Travel

A few things make travel bearable.

Even airline meals. Below, my dinner on the plane from Perth to Kuala Lumpur. A surprisingly tasty chicken curry. Only surprising because I never expect airline meals to be tasty. The carrot cake (top left) was okay, but I have no idea what the item in the middle top was. It was served cold, and had a musty-ish flavour – definitely not sweet, but not savoury either. I noticed most people left theirs on their trays too.

And here was breakfast on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam. The sun had just risen and the lights in the cabin weren’t up full yet. It arrived after we’d been on the flight for around ten and a half hours and I for one was glad to have it. (They served us a meal not long after we took off from KL, but I was trying to sleep and did not have it.) Breakfast was a potato rösti, chicken sausage and omelette, with some tomato. It was kind of Macdonald’s-like, but when you’ve only had uncomfortable plane sleep, it was just the right sort of meal. The fruit – pineapple, pawpaw and honeydew melon – was nice, and the yogurt (some sort of berry) also good.

The hotel room was a sight for sore eyes. I’d been flying for 20 hours, and adding all the transit times it was probably a good 24 hours’ worth of travel. I slept well (although I woke at 3:30am and then couldn’t get back to sleep). A small room but clean and cosy. So small that all the tea-making utensils are in the communal space in the corridor. (I’m not complaining.)

The shower nearly confounded me. I didn’t try too hard to figure it out, just turned things in the direction one expects to for warm water, and it was great. The six lower nozzles just give you extra water – which is lovely when your body is tired from cramped plane seats.

After showering and getting out of my travel clothes I wandered around Helsinki for a few hours, to get a bit of a feel for where I am in relation to everything else. Despite getting lost (my wonderful sense of direction always serves me well) I had fun and even ended up in a very nice art gallery (I’ll write more about this later).

I did start to feel a bit desperate when I decided I wanted to have dinner, because all the venues I could see were pubs full of loud tourists, which just didn’t suit my mood. Looking in my guide book and map didn’t help either as all the places that sounded good were kilometres away and I was just not feeling energetic enough to get myself there. So I gave up wondering where to go and just walked.

Amazingly I very quickly found a nice place, Taivaanranta, which I understand is a restaurant that is part of a brewery company. The waiter had even been to Perth before (! what are the odds) and offered to make me a flat white 🙂 I was ravenous by the time I got my dinner – sausages, potato salad, sauerkraut and a very tasty mustard sauce. I even allowed the waiter to talk me into trying THREE of the brewery’s beers. The nicest one I tried was a dark, smokey beer called Vauhtiveikko. Vauhti is apparently the name of one of the workers at the brewery (if I got that right).

As you can see, I will never be a food blogger – forgot all about taking a photo of my meal pre-hoe-in.

Even better, the restaurant was almost just around the corner from my hotel, so it wasn’t too arduous a trek back.

I wanted to stay up a bit longer, but I think I was asleep by about 8pm.

It’s now 6:36am in Helsinki. I’d best start getting my head into conference mode.