The flight to Helsinki was dull and uneventful. The inflight entertainment was a good deal poorer than the Virgin flight from Heathrow to Tokyo – though I doubt I’ll be flying by FInnair much so it probably doesn’t matter. The inflight movie was Anger Management which turned out to be about at boring as I had expected but in a different way.
There were some Japanese people causing trouble in immigration (I think they were just being confused) so it took Ishikura-san a while to get through. Neither of our Japanese UIMs were working with the GSM networks (my UK phone is still working as expected so its not too much of a problem for me) here so I just had to wait until he turned up.
Getting the hire car was interesting – they’ve put the steering wheel in the wrong place, and the gearstick. So after much overrevving and wobbly lane changes we stopped at a service station where Ishikura-san took over the controls while I wondered at the beautiful trees. There seems to be a 50-50 mix of silver birch and fern, with all the birches taking various shades of brown.
We passed a few little lakes and an upside down tree (which I can only assume was art) on the way Tampere.
As we were deciding what to do about food Ishikura-san spotted a Japanese person in the hotel lobby, which could only mean one thing, someone else from the Tokyo office. They were just going out to get some food so we joined them for a cozy taxi ride across town to the theme park. Passing the ‘Big Tits Erotic Restaurant’, a name which I think sums up quite a lot of the cultural differences between the FInns and the Brits.
Of course, what I needed after spending all day travelling was to eat in a revolving restaurant. Ooops. Still it was high up and with nice views across the lights of the town. The taxi ride back to the hotel was in a lurve wagon Elvira would have been proud to drive, a seven seater taxi set up with a constellation of sparkling blue LEDs in the ceiling and \m/ rock music…
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