Östersund would be awesome had I arrived two weeks from now.  There will be a 20km ice-skating ring opening up and the Biathlon world championships will be wrapping up.  I ended up just hiking around and grocery shopping for the next few days.  Fortunately I am leaving tomorrow to Åre, which happens to be the place to snowboard in Sweden.

I crossed the border from Finland to Sweden on foot.  Actually several times.  There are two towns beside the border.  Haparanda, Sweden and Tornio, Finland, which I cannot pronounce correctly.  It’s a bit odd to think that there is no security for crossing a border, being from North America.  I ended up not spending a lot of time looking around either of these cities.  Maybe a few hours.  There wasn’t much.  And even when I came to check in to the hostel and told them I wanted to spend 2 nights, the guy asked me if I was 100% sure I could find things to do.  I did a day trip to Kemi, Finland to check out the Snow Castle they have there in the winter.  To my dismay, it doesn’t open until January 26th.  Oh well, I got see it mostly completed.  The only real reason I went to Tornio/Haparanda is to make my way into Sweden.  Because of its border location, it made it quite simple.  The hostel I stayed at was very quiet with only one other elderly gentleman staying there who worked nearly all day.  I only saw him once watching TV.  It was a good opporitunity to just relax after my adventures in Rovaniemi.

I am in Umeå now and I have to say, I’m not seeing a lot to do here.  I plan to go down to the common room tonight and see if there is anyone going out.  I haven’t done that in a while and it would be good to unwind with a couple of pints.

I’m Rovaniemi right now.  Scamming on some free Internets in a hotel lobby.  I’ll be leaving tomorrow to Tornio, Finland/Haparanda, Sweden.  They are two towns basically connected on the Swedish-Finnish border.  I don’t have anything booked.  I’m just going to go and see if it works out.  Enough about that though.

So here I am in the Lapland of Finland.  I’ve been doing a lot but also spending a lot in the process.  It seems like the best place to go if you want to do some activities in the arctic in Scandanavia.

My first tour was the snowshoeing in search of the Northern Lights.  Well bad news, we didn’t find them.  It was too cloudy.  But every cloud has its silver-lining and a decent amount of snow was coming down from the clouds.  It is supposed to clear up in the next few days, which means two things.  One, it is going to get a lotcolder very soon.  And two, the colder weather means the Northern Lights will shine brighter.  So it should actually work out nicely.  Regardless of the lack of the Northern Lights on this tour, I still had a fun time snowshoeing in the wilderness.

Dog sledging was something I have never done before, despite the fact that I live in Canada and it is our only means of transportation.  I guess I just don’t go any where.  Anyway, the tour consisted of driving a snowmobile/riding a snowmobile to some location in the woods.  If you want to snowmobile alone, you have to pay extra.  I lucked out by being the odd person out and getting my own snowmobile without any extra charge.  Anyway, we ended up going fairly slow (about 40km/h) due to the fact that some people on the tour weren’t confident on a snowmobile.  The guide said they usually go twice that speed down the frozen river, which would have been great.  But I’m not disappointed I suppose.  I can always snowmobile at home.  We got to the location where the dogs were waiting, went for an hour ride, and then cooked some sausages on a camp fire.  Then snowmobiled back to town.  I actually got to drive the dog sledge, which sounds good, but the dogs are very welly trained and they know what they are doing.  There is no need to steer.  You basically just control the brake.  All-in-all, it was a good tour.

Today, I went on the Santa Claus Safari.  Probably the sweetest name for a tour ever.  This involved a few things.  Snowmobiling to and from a reindeer farm.  Going on a reindeer sleigh ride and getting my reindeer driving license.  Hearing a story about the winds of the North from an old Finnish man, which was probably my favorite part of the tour.  The guy got so into it and cast magic spells to cleanse us of our bad spirits and bad blood.  Also, we checked out some reindeer at the farm.  When we got back to town, we took a van to Santa Claus’ village.  I got to meet Santa at his house and talk to him a bit.  Apparently he’s an Edmonton Oilers fan.  Also, he was the most enormous person I have ever met.  I’m sure he could’ve crushed me with one hand.  Then we got to spend a couple hours checking out the village, which consists of restaurants, cafes, and more souvenier shops than necessary.  Definitely the largest attraction of the area.

Rovaniemi is kind of a strange town.  Their only real industry is tourism.  They do also have the only snowmobile factory in Europe, which happens to be Lynx (apparently it’s the same company as Bombardier).  Anyway, because tourism is the only real industry here.  It is expensive to stay here a long time.  So my wallet will be happy to leave.

My first bit of advice about Oulu is don’t come here in the winter.  The only hostel I found seemed to only be opened in the summer.  So I ended up staying in a hotel.  Even though it was nice, it was much more expensive than I wanted to spend.  The hotel is called POHTO and you do get free wi-fi, free breakfast, free laundry and TV in the room.  Enough about the hotel.

