving in Italy was surprising. I haven’t driven on the right hand side of the road much, but that doesn’t seem to matter – people drive wherever they like, and generally keep to the right. There’s really no such thing as a lane. When I get a bit confused as to how traffic is supposed to flow, I’d just follow someone else. Unfortunately both times I tried this, the drivers must have been tourists and we went head on into major traffic. We luckily vered into the correct road both times, but I learnt my lesson watching caos as cars tried reversing in the middle of 4 lane intersections out of oncoming traffic. Hilarious. Here’s a picture of our Lancia:

Driving in Rome may have been stressful, but driving on the Autostrade was great. Huge roads, good condition, top speed of 130km/h, though we were frequently overtaken at this speed.

When we finally made it to Florence, ( we bought a road map at the first service station we found ) we did what has now become routine. We drove around in circles ( lots of one way streets in Italian towns ) until we found some landmark or clearly signed street. Then we rang the hotel we’d booked a few hours earlier for directions. This particular hotel had a parking service ( €25 per day! ) where some guy picks the car up from the hotel and parks it somewhere nearby in a car park. They bring it back for you on request. Once we found the hotel we double parked and Riina ran in to find out what to do with the car. The guy said “Just leave it where it’s parked – if it looks illegal, just put the flashing lights on”. So we did just that, and felt bad as buses had to vere around our parked car into oncoming traffic. When in Rome.

Turns out it was 40 degrees today at 17:00. Probably hotter earlier. Same temperature as the previous day. Just for those of you who may think I’m whinging about the heat.

I think I was nearly pick-pocketed today. I’m generally a front of the pants kind of guy when it comes to wallets and mobiles.  This is generally OK in jeans – but not so much in my shorts which have more of a wide open top. We got on a bus after a 3 hour walking tour ( +40 degrees with no clouds ), dinner and several very welcome beers ( and the rest of the wine Riina couldn’t finish ). As we were squishing in, I felt some pressure on my leg and my 10 ninja training caused my hand to jump  to my hip, where I think, but I’m not sure, a hand was quickly withdrawn from my pocket. On later analysis with Riina, the guy’s female accomplice was pushing into Riina ( with her fat wobbly arse ) who was then obliged to push into me. We reckon it’s all part of a distraction attempt whilst my pocket was supposed to be picked.  They quickly moved down the bus and got off a stop or two later.

Well, we’re off to our non air-conditioned apartment to lie under a fan.

Buona notte!

Here’s a photo of our little apartment, €80 per night, no AC. The fan works well tho, and it’s quite ok, if a little warm.

The last post may have sounded a little negative – and I hadn’t even mentioned the most annoying thing – I had a block of Lindt Dark Mint chocolate in my backpack. I was sensible enough to remove it before traipsing around Rome on a 35+ day, but not careful enough to check that I’d removed all of it. 15 minutes into our 3 hour tour, I jammed my hand into my backpack looking for something when it came out wet. I thought initially that it was sunscreen lotion, but no – chocolate. It was all over my hand, passport, Lonely planet, notepad, pacer, ( inside the packet for the extra pacer leads ), but thankfully not on the camera, SD cards or iPod. Small graces. Someone’s God must love/hate me.

Here’s me at the Roman Forum. After moving all my non-chocolate coated stuff to Riina’s backpack.

Flying to Rome’s Fiumicino airport went smoothly on Finnair. When we got to the terminal however, the pilot explained that we could leave the plane, but couldn’t yet leave the entry concourse. So, we all piled out of the plane and stood in the hot corridor, just outside the plane. Meanwhile, a chap was desperately swiping a card through a card reader, and talking on the phone. After about 10 minutes, a old maintenance guy ( Scruffy from Futurama ) turned up with a screwdriver and proceeded to pull the machine apart. 5 minutes of this and we were sent down another door and two stair cases. Thwarted once more, the doors here failed to open. By the time we reached these doors, the original doors opened. Welcome to Italy

The train ride in went past some derelict buildings which now appear to be used as a rubbish tip. Meanwhile, the guys behind us where amazingly obnoxious – banging the lid of the ash tray in time with some crappy eurotrash music playing out of his mobile phone.

Finally, we arrived at our destination only to discover I’d booked an apartment with no AC, on a day which was 37 degrees. The fact that it was totally my fault didn’t help. At least it was a ground floor flat with a fan and some solid concrete walls which had kept some of the coolness.

Must dash. 30 seconds left at the internet cafe!