Off to Helsinki

And again I´m off to the beautiful Helsinki. But today I won´t see anything of the city itself. :(

In half an hour I´ll go to the train station and at 15:10 my train departs to Helsinki. About 6,5 hours in the train is not much fun, but I have a book to read, a book to learn, my laptop and my mp3 player with me, so I think the time will pass quite fast.

This night it´s going to Helsinki-Vantaa airport to wait for my flight to Germany.

Iloista vappu kaikille! :)

Helsinki Photos

So yesterday I arrived back home, after a looong trip by car from Helsinki up to the town where I live. But it was absolutely worth it! I love being in Helsinki, it´s one of my favourite cities!

One of my favourite places in Helsinki :-)

We have visited the zoo called Korkeasaari, which is on an island. This is the way where you walk when you want to visit the Korkeasaari zoo in Helsinki.

It´s a really beautiful zoo, actually the most beautiful one I have ever seen. It´s a nice scenery there, with little hills, forests, lakes, a lot of animals and of course all the water around the island.

I have been so many times in Helsinki, but I have never visited this zoo,  but now I can say it´s worth to visit it!

I absolutely loved this view from a restaurant, which was on the island. I had to take some photos of that, because it was just so amazing! People were sitting there, fishing, just relaxing, talking, having fun and enjoying the beautiful scenery.

It´s not often so, that you can combine all those things with visiting a zoo. All zoos I have visited in the past were really nice too, but I just went there and watched the animals, ate a bit and went back home. But this time it was different. It was kind of everything. :-)

Then I went on a little hill, where I could see the centre of Helsinki. Unfortunately you cannot see it that well on those photos, but believe me, it was one of the best views I ever had. :-)

If I had more time, I would have been just on that hill probably for some hours. ;-)

But of course we hadn´t the time to sit there for some hours, since we weren´t there just to sit and enjoy the scenery. ;-) We wanted of course to see all the animals they have there and so we did. I have also to say that the price you have to pay for entering the zoo

was quite cheap. I cannot remember it correctly but I think we paid something like 35 euros for all four of us. So three adults and one child. This we paid also in Germany when we went into the zoo, but the difference is that the Korkeasaari zoo is much bigger and has more beautiful places in the zoo and more different animals.

The best photo I made of animals is probably the following one. I liked these kinds of birds so much and their color is just amazing! I have never seen animals with such a strong color!

Another thing to tell is that we were really surprised as we came to the lion area, since you could see the lions really close to yourself. It was not like in the zoos I have visited before, that you had maybe about 10 meters distance to the lion area. Between the lion and us were probably just 2-3 meters distance and that was much better than in other zoos. And it was still a safe distance.

So again, if you plan to visit Helsinki, plan also to visit Korkeasaari! :-)

This photo I took on the way when we went back to our car. Unfortunately we don´t have green trees yet in Finland, but anyway, as long as the sun is shining, I enjoy that weather and the finnish scenery! :-)

But soon I think we will have green trees and colorful flowers also in Finland ... finally. ;-) Let´s see maybe it´ll be green when I will come back from my holidays on the 8th of May.

I have many favourite places in Finland and of course also and especially in Helsinki. But

the best one is the Uspenski Cathedrale,     which is on a little hill.

If you go up there, you´ll have a very nice view on the centre of Helsinki and the harbour and market place.

I often sit in the gras, reading a book or just listening to music and enjoying the weather and the amazing view from there. So if you visit Helsinki, I can just recommend it to go there! :-)

This photo on the left side I have taken from that place, but it´s not that high as the Uspenski Cathedrale itself is but in front of the cathedrale, there is a green place, where a lot of people sit in spring and summer to relax. The next photo shows the Uspenski Cathedrale and the green area in front of it.

There I spent a lot of hours, also to think about difficult things, making decisions or as I already said, just to relax.

I must say that we have had the best weather ever in these days in Helsinki! Exept of some rain, which came down on Friday we had sun all the time. It was sometimes a bit windy, but hey, we had sun and it´s such a beautiful feeling to have that weather! Today we had a sunny day too in my town and it seems the summer comes faster as we all thought. :-)

On Friday I´ll go again to Helsinki by train since I will fly to Germany from Helsinki-Vantaa airport on Saturday. So let´s see if I will have some time to spend also in Helsinki, or just on the airport? :-)

In Helsinki

Since Friday I´m in the beautiful Helsinki and it´s been so warm all day. I´ll post of course some photos and write a bit more within the next days.

Happy Easter to all of you! :-)

Spring is finally here!

One more post to update all the things which happened during the last weeks.

SPRING IS FINALLY HERE! :-)

It´s so nice because I was longing for spring such a long time and now it finally arrived also here in Finland! I have taken some photos of my way back home from the train station, when I came back from Kuopio last weekend, it was a reallly hot sunday!

Here we go:

This first photo was taken on saturday in Kuopio. It´s some big building on the other side of the market square. It looked so beautiful that I had to take a photo of it. ;-)

Since we had some politic thing on saturday, where you can go and choose some politicans or whatever, everyone in whole Finland has taken out his flag. At least those people, who have a flag. I was wondering already in Kuopio, when I was waiting for my train back home, why I can see everywhere those flags:

I really like the finnish flag, so always if I see one, I have to take a photo of it and as you can see, the wind was perfect at that moment. :-)

I was happy that I just had two hours in the train, since I started not to like travelling by train anymore. Usually I liked it to travel by train, by bus or by airplane but when you are travelling so often as I did in the last time, you get really tired of it, especially when you have to change trains, busses, or airplanes. You always have to wait or you´re afraid to miss your next train/bus/airplane, because the first was too late.

