(10/01/05)
Cullen, Hannah, Richard, Sharon and I went to Finland, Russia and Brussels for Xmas/New years and had a pretty "cool" time (bah, ha!!):
We were expecting some pretty chilly temperatures (like -20°C) but thanks to green house gasses it only went down to around -3°C for most of the time, still cold enough for loads of snow and heaps of playing around in it (much to Richards downfall):
Also more than enough snow available for us to make a kick ass snowman:
Initially we arrived in Tampere for a night but caught an overnight train up to Rovaniemi pretty soon after, which is right on the Arctic circle. Got down to -20 overnight there. We took the opportunity to go reindeer riding and snowmobiling in ninja outfits:
Here we are on a frozen river:
Seeing as it gets down to some fu<ken freezing temperatures, they provide guys with instruction on how to relieve yourself outside:
Also up by the Arctic circle is the "real" Santa Claus' village, or as I like to call it Santa's "real" multi-million dollar commercial rip off mall.
They did have some cool ice sculptures to check out (for a price, of course), you just had to find them in amongst the overpriced shops selling complete dribble:
No, we didn't queue up for an hour and chop off our fingers as payment to see Santa, instead we took some time out to make another snowman:
Another really cool thing we got up to was husky dog riding:
It started off really sweet, until one of my dogs started a fight with his partner after he crapped on his feet. As our guide was sorting them out, this Asian fu<k decided to try and pass us (after being told 30 seconds before NOT to under ANY circumstances), resulting in an all out 12 animal dog fight leaving one of my dogs unable to run any more after a bitten arse. Don't worries ladies, they have plenty of replacements:
Oh yeah, you wouldn't have picked it, but Finland is full of red-necks and they're not afraid to advertise that fact:
Kinda puts supermarkets in southern American towns to shame.
And that was a taste of the first part of our trip, we went to Helsinki for a night (which has some cool buildings):
before catching an overnight train to Saint Petersburg in Russia, but that's another web page for me to write up...
By Tony Baker: email