Saturday, August 4 – To the Boat!

So, another nice relaxing morning. I ate breakfast at the hostel (oatmeal, yay!) with a very extroverted Russian. He’s been to Boston twice and loves America, so he talked about that for a while. He’s travelling around Europe, as well, but a very different route from me – Sweden, Spain, Germany…that stuff. It was a nice breakfast.

Then a hunt for an ATM, and some grocery shopping (if fruity drink pouches and cereal count as groceries) as preparation for the boat ride.

I stopped by the Helsinki market one last time and had coffee, a second breakfast and lunch and then wandered along the Esplanade where I happened upon a dance show in the pavilion thingy. It was called “Aiti” (mother), and performed by one dancer and another person who hardly ever faced the audience and just read off a script. The dancer was an amazing actor but the dancing wasn’t amazing – it wasn’t terrible, not at all, its just, I’ve seen highschoolers dance at about the same level, so it didn’t blow my mind. It was fun, though, first time I’ve seen decent dancing (besides the adorable folk dancers) since I’ve been here.

Then I took a very orange metro to Vuosaari, where the boat was.

Being me, I mixed up Vuosaari Harbor and Aurinko (Sun) Bay, so I got a bit of an extra walk to a very beautiful beach, before I got to the Terminal.

There was a very sad good-bye to Finland, before it got too windy to stand up on deck.

So yeah, boating is fun, though kind of boring. I got myself a pocket version of “Sense and Sensibility” (its genius, its about the size of my camera and has the entire book, no shortening), so I’ve been reading that and looking at the pretty water and sometimes eating, no huge adventures (sadly). My roommate is Finnish, from Lapland, way up North where the sun never comes out in winter, so she has some interesting things to say about Finland.

Addition (because this is too short to be deserving of a new post, but this is Sunday now)

We stopped in Gdynia, Poland and got an additional roommate, so, three people to the tiniest room I’ve stayed in yet, ouf. The third roommate, however, is probably my favourite person I’ve met so far. She’s Danish and probably the happiest person I have ever met in my life. She’s a teacher and then travels around doing seminars. She was also a foster mother for young criminals for a long time, and just all sort of travelling and languages and reading – fascinating person.

Also, for the fun of it, here’s a picture of the Gdynia harbor.