In the past we’ve done trips to someplace warm in December like Barbados for example. Which is always lovely, you should go. This year perhaps caused by global warming and a prior year with very little winter we decided to visit winter by going to a couple of Nordic countries and also countries we have always had on our list.
I worked for Nokia ( a company founded in Finland ) for a few years but never got to visit the mother-ship in Espoo, Finland (just outside Helsinki). I’ve worked with a lot of folks from Finland and really enjoyed the experience and I have to say that Nokia was one of the kindest and most thoughtful companies I ever worked for. I think a lot of that comes from the culture of Finland.
Iceland Air has a great deal where you can book a flight via Reykjavik to someplace else like Helsinki, Finland and take a long layover ( up to seven days I think ) in Iceland for no extra charge and then continue on your journey after enjoying Iceland. They also have very good service and very reasonable airfares. So, we booked a three day layover in Reykjavik and then three more days in Helsinki.
We visited modern art museums, the museum of Icelandic Punk Music ( in a former public restroom), the national museum, tried to see the northern lights ( at an abandoned NATO base ), and toured a huge lava tube. Along the way we had a lot of great food and really excellent cocktails ( there are a couple of local Gin producers who are using local botanical elements to make truly excellent gin ). We got a Reykjavik City Pass which got us into most of the museums and free passage on the trains and busses which were excellent.
Since it was the holiday season there were lights everywhere and we got to learn about the Yule Cat which is an enormous supernatural cat that finds people who haven’t gotten new clothes or haven’t finished their weaving and punishes them. I love the whole concept.
It was cold and dark most of the day, the sunrise was at 10:00 AM, sunset was at 3:00 PM… it wasn’t much of a sun either, it just skimmed the tops of the mountains on the horizon before disappearing again. When it was clear the mountains were beautiful and we saw a volcano erupting just outside Reykjavik. There was frequent light snow, they don’t even report it on the weather report because it would be like reporting that there will be air today.
We flew to Helsinki and arrived around mid-day so we had time to get situated in our hotel and to go to the Christmas Market at Senate Square. It was a very traditional European Christmas Market with stalls selling all kinds of holiday items as well as mulled wine, meat pies, etc… It was a Saturday so it was pretty crowded as we made our way around.
The next day we went to see an exhibit about Gothic influences on modern art, it was fantastic. Then we visited the Design Museum which had an excellent exhibit about mending, preservation and reuse as art. As in Iceland the food was excellent and the cocktails were also locally inspired and very good.
On our final day we took a ferry to the Fortress of Suomenlinna which was built to guard the entrance to the harbor. It was an interesting site that was a multi part museum as well as a community where a lot of folks lived year round. Other parts of the fortress had been converted into civic auditoriums and other civic buildings. It was a nice ferry ride and it was fun to walk around the fortress and learn more about Finland’s history.
All in all it was a great winter getaway, our own winter arrived a few weeks later but it was nice to experience it in countries that really know how to celebrate it.