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.
To avoid rushing out of Singapore after the race with everyone else we added a day to the hotel / GP package. After the appropriate amount of being lazy watching we set out to catch a bus to the train station. There were a couple of numbers we could catch and we jumped on the first to arrive. It immediately failed to turn left to the station and continued along the main street.
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Getting to the race track from Gardens by the Bay wasn’t hard, but there was a bit of walking to the closest MRT station, through the Marina Bay Sands. We jumped on a train for a couple of stops, and then changed to another train. On the platform helpful people were explaining that there were a few different trains going to different places on the same platform, we had to wait a whole extra 2min. Getting out the station and into the track was a lot easier than navigating 3 shopping centres from where the busses all stopped.
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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