TacoCat’s Travels (Finland) #9: Christmas in April.? 🤔

Hey Steemit!

Been pretty busy now that the semester has started but I'll try my best to keep posting every week! In the previous post, we headed to Helsinki from our small town of Mikkeli to start off our 1 week spring break!

1 April 2018. Tuesday.

April Fools! It's not really Christmas, but we will be going somewhere Christmas-y today!

Anyway, we were staying in Clarion Hotel in Helsinki and today we're taking a flight North of Finland to Rovaniemi!

But first, a delicious breakfast buffet in the hotel's cozy restaurant area! 😋

Funnily enough, I think there were quite a few Singaporeans staying at the hotel as well. Most of them were cabin crew since the hotel is 1 station away from the airport (which is why we chose this hotel too). I remember the lady at the reception asking if we were cabin crew as well (which is impossible for me since I'm pretty short). 😄

The breakfast buffet was mostly cold cuts and salad. Since we're not a fan of cold food, we only took the hot stuff. It was still pretty yummy though, especially the eggs! 😋

There was also a really cool drink dispenser, where you could select the drink you want from a touch screen! I like that it dispenses just the right amount for the glass, so not a drop is wasted.

Anyway, after breakfast we headed for Helsinki airport!

The check in at Hel was surprisingly smooth! Granted we didn't have any check-in luggage so that helps. Our boarding pass was just a QR code and we only needed to scan it once through that gantry above and that was it! No long queues or anything.

Our flight to Rovaniemi was pretty short; only about 1 hr, so we got there in the early evening.

Welcome to Santa's homeland!

There were still Christmas decorations in Santa's airport; I guess they're just there year-round since it is Santa's airport.

There's even a nice fireplace for those waiting to board

So Rovaniemi is the administrative capital and commercial centre of Finland's northernmost province, Lapland. It is situated about 6 kilometres (4 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

We booked an Airbnb which was in the city so we had to take the airport taxi out. We met up with the owner of the Airbnb who showed us around the house. The apartment was kinda hipster-looking but really cool!

The kitchen kinda reminds me of the one in Friends. Maybe the owner modeled it after Monica's kitchen.?

After we settled in, we took a walk to the main part of the city. Turns out there weren't that many buildings around even though it's a capital city. It was somewhat like Mikkeli's city centre. There were many tour agencies around as many tourists come here to experience the Winter.

We decided to grab a bite at McDonalds since we hadn't eaten there in a long time. The McDs here had something like a buddy meal, called Big Share, which had different types of snacks so we gave it a try.

The snacks inside included drumlettes, winglettes, nuggets and cheese balls! 😋

We also ordered a premium chicken burger with bacon! 😋

We haven't had fried chicken in a loooong time so the Big Share provided extra relief for that craving. 🤤 The burger was really good too!

After that delicious meal, we headed to the supermarket as usual to get some fruits and snacks since we were gonna be here for a few days.

We also looked at some of the tours offered by the agencies here and decided to go on one during the week which I'll post about next time!

Thanks for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://tacocat.vornix.blog/2018/09/02/tacocats-travels-finland-9-christmas-in-april-%f0%9f%a4%94/

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[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 66.563331 lat 25.828941 long TacoCat’s Travels (Finland) #9: Christmas in April.? d3scr)

Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat’s Travels (Finland) #8: First official trip to Hel!