Journey to the (North) East… Of Europe (II)

Day 2: Helsinki, Suomi (Finland)
1 May 2008

by David Ho

The island…

The boat…

The others… And, a mysterious floating creature… By the end of this post, some won’t make it off the island. Friends will part ways. Who remains on the boat? And who are the others? All that’s certain is, nothing will ever be the same again!!! Now, the producers of Lost may come after me with intellectual property laws or something... However, unlike them, I actually know the answers to MY questions, and HOW my story is going to end. Heh heh. Probably the biggest issue here is… Intellectual? Really? All people are is confused!

I’m rather un-enthusiastic about typing up what happened today. I didn’t really find Helsinki very interesting. Still, I’ll try my best to carry you faithful readers on to the next post. Plus you get to look out for all the answers to the above! (You just got to figure it all out for yourself)

The day started out pretty good, we had a buffet breakfast… That’s MY definition of a good start! Buffet breakfasts are good for 2 reasons. The first is breakfast, and the second is lunch. Enough said. Of course while you’re busy helping the poor boat people not waste food, make sure you are well equipped to pull this off. Wrapping your food up in tissue paper and your jacket, doesn’t really fall into the definition of well-equipped, but was what 2 of our buddies did anyway.

With lunch quite literally in the bag, we set off to explore Helsinki! First off, to where it all began. Suomenlinna! (I spelt it right on the first go, so klever!) Suomenlinna is one of the biggest island fortresses in the world. It was originally built to protect the Eastern parts of Sweden, but then in the 1800’s Napoleon and the Russians decided to take it. The Russians invaded and occupied Finland, and used the fortress to guard the shipping lanes. It was really quite a strategic piece of land, and it was this that helped fuel Finland’s economy which in turn helped Helsinki to prosper. It cost us a few Euros to get there by ferry, but I thought it was pretty worth it to go have a look-see. We spent half a day at the fortress walking around and seeing all that “had to be seen”, most of which isn’t very memorable. The only thing I can remember is me running around, up and down hills, onto cannons, walls… Basically anywhere I wanted to go. I also raced Yock Song up a hill in a bout of childishness, which really is a testament to how relaxed I felt there. Yock Song must’ve been pretty light-hearted as well, though we all speculated, (and I’d vehemently insist though he denies it) was because of reasons slightly more sinister than walking around an island. It turns out that all that energy I had was going to come in really useful, because we had to jog/sprint across the island back to the ferry point to catch the boat back to Helsinki. That makes it 2 for 2 days we were rushing… We made it without a minute to spare. Seriously, the other tourists right behind us didn’t make it.

Back in Helsinki, Debbie went back to the boat while we went off to see the Olympic stadium which looks like any other stadium. Olympic stadiums are white elephants, you build them, use them for one spectacular event, and then no one ever hears about it again, unless they’re tourist who find themselves with a travel pass with nowhere else to go. I’m sorry to say that there really isn’t much in Helsinki. Sure we went to city hall and a church that was supposed to be half carved out from a rock, but in terms of architecture there is nothing that really left an impression on me. If you want some more details, go look at Debbie’s blog.

Oh oh! The one highlight in Helsinki was probably the flying pig. Yep! A pig balloon was released and started its ascent to the heavens. That really left Carol in a fit of laughter. I never knew a flying pig could make her so happy…

We eventually got our bags from the ship, bought some food at a supermarket and went to the train station to meet up with all the others, where we would take an overnight train into Moscow! Somewhere that no-one that I know of has written about. Not Carol, not Debbie, nor Jian Feng… It would be unfair to say that the Russian experience started the next day, for it really began that night. Consider this for a bedtime “farewell”: “Goodnight, sleep tight, try not to think so much about the bed bugs, lock the door, and oh, stuff bits of cloth into the gap between the floor and the door so you don’t get gassed and robbed.” All I’m saying is, Russia is not the safest place for tourists, and we were going to be very careful.

Next: The imposing, the incredible, the irresistible… Red Square! (and other touristy places)

Journey to the (North) East… Of Europe (I)

Day 1: Stockholm, Sverige (Sweden)

30 April 2008

by David Ho

This journey begins pretty much in the same way as all our journeys begin… “Hurry up! We’re late! We were supposed to leave half an hour ago!”

“What time’s the flight again?” “So do we have to check in 40 or 45 minutes before the flight?” (Those 5 minutes are often very crucial to us.)

So let’s see, the metro takes half an hour to get to the airport, we take 15 minutes to walk from our apartment to the metro… Which is the same as a 7 minute run/jog… We’re not gonna make it, we’re not gonna make it… It’s like that all the way to the metro. On the metro, we talk about the same things too…

Rather breathlessly- “I’m never going to do that again. I’m going to be early next time.”

“Ok, so the plan is, once the metro doors open, we have to run ok? All the way to Terminal 2, which is a kilometer away.”

“Ok!”

This time, like all the others, we made our flight. Thank God for that! We were bound for Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, where we’d embark on our 10 day trip from Denmark to Moscow, the heart of Russia, to St. Petersberg, and then a pit-stop in Riga, Latvia, before heading back to Copenhagen.

We landed in Stockholm after a 2 hour flight. As usual, we both knocked out on the plane, and missed out on the only time the airlines served food. The only reason we knew this was because Debbie told us, and also because I ate half her sandwich. In Stockholm the first thing we realized was that we wasted 600DKr each because of the stupid visa thing. The second thing we did was collect our bags and bump into Ansen. Ansen is the meek looking Taiwanese guy with glasses. He may be soft spoken, but he does have his opinions about stuff, and most of the time I found him really entertaining. Either I was struggling to speak to him in mandarin, or he’d be telling me what he thought of this and that, which, more often than not, would be pretty funny.

