The Finnish train from St Petersburg to Helsinki was wonderful. It had the dining car design we expected on the Trans-Mongolian. A bar where you could buy food with lots of tables and standing areas with small table (like in bars) to socialise around and they took credit cards which was great. Kane ordered a giant meat pie, which when served was a bun with beef mince smeared inside, actually tasted very nice, but his also included cheese and frankfurts in the bun as well! It’s a 5 hour train journey to Helsinki and very busy. A lot of people do short package visits to St Petersburg on the train from Helsinki.

In Helsinki we stayed in a small hotel called Omena, where there are no staff and you get in and out using a pin number. In finding accommodation we found out it’s not a huge tourist destination and being like everything else in Scandinavia, its expensive and a general lack of budget accommodation. The stay in the city was more to relax after a hectic trip through China and Russia, before we headed off to Italy.

Helsinki is a nice little city to visit with an interesting mix of architecture and a large number of bars and clubs, as they need to past the long dark winters somehow. It has a large and very interesting Town Hall above a massive set of stairs and a great dock area, where some very nice boats were moored, Kane was very envious. Getting around the city in the stroller for Isabella was very bumpy with the abundant cobblestone footpaths and streets that her stroller had to travel over (though she would experience this more than once again), we were afraid she might get whiplash. We noticed all the prams in Helsinki had large pneumatic tyres to get round the problem. I might even add there is a bit of a baby boom going on there too, though they do have such generous maternity conditions we were thinking of immigrating there. Although they isn’t a single pay phone in the entire city!! Not in even in any of the hotels, I spoke to a few people about this and the Telco’s assume everyone has a mobile to use these days.

We did meet a great local that owned the “Café Picnic” not far from the hotel, who served wonderful breakfasts and nice fresh rolls. He was also very helpful in letting us know where things were located when we needed them around the city.

During our stay we did visit the famous Ice bar, which is really setup for tourists, to be honest it’s a bar in a freezer, buts it looks good and they have an ice sculpture come in and design it. Looks pretty cool and its cooled to around -5 degrees Celsius, you see pictures of it in the gallery, its extremely popular.

So that was pretty much our short stay in Helsinki, except for a bit of retail shopping for new socks for Isabella as she had outgrown the one’s we bought with her and some other bits and pieces we needed.