After two hours in train, which were passed by really fast, I arrived back home and I walked over 20 minutes from the train station to our house. I had my luggage with me of course, my bag and my laptop, so it was not so nice to walk so long, especially because it was so hot on that day! Or at least it was hot for us here in Finland. ;-)

But when I have seen how beautiful our scenery looks in the sun and that almost all the snow went away, I was so happy that I walked and of course I took some photos! ;-)

On the right side of the photo there is the small town, which you cannot see unfortunately so much on that picture, and on the left side there it´s going to my home, where I live at the moment.

But the best day was yesterday! It was so warm and sunny outside that I almost couldn´t believe it! I went out with the dog and went to a small beach, which is probably 5 minutes from our house and there´s a lake too. You cannot see the beach really much since there is still a bit of snow, but anyway, the scenery was so very beautiful! I was sitting there for an hour

maybe and watched the dog walking around and playing and just relaxed in the sun.

I was just enjoying the spring. :-)

You cannot imagine how good it feels to have such a beautiful weather after almost 4 months snow, darkness and coldness.

I mean I wasn´t depressive or "melancholic" in that finnish winter time, although I haven´t been used to it and I imagined it would be much harder than it was in the end, but of course I was longing for spring now in

the last weeks since I got tired to see just snow. I love snow really much, but after a time you get really tired of it and after a time the snow gets also pretty dirty from the cars, the air, etc. and then it doesn´t look like really nice anymore.

Unfortunately it was raining the whole day today, but I didn´t care that much since I was still so happy about the weather we had yesterday and the days before.

I mean we cannot have beautiful weather every day.

Now I´m going to sleep since it´s already quite late and I have a lot of things to do tomorrow.

I have to work tomorrow, I have to clean up and wash some clothes and then I have to pack my stuff since I´m going to Helsinki on Friday morning.

Let´s say in the very early morning ... at 4 o´clock!

I´ll meet my lovely relations there which are coming to Helsinki by ferry, they start today and will be over 15 hours on the ferry, which means that they will have a sleep-over on the ferry and they will arrive at 9:55 in Helsinki. The same time as I´m going to arrive by train.

So have a good night and sleep well!

Tarot, Juha Tapio and Johanna Kurkela

Hej and SORRY that I haven´t written in here so long again.

A lot of things happened, I have been in Kuopio the last weekend to visit Juha Tapio´s and Johanna Kurkela´s concert on friday there, on saturday I went to see Marco Hietala´s second band Tarot, which also played in Kuopio. So it was a weekend full of concerts, action, emotions, travelling, etc.

Here some photos of Tarot´s concert:

So let´s start with Tarot´s concert, since this was my favourite concert of the weekend.

It has been really really nice there, there have been mostly young people, since it was a concert, which can also be visited by people under 18 years. (It was a non-alcohol event). The concert started already at probably 19:30. Tarot had one support band, which was a band of some young boys who were maybe between 15 and 18 years old.

I didn´t like their music style or their taste of rock music, but anyway, they rocked on stage! So respect! For their age it was really really great and I´m sure we´ll hear from them in some years again, when they are maybe playing on a big festival in Finland, like the Tuska Festival, for example. ;-)

I don´t know the name of their band unfortunately, but if you are interested, you can check it up at Tarot´s webpage for sure!

No niin ... after probably one hour, where the young guys played on stage, Tarot started finally to play! It was so nice to see the guys again since it has been such a long time since my last Tarot concert, which was in 2007!

They played songs of their last albums and some songs of their new album, which you can and should check up on their webpage, too! ;-)

Really good music! One of the best songs they played was an acoustic version of "I Walk Forever", which was so beautiful, especially with Marco´s "soft" voice and all the people singing along!

If you wanna see and hear it, here´s a little video of "I Walk Forever":

On Friday I have been at Juha Tapio´s and Johanna Kurkela´s concert, which was nice too. But it´s not really my favourite kind of music, but I have to say anyway that Juha Tapio is a really great singer! I have never heard him before and I was never interested in him, but NOW I´m definitely a fan of him!

He´s such a nice and friendly man and a great singer, although I´m not the biggest fan of his music style, but his voice is amazing!

And a nice thing was also that you could really see how he loves music and that he totally is behind his music and lyrics.

Let´s say like this: He lives the music!

He played that concert together with Johanna Kurkela, so it was that he started the show with one song of him, then Johanna sang a song of her, then Juha came back and sang a song, ja niin edelleen.

Johanna has a really nice singing-voice, also live and there have been a lot of very emotional moments during their concert, since some of their songs are very sad and maybe also a bit melancholic. Anyway, I don´t listen to Johanna´s music that much, since I am not very much interested in her as a person or a singer, but some songs are really nice and maybe I will visit a concert of her one day again.

But Juha Tapio is it definitely worth it to attend a concert of him and I will do that as soon as I have the possibility for that. ;-)

It was a really nice but stressful weekend, with the train travel, going from one concert to the other, finding the concert venues, and so on. Especially because I have never been in Kuopio before, it was even harder to find everything.

I was happy when I arrived back home and I was so happy that I have taken the first train on sunday back to my town, since I had the whole sunday almost to relax. :-)