Due to some requests from some of my best Erasmus friends (Adèle and Max), I am going to start to write my posts in English. I hope all of my followers keep reading my Blog even though I am making a change in the language of it. I think we all can take advantage of this initiative, the first one (of course), the guy who is writing write now.
After this little explanation, let's start telling about my trip to Helsinki:
January 21st we headed to the capital of Finland. Thanks to my corridor mate Jing, we realised that if you became a member of the company Viking Lines you could take advantage of a lot of really good offers. From 20 euros, we took 2 buses (from Linköpint go Stockholm and back to Linköping again) and we took a cruise from Stockholm to Finland (both ways). All for 20 euros! Obviously, the cruise did not include any kind of food, but we brought some sandwiches, snacks and we could buy all that we need inside the cruise.
When the cruise starts to move, due to this thing about "international waters", you can buy alcohol and tobacco very cheap, and very very very cheap if we compare it with the price of alcohol and tobacco (specially alcohol) in Sweden. Again, another good thing in our trip to Helsinki!
We were 16 people, splitted up in groups of 4 people, and each group had a room. The rooms were not very comfortable, due to the small size of these, but we managed this little problem as well as we could. Before continuing writing, here I attach some pictures:
When the ship sailed, we went to our very narrow room (Tomas, french guy, Max, german guy, Jorge and I), we left the lugages and we meet the others to have a look to the different places inside the cruise. The ship had 10 different floors, the first ones were for parking cars and bringing some stuff from Stockholm to Helsinki, the next ones for rooms, the next ones for clubs and in the last one was the captain cabin, but we could not get inside...
Here you have some pictures inside the boat:
Once we were walking around the main areas of the boat, we came back to the rooms, we took a shower and let the party started. We were having "botellón" in the rooms, playing speed datings and then we went to the Karaoke's place where we showed and delighted (specially I showed) our great skills for singing ;). Eventually, after got the applauses from the whole people who was there, we rocked the floor on the club, we went to sleep and we woke up to see that Helsinki was a little bit more snowed than Linköping...
Never say never, but so far, and regarding the trips and experiences that I have to live until my Erasmus year finishes, I think I am not going to see any city so beautiful and magic like Stockholm. Helsinki was pretty good, but from my point of view, it can not be compared with Stockholm, like the most of the cities that I visited so far. Nevertheless, we got a really time over there, even though it was really cold over there.
We started our travel visting one of the most important and beautiful church of Helsinki, but, at the end, we finished visting the most of them...I do not think that our group was very religious, but maybe because inside the churches you could get yourself warm, or maybe because we did not organize the trip very well, we spent the most of the time moving around churches.
One of the curiosity of the travel (at least for me) was that in Finland they have Euros, like in the rest of Europe, but not like in the Scandinavian Countries. Once we have this thing clear, let's move on to the next part of the travel.
We kept walking through the city until we reached the city center. After some discussions, and as we all knew, we finished having our lunch in Mc Donalds, instead of one of the amazing places for tasting the reindeer meat, or some specific recipes from finnish cuisine, but it is true that Mc Donalds was one of the most, or directly the cheapest place for eating, and as none of us is already rich, we have to keep going to these places.
Once we avoid the death for starvation, we went to the Central Station, where we could see an essay of the New year's Chinese Eve (Dragon year, this year) and we went inside the Station to have a rest and get ourselves warm. On the way to the Helsinki's harvor, we had to help 2 or 3 people who had problems to move their vehicles due to the big ammount of snow (what a good people we are). Arriving to Helsinki's harvor we could see a lot of snow, really beautiful and land scapes and one of the most impressive things for me, almost 15 or 20 meters of the coast was frozen, and we saw a guy walking on the Baltic Sea's water, making a hole in the water, and fishing.
The boat sailed soon, and we had to arrived there, but we lost on the way and after nerves and emotions, we reached the boat without any trouble.
The return to Stockholm was more or less the same that when we went to Helsinki. We had fun and we went to the karaoke again. This time Balta and Benni (B&B connection) sang "Wonderwall" and we made a really good performance.
Next morning, before arriving to Stockholm, we woke up early to try to see the sunrise, we failed, but we took some nice pictures and I made this video:
I hope you had enjoyed with my new post, see you soon in the next one, hugs and kisses!!
