Posts Tagged ‘finland’

The Hairy Bikers in Finland? We had to watch that, of course. We also watched the Swedish episodes for good measure.

I had never seen The Hairy Bikers before I watched it. I have mixed feelings. At first I was put off by the somewhat low-brow comments and humour they seem to display. But I have since warmed to them, and both Elina and I agreed that they did a good job of representing Finland.

There are some excellent tools out there if you want to learn French or German. There are plenty of tools out there if you want to learn Spanish, or Italian, or Polish. Finnish, not so much. There are a few resources out there, but nothing that really rocks.

So we are developing our own. Learn Finnish will be launching this summer. It will be a premium subscription service. Sign up for beta testing opportunities and advanced offers.

We’re only a week into 2016 and there is already reason to celebrate. Earlier this week the world junior championship of ice hockey took place in Helsinki. The winners? Finland! Triumphing 4-3 over Russia in the final. To top all of that off, Sweden lost to the US in the play-off game as well.

Unfortunately ice hockey is not well covered in the UK. BBC Sport do have a section, but only if you go to All Sports, then A to Z, and then find Ice Hockey. Sky Sports require you to go to More Sports, then Filter, then Ice Hockey. Neither even mentioned the junior world champions when I checked. Similarly, to watch the adult world championships we had to buy Premier Sports for a month.

Finland’s victory in the juniors suggests they will continue to field a good team in the coming decade, and hopefully many more world championships to come.

Last month we made our fourth annual pilgrimage up to St. Lukes in Headingley for Finnish Christmas Carols. Turn out was higher than ever with almost every seat in the small chapel being taken. Possibly due to the recently started Finnish language school based in Headingley.

After, we piled into the church house for food and conversation. Alas we did not win the raffle for the ginger bread house. Better luck next year…

Back in September I wrote about our trip to Finland and Finland wedding. A lot of the photos I posted were my own though, which meant I missed some of the group shots and wedding photos that I was on the other side of the lens for.

My parents were good enough to send me their photos though, so we’ve now got some photos of the two of us.

Check out the website for the Finland Restaurant Guide. It’s super. It contains all the reviews that can be found in the guide. It is not quite as good as the real thing as it does not have the introduction, information on ratings, or high-quality images, but will still give you an option, or maybe even two, if you are looking for somewhere to dine.

I am pleased to unveil my new book, Finland Restaurant Guide.

It is a very short book. I have not visited every restaurant in Finland. Believe it or not, we are not even close. However we have reviewed twelve of the restaurants we visited while in Finland and will be expanding the guide over time.

It is available on Amazon now. I had intended to give it away for free. However, the Kindle Store does not support giving away free books, so I have set it at the minimum price possible – 99p.

What do you get when you book a party barn and fill it full of Fins and Brits for a wedding? The answer is a damn fine party. I like to think that is down to the excellent team that Elina’s mum Riitta and I make. Riitta organised everything, and I resisted the urge to try and control everything, and everything worked out well.

We started with a champagne reception. Elina and I even had our own non-alcohol tray. We then sat down for a formal meal and then the cutting of the cake, which involved the usual awkwardness of everyone gathering round taking photos. Then we partied.

The barn had seating areas downstairs, including a bar with saloon doors and a dart board, and then an open area upstairs with a poker table, pool table, ping pong table, two table footballs and an air hockey table. There was also a TV with a variety of games consoles and a karaoke machine.

Oli won the book on Kieran’s arrival time after he turned up 2 hours 34 minutes late, beating out Cara’s guess with four minutes to spare.

I don’t have many photos of the day because I was busy being the groom and everything, but some more should hopefully turn up.

Elina and I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who made the trip over from the UK, from Sweden, and from the various parts of Finland too! It was wonderful to celebrate the day with so many special people!

For the first half of our wedding we travelled to Finland. I do me “we”! All together we took a contingent of 17 people there. Elina and I flew out in advance to spend some time in Helsinki.

We stopped by Stadi Talkers Toastmasters club and then checked into Hotel Haven. Haven is my favourite hotel in the world. However, Helsinki is the only place we stay in a luxury hotel, so there isn’t really any competition. But it is really nice. I couldn’t blag us a suite for the wedding, but they did give us a celebratory box of chocolates!

Moomintroll looked very pleased to be back.

We then headed off to have dinner. The first time we were in Helsinki we had seen Ravintola Nokka but decided it was too expensive. This time, we were here for our wedding though, so decided to splash out. It was awesome. The best food I have had in Finland.

Below is a panorama from our dockside meal.

On Tuesday we visited Helsinki Zoo who had elk this time, and in the evening meet up with my family for a steak at Goodwin. We spent the day with them on Wednesday when we visited the island of Suomenlinna.

On Thursday we set off on our own again to visit Moominworld, before having lunch on a riverboat in Turku and meeting Elina’s mum for dinner in the evening. We even had time to stop by the yarn shop.

Then on Friday, we headed up to Pori to spend a day on the sandy beach up there, before having a late lunch in the town.

James took this photo of the beach.

Saturday was the big day itself. I will write that up separately.

We spent Sunday touring the lakes around Laitila, going for a dip in two of them and making use of the beach sauna too. Trouble was ahead when Norman managed to lose his glasses in the lake, but Dr Barr came to the rescue by managing to dive down and find them – and they laughed when I said I would go fetch the PhDs…

Helsinki was good, but relaxing over in the west was one of the best parts of the trip. We’re already eyeing up summer cottages for when Worfolk Limited makes its IPO.

Having finally arrived in Helsinki after an exhaustive day of travelling there was really only one thing to do – find a local Toastmasters meeting. Actually, I had already found the club online. There are half a dozen in Finland but only one was meeting while we were there. Stadi Talkers is a President’s Distinguished Club, the highest honour a club can earn.

Meetings are conducted in English. Although some clubs speak in their own language, Toastmasters is generally like the British Empire – they go into other people’s country and insist their speak English. You have to learn Swedish as a second language in Finland. That means that the people at the meeting who were speaking more eloquently than I was were mostly doing it in their 3rd language.

People were friendly and welcoming. It was a mixture of Finns and immigrants, and the standard of English was high. A lot of cool people there too. I got chatting to a guy who used to work at Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds. They have something like 900 people working their now, which I assumed meant they were branching out into more games. However, it turned out that was 900 people all working on Angry Birds!

The meeting format only had minor differences to ours. They had Table Topics in the first half and a seperate person from the Grammarian introduced the word of the day. Every time someone slipped it in they pounded on the table. They even had an educational on Easy Speak – it would have brought a tear to Euan’s eye. Guests were only introduced at the end of the meeting, after they had had time to settle down and get comfortable.

I spoke twice. I did the toast of the meeting, which we do not have in Leeds but makes perfect sense when you are in a pub. I also did a Table Topic and came away with the ribbon. Not a bad start to the trip!