SWEDEN

 Flywheel and I ended up staying five days in Finland as guests of  charha and  morgain, who were wonderful hosts.

Friday had to work, so after we lazed around for a while took us out to see a kind of preserved part of old Turku, a "craftsmens village" that dated back to the 18th and 19th centuries, one of a few parts of town that survived a fire that burned down most of the city.

It was pretty interesting seeing those old small wooden houses, and the tools and furniture preserved inside. Apparently there used to be a lot of re-enactors who could actually do the jobs and tell you about them, but the place has little money now and there were only a couple.

I particularly liked the old way of baking bread in rings and hanging it from poles across the rafters. You could just reach up and grab dinner!

After that  charha had to take a train to Helsinki so she could recieve a prize from a comics contest in the morning, so  flywheel and I played computer games the rest of the night!

The next morning we and  morgain took the train to be at the ceremony ourselves, courtesy of  charha's mother buying our tickets, hurray for her! The ceremony was a bit of a badly-organised botch, unfortunately, rather disappointing. Hopefully  charha was able to make some good connections there to make up for it.

Lunch at a truly awful student cafeteria, then a lot of wandering around Helsinki looking for comics and a games store, the latter of which closed just as we got there :( But Helsinki is rather beautiful, with a lot of old architecture that looks like layer cakes with various styles imposed on each other.

Then back to Turku and more video games :)

Sunday was a big excursion to Turku Castle where we saw a lot of medieval and renaissance stuff and some cool paintings and costumes, then back to the house to finish up our Cthulhu adventure!

At least, that was the plan. We played 'till 4am but didn't finish. The characters did get to meet a lot of suspicious Scottish rural villagers and spend a night in a haunted house where they were tormented by nightmares that seemed so real that their sanity was threatened. And one of them was brained from behind by a stone axe. We plan to finish the adventure online :D

Three hours sleep and  flywheel and I were off to the ferry for Sweden!

"Ferry" is a misnomer; it was more like a cruise ship. Ten hours through the Finnish archipelago and across the Baltic to Stocrkholm, in really great comfort, and only 30 Euros for the cabin! I spent a lot of money on Tapas and red wine from Chile... >.> We also slept so much that we were speculating whether there was something soporific in the cabin air.

came along because it was actually cheaper to ship to Sweden and fly from Stockholm than fly direct from Helsinki back to Germany. Go figure!

And I'm glad he did, because he got to meet my friends and ex-gaming buddies Andreas and Anna (now returned to Sweden from Kingston), and we could walk through old Stockholm in the evening and saw medieval streets barely a metre wide, and today we could go out to the burial mounds of the Viking kings of Sweden in Uppsala, but mostly because I got to spend two more days with him <3 <3 <3

Now I'm typing this at 10:30pm as we're preparing for a trip only slightly less difficult to plan than the Normandy invasions, and I'm not even travelling! Everything has gone wrong, but we still hope to get on his plane at 7am in Stockholm, even though there's no train and the buses don't take our money and we'll have to stay awake the whole time and I'll be coming back to Uppsala at 6 in the morning by myself after no sleep. We leave in less than two hours, assuming we can buy our tickets. Heaven help us!