Home Sweet Helsinki
It was the strangest thing.
We were heading north from Berlin on a 3 hour flight, and somehow we landed in Canada!
How is this possible? Surely you are joking? I can hear you now, sceptical and unbelieving, but I tell you, the senses do not lie!
What are these trees I see, these mighty pines and birches… Europe doesn’t have trees like these… but I know them well.
What are these smells, the raw wilderness, the fresh cold air of a late summer morning… this cannot be Europe.
And the people, sure I can’t make any sense of the sounds coming from their mouths, but they have that same cold politeness that I know only too well.
So after landing in this strange doppelganger of a home land, Matt and I set out to find a place to rest our heads. The first step would be to attempt communication with one of our strange speaking brethren… sure enough, they spoke perfect English. Finding a room for the night was not that easy. We must have called every hostel in town, only to be rejected each and every time. We finally had to settle on staying in the burbs for one night, and to make a reservation in the city for the next night. We hopped on a bus, headed just a little west from the airport, and got to the suburban town that would be our hermitage for the evening, and what do you know… it’s Kanata. Yup, the same neat, quiet streets, the same corner stores, and above all, the same bored teenagers. Thank god we were only staying one night. We got up bright and early the next day to take the train into the city. It’s a lovely city, the nation’s capital, many nice museums, beautiful buildings. It’s small too, and easy to walk everywhere. We had a very pleasurable 10 day stay in that city, which I could have sworn was Ottawa, but they keep telling me was Helsinki, Finland.