After almost seeing the sunrise the morning before I set out in the dark towards the foreshore at the south tip of Helsinki. I grabbed a tram from just outside the hotel. The tram took me through the centre and out towards the bay, where I had a nice walk through a park covered in snow from the night before.
After flying back from Oulu to Helsinki I had a couple of days to get some washing done at my favourite coin laundry, and get some more photos around Helsinki before my flight to Stockholm.
On the first day I got up fairly early and walked in the general direction of sea, passing the Cathedral and the Senate Square, before spotting the first of the sunrise.
Oulu, I still have no idea how to pronounce it, is an interesting place. A colleague at work who had spent some time in Finland would keep correcting me.
“Oulu?”
“Oulu”
“Oulu?”
“Oulu”
The easiest way to get around Finland in winter is to fly. Unlike more southern airports, Finnish airports don’t close if there is snow, like everything else the infrastructure is built to handle it. I had a short flight from Helsinki to Oulu, and probably spent more time in the taxi and waiting at the gate that I did actually in the air.
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China is pretty big.
It covers a very diverse area, and the people from different areas are very diverse. Even beyond Hong Kong and Taiwan the concept a single unified China is something I struggled to get my head around. Our guides would often reference dynasties from hundreds of years ago and say “they unified all of China.”
China is old.
They have a recorded history going back quite a while. Though there ██████ are some notable ██████ blank spots ██████ in that history.
We visited a lot of places that were very old, or at least were old at some point. China seems to have a new found pride in its history, or █████ at least █████ parts of ████ it.
On the way to the Great Wall we visited the Ming Tombs. Our guide explained that a number of the tombs were destroyed during the cultural revolution. What was left hadn’t been completely excavated.
