Monday April 21 2008

This was to be our first long haul journey. Three trains, two bus rides and one flight, with a total travel time of around half a day. Fresh from a grand old weekend in Finland, we had a weighty stockpile of cheerfulness to last us the trip.

The first leg began on board a double decker train. These seem to be common across much of Europe, but they’re a great novelty for Brits. Our country hasn’t got round to making these yet. We’re a bus kind of people: bottom deck for po-faced commuting, top deck for naughtiness. I used to ride on the upper floor of a double decker bus to and from secondary school, before officially moving downstairs at the age of 15 after years of minor scuffles culminated in somebody throwing a cow’s eyeball at my head.

Brodos and I whiled away the journey by cycling through our various forms of entertainment: videogames, books, conversation and our iPod supply - the latter now reduced in quantity by 50 per cent, and quality by around 95 per cent. Between these bouts of media consumption, we peered out of the window, marvelling at the sheer squareness of most of the buildings.

Finland may be Scandinavian but to somebody from the far west of Europe it conveys a tantalising hint of Russia. Sparse, cold and practical, uniform collections of trackside architecture separated by great expanses of water and thousands upon thousands of instances of the country’s sole tree. It was a beautiful sight, but you wouldn’t call it pretty. That would come in two stops time, at the picture postcard university town of Lund, in Sweden.

Disembarking on the outskirts of Helsinki, we took a bus to the airport (Brodos: “You do the talking,”) and killed time eating, browsing shops and taking photographs of anything that sounded faintly rude. We gurgled a little at a Moomin merchandise shop and I bought four small packs of the least pleasant-looking licorice available, in a fit of ill-advised curiosity. It tasted like the charred anus of a dog. I decided to fob the unopened boxes off on our next hosts, Morani and Maddok, as a “gift from Finland”.

Looking back, I envy that innocent young traveller, carrying his tiny payload of licorice as if it was the most natural thing in the world. For now I have seen the full horror of Scandinavian confectionery, I fear that person is lost forever. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and terrified after nightmares haunted by these “sweets”, rattling around in their poisonous little tins like tiny pellets of pestilence and plague.

That, however, is a tale for later.

Read from the start:
A Geek Adventure