#Eurafrica2013 || Backlog begins with Finland

Ok, friends. Get ready for some travel blogging overload! My recap style for this trip is "brief overview of each destination with a few photos, details, stories & tips." The hardest part is, of course, selecting the photos. When you take more than 5,000... it's time consuming.

Oh and get excited for a pretty awesome video for the grand finale. It's creative and you're going to love it.

But first, let's rewind to 5 weeks ago (feels more like 5 months ago) when our journey began...


After our overnight flight from New York, our first stop was Helsinki, Finland.

It wasn't exactly a dream destination, but we saved about $500 by selecting a flight with a 24-hour layover in this lovely city.

We began our adventures by purchasing a 24-hour transportation pass and heading to the city center.

There we found a cute seaside market with fresh fish, reindeer meatballs, and local goods for sale. Check out this fur!  

At the food tents, they loved giving away free samples! You could probably walk from tent to tent and get full just from that. One of the popular items was a tiny fried fish. It was crunchy and had a good flavor, but wasn't anything too spectacular.

My body clock was still confused, so I opted for more of a breakfast item: an apple pastry coated in sugar. Yum.  

Our transportation pass also included a boat ride. After exploring, we took the ferry to Suomenlinna, a small island that used to be a maritime fortress. We were told this is a popular activity for both locals and tourists. The harbor looked really pretty as we sailed away.

The ferry ride only took about 15 minutes, which gave us plenty of time to explore!

Except... once we arrived, we kept feeling like we were missing something. Maybe it was a result of the jet-lag from our flight? But honestly, we were a little disappointed. There wasn't really much to do, or see. So we quickly caught the next ferry back to Helsinki.

The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing in Esplanade Park (trying REALLY hard not to take a nap... we wanted our bodies to adjust to the new time zone). While people-watching we noticed that there are A LOT of natural blondes in this country. Good to know they're not completely endangered.

In the evening, we headed into the suburbs to find our couch surfer's home.  Her name was Katja and she welcomed us with a home-cooked, traditional Finnish meal of potatoes with sauce, and salad. This is also the first time I questioned whether our host was going to leave us a positive review or not. See... we had purchased an adapter and a converter for my hair dryer. I tested it already and it worked fine. But for some reason when I plugged into her outlet... it blew a fuse and the power went out. We tried to fix it... but it didn't work. I felt so bad! We offered to pay for the damage, but she refused. I think my converter protected my hair dryer and surged the electricity the other direction. But luckily for us... she still left us a nice review :) We are still in awe of the kindness and generosity of couch surfers! They open their homes, kitchens and lives to us... complete strangers. It's really a great opportunity to understand culture and way of life. If you get a chance, do it!

Aside from the boring island and hair dryer mishap... Finland was nice. The people were friendly, most spoke perfect English, and I found a cute dress at H&M for $10.  Plus it's another pin for our wall map! And that alone makes me happy.