So the five of us made our way down to the city, where we split up. Ansen came with Carol and me to the Vasa Museum, which is built around a great big mother warship. Now now, don’t go calling it a Viking ship, the Swedes insist it’s a warship. Yep, a great big mother warship that sank quite soon after it set sail on its maiden voyage, sounds quite familiar doesn’t it? The only difference is that in those days, they didn’t have Celine Dion to sing about it. We spent the better half of the day there because the ship was just wicked cool, so much so that when I grow up I wanna be a pirate, or a king. Yeah, a king would be better, because then people would build me great big ships like the Vasa, carve my family coat of arms on the back, and then have the ship sink 2km after setting sail.

Now here’s where it all becomes a little fuzzy, we met Yock Song somewhere in the middle of the old town, also known as Gamla Stan. We then had lunch on the grass of some little park in front of the parliament building, and walked around taking photos of things like the palace, and the opera house and some other churches up North from Gamla Stan. We had left our bags with Debbie and Jiamin who were lazing about on the grass. Bums… Heh heh. After gathering the crew, the 6 of us headed wandered around the palace and “Storkyrkan”, which is the oldest church in Stockholm. Oh, this was not before Carol got shooed off by a guard on the palace grounds. She was taking a picture of him and he was gesturing for her to stay away, but she just thought he was doing some kind of drill, and decided to stand right where she was to observe. Haha! The church is located just behind the palace, which made it pretty convenient for the king to go to church. There’s the other reason to be king. Kings were crowned there as well. Ah, to be the King of Sweden. Meatballs, superfluous ships, what’s not to love? Then again, the Swedes were always getting into fights with everyone else in the region because that’s what people do. They are, in my opinion, in one of the worst geographical places. They had to contend with the Danish in west, and the Russians in the east. Somehow during the Great Northern War of the 1700’s they managed to find themselves at odds with both these parties, as well as with the rest of the ominous sounding “Northern Alliance”, and they got their’s handed to them. Maybe Europe just wasn’t ready for Ikea’s cozy furnishings yet. I digress.

Storkyrkan is a pretty cool church because it houses the famous wooden carving of St. George and the Dragon. Now this guy, George, was the real deal back in the day. You know the story of the guy who killed the princess and saved the dragon? No? Good, because the story is the opposite of that. St. George is everyone’s patron saint. He comes up all over Europe. I know what you must be thinking- They canonized this guy for killing a mythical creature? Not exactly, the real story was that in the 3rd Century or so, George was a Roman soldier under Diocletian, who had made Christianity illegal. George was tortured and executed for the faith, but not before converting others through his steadfastness. There are only 2 reasons a man would be willing to be tortured and executed. Either he’s on to something, or on something. However, since this wasn’t set in Amsterdam, I’m pretty sure it was the former case. The dragon bit came quite sometime later.

After the church we wandered around the old town heading south towards where our cruise ship would be. We made our way down to the ferry point (which was half an hour away) and after meeting up with the rest of the 30 odd tour group (which took like another hour), boarded the ship which would cross the Baltic, sail into the jaws of the gulf of Finland and dock at our next destination, Helsinki! If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, we also had a buffet dinner that night! It was really the main highlight of the cruise. It was my first time on a cruise though, so everything was pretty exciting for me. We explored the entire ship; the deck, the restaurants, the shops and the lounge/bar, which had old people dancing. Carol and I forgot to do the titanic thing! The buffet was really good though, it was the first time in a really long time that I could eat all I could eat, so that’s exactly what I did. We went to sleep at a pretty reasonable time, because the next day we would be exploring the capital of Nokia Land!

Stay tuned! We’re not quite Finnish-ed.

Accounting Heaven

In accounting theory, we learn that from the day we were in 'accounting diapers', we all want to get to 'accounting heaven'.

I'm not so sure I want to go to accounting heaven.
The thing is, i'm quite sure 'accounting heaven' is somewhere in hell...
The journey there is fraught with difficulties, and the destination isn't even desirable.

No thanks, Prof JJ.

finders and keepers

a few days ago, karen asked me if i am a finder or a keeper...

i told her i am a loser.

what are you?

(as usual, sharon did a better job blogging)

moving on

is never easy.

but finding out that people and things have moved on, sans toi, is worse.

my sentiments exactly. been back about 4 days now, and things have just been moving ahead at full-steam. at home, it feels that there's no more space for me or my things; in school, i've been fumbling around, feeling lost and incredibly dumb every single class i've attended; friends, well, i'm still finding out (but it was nice to see familiar faces again - deb, luyi, bren, sj, yinglu, etc etc).

took a walk to lot one (yeah i now walk when i'm not in a hurry because it's actually quite near- new perspective. heh), and it has been transformed. felt a little uneasy squeezing with the ungracious crowds on the trains in the morning, and hearing an unfamiliar voice over the PA system. instinctively jaywalked across the entrance to the central and got stared at. stood on the right of the escalators instead. realised that i could no longer get around with just a few dollars in my wallet. decided that i wasn't ready to play for service this sunday- i don't want another shock when i find out that more things have changed.

the pace has been relentless. there's no time for jetlag. my 7 hour sleeps are no longer to be, and i've to stop being a tourist- there are now responsibilities and gardens to tend to.

it's nobody's fault- just the nature of life.
we're all just going down a river. a river called time. and i'm just trying to get back into the flow of things.