Arrvial...

My adventure starts as I sit in Gatwick airport, waiting for my friend Ben to arrive. Once he has, we proceed to check-in to find that our bags are overweight. Apparently if you want to take more than one bag simply purchasing the option is not sufficient; you muat also inform them of how many kilogrammes you want, which naturally occurs at a fee. We did not know this. I will neglect to mention the actual amount overweight my bags were, but at £10 per kilogramme over weight, it did not come out cheap. We continued to security, where a fairly small mountain of a man saw fit to touch me all over because I looked like some kind of terrorist. Scowling over my latest encounter, we boarded the plane. Many Finns, few English. I spent and hour and a half with the plane stationary and a rather moody looking man sitting next to me before we could take off. Apparently someone had checked in a bag for Helsinki when they weren't going there. I shouldn't really have been surprised...

The flight was uneventful, the only notable point being that when we came to land at Helsinki airport all that could be seen was a zigzag of yellow lines indicating the road lights, and not much else. "Great, no one actually lives here", I thought. After landing we spent the night sitting in the airport with a girl from Australia doing the same thing as us (except she was destined for Turku), and a Polish guy going to Amsterdam to sell the 'I Love ... t-shirts' finding out anything we could about what to expect. Facebook was also an option due to the FREE wireless internet service to which the Finnish government believe all people are entitled. "Not bad", I thought, considering in England you have to sit on a phone to customer services for 3 hours complaining before they will let you pay them for a connection! The hours passed and I got tired, so I treated myself to a Pepsi, which wasn't too cheap but that was justified by remembering my location. At 6 o'clock, the sun began to rise, and we went outside to catch the bus to Helsinki railway station (Rautatientori). Thus, the next stage of my adventure began.....