Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Last month we popped down to Burbage for the weekend to visit Hugh & Anna.

If Hugh was not a middle-aged man trapped in a young man’s body before, owning his own house has only increasing this vasty. They are like proper grown up people with furniture, and a garden, and a plan for where their lives are going.

Worse still, it is infectious. Hugh took me to the driving range at his local golf club and it was actually quite a lot of fun. I’m 28 years old, golf should not be fun!

They also have two new additions to the family, of the feline variety.

It is difficult to take a good picture of a creature that insists on licking your camera lens.

We dropped by Helsinki Zoo while in Finland. They had elk! We also managed to catch the bear feeding.

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!

Suomenlinna is a fortress island in the bay of Helsinki. It was originally built by the Swedes to stop the Russians from invading. Ultimately it did not work, but it is now a UNESCO world heritage site (one of two we visited on the trip, the other being Old Rauma).

The island has a selection of bars and cafes, six museums and a few shops. It claims to have a memorial to prisoners of war as well but it clearly is not where it is supposed to be according to the map. The island also has several hundred permanent residences ensuring a good ferry service. During the day it runs every 20 minutes and the day runs from 5am to 2am the next morning.

You have to walk on Suomenlinna, there is basically no disabled access due to the cobbled streets, hills and dirt tracks. However, the mile to the other side of the island feels a lot shorter because there is so much to see and do.

Some panoramas too. Click for a larger version:

After years of talking about Moominworld we finally managed to schedule in a trip. It was not easy. We visited on the 20th of August. It closed for winter on the 23rd of August. Short summer.

You park up round the back of a petrol station and then get a bus over. Or at least near it. It’s not very clear. It drops you off and then you wander over this little park, down a harbour side and eventually over a bridge to the island where Moominworld is located.

As the bus pulls upped, one little kid screamed “Moomin! Moomin! Moomin!”. As Elina pointed out, if he was that excited about the arrival of the bus, he was going to have an epic day. Simultaneously, his parents were going to get rather sick of the word “Moomin” quite quickly, and then be forced to endure it for several hours more.

In fact it seemed that everyone there had small children. Except us.

We went to Snufkin’s Camp for story time. There were quite a few kids there listening to the Finnish version, then they all left and it was just us and Snufkin listening to the English version. Good news for me, though I think Elina felt a bit weird at this point.

Next door they have a napping area. This consists of an area shaded by trees filled with bean bags and hammocks. Why don’t more places have this?!? I have long campaigned for business hammocks in the office but what Mumminworld had surpassed even my expectations.

They have lots of buildings to explore, including the four flours of the Moomin house, and all the Moomin characters that you can take photos with. They also do shows every half an hour.

I also had my first entirely Finnish-language conversation. I asked for two tickets, she told me the price, I said “card”, she said yes, I paid, she gave me my tickets and I said thank you. Hardly Academy Award winning dialogue, but a conversation none the less.

In summary, Moominworld is awesome.

Earlier this month we visited Hayfield for a weekend of catching up, relaxing and enjoying the British summer, such as it is.

The Spring 2015 Toastmasters District 71 (UK & Ireland) conference took place in Nottingham.

Nottingham is quite a happening city. There was plenty of people out in the evenings and a good range of restaurants. We also did a walking tour lead by Robin Hood. He told us that the city was originally called “Snotingaham” which it turns out is true.

Workshops

The workshops were a mixed back. You get a lot of professional speakers and motivational coaches running workshops, and they send to speak a lot of shit. Erick Rainey for example started his speech with a slow motion run down the aisle. I thought to myself “brilliant, this is going to be a sarcastic post-modern take on how stupid a lot of the motivational crap is”. But then he did it all seriously. He’s a great communicator, and has loads of good stuff to say, but then he mixes it with nonsense like NLP.

Rav Chambers presented a good workshop on video. It did not teach me anything I did not know already, but it was valuable to have a reminder of all the things I know I should be doing when shooting film.

Vinay Parmar’s workshop on personal branding was interesting. However, for someone who focuses on how you present yourself, he really needs to spell-check his slides as there were several errors in them.

International Speech Contest

The district final of the International Speech Contest took place on the Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t the best venue for it as it was in a lecture theatre. The speeches were good, but I am looking forward to getting back to competing. Two years ago, in Torquay, I felt out-classed (to be clear, I wasn’t competing). Here, I sat there thinking there are a bunch of us in Area 15 that could compete at this level.

Opening ceremony

The Friday evening is a buffet and fancy dress party. Of course the theme was Robin Hood!

Gala dinner

The Saturday night was the Gala dinner. We had the Sheriff of Nottingham as a guest and for one of the raffle prizes, she let someone wear her robes and hat! Best of all, Gillian took the prize.

Earlier this month we visited ICE Totally Gaming to get to know potential customers and suppliers. It was my first trip to the ExCeL centre which is predictably huge.

Many of the stalls were very impressive. One had a slot machine connected up to a Oculus Rift headset and when you won you got taken on a roller coaster ride.

Not surprisingly, there were lots of men in suits and women in far less clothing. I was very proud of the good twenty minutes we spent discussing sexism and objectification of women.Then we had a good stare.

London was as horrible as ever. It took me an hour and a half in a taxi to get there the first morning.

While in Ullapool, we took a Summer Queen Cruise to the Summer Isles. I totally recommend it. We saw loads of dolphins. Loads!

Some awesome scenery too.

And we got some beautiful sunshine in the Summer Isles. We hiked up to the top of the hill and then I ran up to the very top of the island. This is us at the top of the first hill:

Then this is everyone from the very top of the island:

And their view looking up at me: