Radisson Sas Plaza Helsinki

What great place, arrived Saturday morning & Finnair bus takes you straight to town - central railway station - in less than 30mins for eur5.20 (they have Euro hurray). Was staying in Radisson Plaza Hotel which was incredibly near the station (which unusually is not a seedy area) but unfortunately my orientation was a bit skewed so lets just say I had a walking tour for an hour! Hotel was just by the National Theatre & Aaltonen's statue of poor old Aleksis Kivi, who died insane and impoverish...

We got our luggage pretty quickly and took the finnair airport bus to the railway station where it took only 5 min to find our hotel, though we did go start down the right street in the wrong direction.

The hotel is nice. We've got a room on the top floor, there's a minibar (probably not going to use it though...) and the hotel has a sauna, which we're probably going to use at some point, being in Finland and all. There is also free internet, and free loan of bikes.

When we'd ch...

Got up at a decent time (not too early, not too late) to eat breakfast, and then went back to our room just to check a couple of geocaching places, but forgot the time and ended up not leaving the hotel until 11:30 to find a bike rental place.

We found the place without much difficulty, but unfortunately they had no bikes left (Didn't take credit card either, and we were out of cash), so we ended up on one of the seven walks around town (You can get a leaflet/booklet at the tourist off...

Today we borrowed a couple of bikes from the hotel (they only have two and they were gone early yesterday) and went towards the open air museum on Seurasaari island, only a few kilometers from the city center. On the way we stopped by the Sibelius monument. The weather started out being a bit overcast and we got a few minor rain showers, nothing too bad, during our time at the open air museum. The museum consists of old Finnish houses moved there from all over Finland. It is worth seeing, if...

This day was rather grey and the forecast said lots of rain, which is why we decided on indoor activities: see a museum and go shopping for souvenirs.

We were rather lucky and only got a few minor drizzles of rain, nothing soaking, and the weather cleared in the afternoon.

First stop was the Finnish National Museum, located in a castlelike building not far from the railway station. The museum shows Finnish history from the stoneage until the 19th century and beginning of the 20t...

Soumenlinna fortress was our destination today. It is located on a few islands in the bay and was build to defend the western border of Sweden when Finland was a part of the Kingdom of Sweden. It has also played a part for both Germany and Russia, as well as Finland as a sovereign state. Today it is a tourist attraction with a ferry every 20 minutes, but the Finnish Naval Academy is still located on the island and it is also houses Helsinki citizens. The trip to Soumenlinna was a pleasant cha...

We have had a very busy couple of days! :-) Our last night in Hong Kong was lovely... we went for a swim on the hotel roof and took some cool photos of the Hong Kong buildings. Got up around 5am yesterday and caught the train to the airport... so efficient, we got to check our bags in at the train station! Flight to Helsinki was long and uneventful... food was a little ... errr...... average and we were stuck on the tarmac for an hour before we even started. Got to our lovely Helsinki hotel a...

We started our tour of Zoos around the World today with a visit to Helsinki Zoo, the most Northern Zoo in the world that has animals from all the world in it. Felt sorry for the kangaroo and emu, they are not really built for Northern winters, It is set on an island and we got there via ferry. Was a lovely zoo - some very old cages but a beautiful setting. We saw jaguar cubs and they were so cute, playing and running around. Tom got some great photos. We also saw a toucan for the first time :...