Oulu seems quite small despite that it has about 125,000 people.  I suppose this is small compared to most cities, but it just seems like there are a lot less people here.  The Fins seem nice in general, so maybe that is what is going the small town feel.  There isn’t much to see in Oulu, I kind of just stopped here to break up my trip towards the North of Finland.  I am staying about 5km from the city centre.  This gave me a chance to have a nice hike into town and check out the few things there is to see.  Oulu is alright, but I feel it won’t be the highlight of my trip.  I’m looking forward to Rovaniemi.

I’m not going to lie to you, Helsinki is not blowing my mind.  It’s kind of nice, but it is basically just your typical capital city.  I imagine the city would be a lot more beautiful in the summer or with some snow on the ground and not in some horrible transition between it.  I think a large reason I’m enjoying it to its full extent is the rain.  It has been raining here everyday.  Hopefully this will clear up soon and for the rest of my journey, but that is asking a lot.  Until I’ll brave the weather and enjoy the city as much as I can.

I guess in the end I can say I saw Helsinki.  It does have some interesting sights to offer and a couple interesting museums, so I can’t complain too much about it.  I’m glad I’ve seen it, but I wouldn’t make a special stop if I were doing this again.

A new beginning to more travels.  Previous to this, I’ve been making small trips while living in Scotland.  Now I’m back on the road again.  It has been slightly difficult motivating myself because of the comfort level I had in Scotland, but I will manage I assure you.

Stockholm is way more beautiful than I would have thought.  It is actually built across 14 islands all connected by bridges.  It’s a small city of only about 750,000 people, but there seems to be a lot of activity all the time.  Unfortunately for me, it rained the whole time I was there.  At least a slow drizzle.

I basically took a walk around and checked out a number of museums to avoid the rain.  The music museum was first.  It was pretty cool but small.  It was very hands on as well.  You could try out an assortment of different instruments from bongos to harps.  Second, I went to the Army museum, which unfortunately was all in Swedish.  It was rather huge and was filled with tons of stuff. Next, to the Nordic museum which was horribly boring.  I’ll put it this way, there was a section on table-settings, a largesection.  It seemed like it was scraping the bottom of the barrel.  I then went to the large open air museum with prospects of checking out wolverines and lynxes.  I think it was called Skasen or something similar and is apparently the largest open air museum in Europe, maybe even the world.  I however, didn’t stick around too long due to the weather situation, but enjoyed what I saw.  Finally my last museum stop was the Vasa museum.  The Vasa was a large Swedish warship that capsized on it’s maiden journey.  This kind of reminds me of every piece of furniture I ever bought from Ikea, but I digress.  Anyway, because it sank sat under the sea for 300 and some years before they brought it up, it turns out it is the most welly preserved ship from its era.  It is pretty amazing actually.  Well worth checking out.

And that was my Stockholm adventure.

I spent Christmas in Jaca, Spain with some friends this year.  Being my first Christmas away from home I was a bit apprehensive.  I didn’t have the greatest experience with Spain the last time I was there.  I missed my flight from Barcelona to Dublin due to poor directions from people I asked and probably my own ignorance of just assuming everything will always work for me.  Anyway that aside, I had a great Christmas anyway.  The gifts were small and plentiful but thoughtful nonetheless.  <Insert speech of how Christmas is not about the gifts here.>  But truly it is not as most everyone knows.  It was nice to spend Christmas with some good friends in a new place and not just in a hostel.

We ended up doing a lot of different activities.  We helped Dana at school teach her class.  Went out for lunch and dinner on several occasions as well as stayed in.  Attempted and failed to go skiing once and successfully went skiing once.  Had a few snowball fights.  Explored Jaca and the surrounding area.  Visited friends of Dana’s for a meal.  Played board games.  Watched movies.  And relaxed.  All-in-all, it was a different but great way to spend Christmas.

Shannon and I arrived in London. Our flight from Edinburgh was delayed. I sort of thought it was going to happen. When I was flying from the ‘Burgh to the ‘Dam (yeah, I’m hip), several flights were delayed to various airport in London, but it was only 30 minutes. Anyway, we arrived in London comfortably.

Okay, so lets rewind for a minute here. Before I went to London for this 2nd trip. Oh yeah, by the way, if you have been loyal subscriber, a.k.a. a true believer (thanks, Stan Lee), of my online journal, you’d know I arrived in London from Canada for my first stop. Full marks for those who answered correctly. Alright, I digress. I have a hard time remembering the names of people, places and things, basically all nouns and some verbs, adjectives, adverbs… okay, any word in the English language or any other language for that matter. So to the point, I couldn’t remember if I went to the Westminster Abbey, but now that I went back to London. Anyway, Shannon hadn’t been to London before, so I let her decide where to go. Now I know that the Westminster Abbey is right beside Big Ben, so yes I have seen it before. And yes (Lissa), I have seen the Tower of London before.

After some night sight-seeing, we decide to check out a musical. Apparently, Shannon really loves the musical Chicago. And I had watched the movie a few years ago and quite enjoyed it. I have to say, the live musical was far superior to the movie. In the future I could see myself watching other live performances.

London was quite rushed, especially when we were leaving to Spain. The staff at our hostel decided to give us false information on how long the Stanstead Express took to arrive at the airport. Essentially, we arrived 10 minutes before check-in closed. We made our flight. So happy times. OH MY GOD! Weeeeeeeeeeeee!