A Retrospective Day in Finland

I started writing this article about three weeks ago, but never got to finish it. Well until now that is......
As you may remember, two weeks ago I managed to get a bit of time of work and Una and I did a bit of travelling, one place that I haven't already mentioned was our day trip to Finland. It was an early start as we had to be onboard the ship by 7.40. As with every other method of transport over here, even the ships leave on time. It was a typical two hour ferry journey on a fairly typical ferry, with the occasional exceptions such as giant cat and dog litter box on one of the decks and the equally unusual sight of someone actually winning on the slot machines and winning big.

We were in Helsinki once before and it was still pretty much in the same way we left it. Its just like any other major city, with lots of people and familiar brand name shops. Speaking of shops their biggest book shop was absolutely massive, dwarfing in the likes of chapters. In Estonia new history books (written in English) come out about one a month, but in this store there had to be at least thirty.I was picking them up and replacing them with others at such a rate that I was starting to get dizzy. I could easily have spent four days in there. Oh yes I nearly forgot, I was about to buy the "Daily Mail" which costs about 1 Euro, when I noticed the shops own price of 5 euro 40 cents. Wow, when people say there is nothing in news papers but bad news, they really weren't kidding.

Now I don't know if it because I've been out of Ireland for a long time and have lost track of how much items cost, but 5.40 for a news paper and 1,94 euro for a can of coke in supermarket still seems pretty extreme to me.
Apart from that Helsinki can boast quiet double decker trains, a science museum with some weird exhibits such as two unattached satellite dishes that can be used as telephones, a mask of Einstein that plays tricks on your eyes and a bed of nails that was actually more painful than I was led to be believe. But the main reason for going to the Heureka Science museum was its planetarium. I'd hate to guess at how long its been since I was last in one, but it was well worth the visit, especially for Una as this was her first.