TacoCat's Travels (Finland) #2: The 30 hour day in HEL

HEL has frozen over

5-6 March 2018. Tuesday.
My flight to Helsinki was without incident. It was a Finnair flight on Monday night (2345) but it was surprisingly (and sadly) full. We couldn't choose our seats for some reason so we ended up sitting apart for 12 hours! 😣 It wasn't all bad though, I ended up with a Premium Economy seat! I also had an aisle seat which was great because I drink a lot of water and I'd be uncomfortable if I had to disturb strangers to use the bathroom (which was only twice, but still). The couple beside me were good flyers; they didn't bother me at all, and they also never left their seats, which was slightly concerning but meh, it's not my bladder.

Other than lacking neck support, the seat was really quite comfortable, and I usually have trouble sleeping on planes but this time I managed to sleep for around 5 hours or so so that's great.

There was a baby in the row in front of me that made noise sometimes which would've bugged me a lot more if I didn't have my awesome Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They're always a godsend on the plane.

They served chicken and noodles OR fish and potatoes for dinner/supper. I took the chicken because I didn't want to risk it with plane fish. The noodles were a little funny but still okay.

I watched 3 movies during the flight; Marley and Me (pretty overrated), Inception and Battle of the Sexes (surprisingly good!).

We had omelette, bacon and croissant for breakfast. With yucky tomatoes and baked beans, bleh. The omelette was okay though.

Towards the end of the flight they had a northern lights display within the plane itself was really cool!

We touched down around 6am Finland time so we essentially had an extra 6 hours in the day. The moment we left the plane it was really cold! We cleared immigration fairly quickly, and went to get our bags so we could change into our winter wear.

From Helsinki airport, we had to take a train to Mikkeli, changing trains once on the way.

Waiting for the train

The scenery was beautiful! And it was our first time seeing snow! It was around -11°C when we arrived and we were really not accustomed to dealing with the cold so our faces were freezing!

The train was really cool too, they had multiple levels in the train and even a restaurant car!

We had an exchange buddy and her friend came to pick us up from the train station. She very kindly brought us to get our apartment key from MOAS, a company that rents affordable apartments for poor students and budgeteers/cheapos.

We spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning and unpacking and by the time we were done it was past 6pm!

Before

After

Our exchange buddy, Hilma, came to pick us up to go to the hypermarket to get supplies. But before that, we had to get dinner so we went to Hesburger! It's a Finnish fast food place and they're servings are really quite huge.

We got a grilled chicken wrap and a chicken burger. It was really delicious, esp after all that cleaning.

After dinner, we went to the 2 hypermarkets to get stuff like pillows, soap, rice and other stuff. They were closing soon at 10pm so we had just a little over 30min but the store was huge!!! More on that in another post.

What a loooong day.

Thank for reading!

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