We took a fifteen minute bus ride to old Uppsala where there are Royal burial grounds, a museum, and fortuitously when we arrived there, a Viking festival. It’s an interesting place with history like we just don’t get in NZ. I always thought that places like Sweden were probably discovered by the English in Victorian…

At the risk of editorialising I’m going to give you my thoughts on Finland. What a great country! It’s a lot like Japan in some ways, very safe, hardly any crime, the people are reserved but will do anything for you if you ask them. There’s very little homelessness here because they give homeless people…

Pauline had to give a talk in Helsinki on Thursday so we took the train on Wednesday night and stayed until Sunday, visiting some friends and having a look around. It’s a very nice city and easy to get around what with trams, the metro and buses all accessible with an excellent app on one’s…

Pauline has always raved about Åland and I can see why, I’m very happy we got here while I can still ride a bicycle 🙂

I wanted to visit Estonia while we were here as Pauline had already been a couple of times and said it was very nice. Also, it’s interesting to visit other countries particularly if its only a couple of hours on a ferry, so I took the train to Helsinki and booked a guided tour for…

The hotel was about 4 kms away from the town, so we caught the bus. We were the only people staying there so we arranged a time to meet Johanna and she let us in and gave us a key and showed us the bikes we were hiring. She then went home and came back…

May Day in Turku is quite a big deal, they celebrate workers rights of course but also the students. On the night before thousands of people assemble near the square and all put their university caps on at exactly 6pm. To quote the students web page: MAY DAY IS COMING (or did it ever leave..?)…

We had to get the bus from Stockholm central at 6:30 am which would have been no problem if we hadn’t slept through Paulines alarm at 5:45. Luckily I woke up at 6:07 and we just made it. The Viking Lines ferry “Grace” is absolutely enormous, we had a nice cabin and the cost was…