We flew out of Boston's Logan Airport at 9:30PM. Two or three hours later, somewhere over Greenland, I think, the sun came up. We didn't encounter darkness again until our ride home from Logan on Sunday, 28 June.
Particularly on cloudy days, this perpetual light is disorienting. Not only don't you know what time it is, you also don't know what direction you're facing. Throw in eight hours of air travel in coach and a seven-hour time difference and you have a couple of travelers expecting Dick Cheney to show up and administer advanced interrogation techniques.
Instead, we stood in Helsinki's Vantaa airport, waiting for a taxi driver who was supposed to meet us. Our trip through Customs was simple. There were two lines, one if we had anything to declare, the other if we had nothing to declare. We followed a steady stream of non-declarers out the door.
While waiting, we watched experienced travelers change SIM cards in their phones. Others just started making calls. This is the land of Nokia, the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, so it's with no small amount of pride that Finns use their cell phones a lot. Texting seemed to be less common than in the States, but, given the challenges of the Finnish language, it's understandable. (More about language in other notes.)
I have often said that my wife really had to love me to grab a name such as mine. I went through the same school system for 12 years and still the principal mispronounced my name at graduation. So, it was a giddy delight to hear the name pronounced correctly at every turn. The Finnish pronunciation is Huck-a-rye-nen, with the accent on the first syllable and with a rolled r. Hence, my father's nickname (and mine through high school) was Huck. My uncle, who moved to St. Louis after the war, was known as Hakk.
We enjoyed the cab rides. We learned from one that his house had a geothermal system, giving him free heat for just 30€/month. We had the same driver on three other occasions in Helsinki and learned of his plans to visit Washington and New York this week. He had been scheduled to travel to New York in 2001, in September, but those travel plans had been, as it's said, overcome by events.
Finland uses the Euro. The currency is very sensible. The paper bills are in different sizes for each denomination so that you can tell without looking how much paper money you have. There are coins for 2€, 1€, and smaller. Because we were constantly trying to the conversion math in our heads (1€ = ~$1.47 while we were there), we'd get tired and just call them things. ("How much should we tip the driver?" "Five things seems about right."
We arrived at our hotel in downtown Helsinki at about 4PM, which was like 9AM, without sleep. We'd be staying in Helsinki until Thursday evening, when we'd be taking an overnight train ride to Rovaniemi.
Helsinki is just a bit smaller than Boston, with a metropolitan area over 1 million people. A short walk from the hotel is a large shopping and business complex, including restaurants with outdoor dining, department stores, little shops, the train and bus stations, and a whole lot of stuff going on. We needed something to eat and wandered about, uncertain of what we'd find or even what we were looking at. We were also very weary and finally just picked a quiet place in a mall. It was called Memphis Erottaja (It sounds a lot sexier than it is. The name means The Memphis Difference.). They served burgers and other American fare. We had dessert at a Ben and Jerry's kiosk in the mall and then went back to the hotel for the night.
The room was nice, a simple Nordic design, with comfortable bedding and good black-out curtains to block the ever-present light. The bathroom and shower fixtures were a bit strange to those used to American Standard, but we figured out how to do what we needed to do. Sleep came quickly and we didn't get up until the next morning.
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