Leaving Toronto

Toronto's International Pearson Airport was quick and easy. Our flight was at 22:50 Tuesday, 7 June. I didn't have time to take pictures so I'm going to draw stick figures of the whole scenario and post those. Later though.

[Pic1]

I had several thing I had to take with me to do these astrophysics experiments. I had in my bag: 50TB worth of hard drives, Two long antennas for picking up radio interference, and wires of various lengths, as well as Radio receivers and GPSs.

[Pic2]

Since things were clearly sticking out of my bag I wasn't allowed through checkin right away. I had to carry on my antennas and reassure security that they were not weapons.

[Pic3]

8h plane ride to Helsinki. Got as tossed as we could with only 4 mini's each and wine for dinner.

Good times in Helsinki.

And Helsinki: Beautiful people, free wifi everywhere, bustling (but very clean) streets and awesome architecture. In short I found Helsinki pretty damn nice.

Mark on the bus from the Helsinki airport.

We arrived at Helsinki at 14:00 Wednesday, 8 June and didn't leave until 20:00 the same day. We found a map of the city and found a bus that went every half hour from the city centre to the airport and back. It was EUR3.20 per person each way. More than the ttc but cleaner and not as many crazies. The three of us started walking.

We found a really nice park with tons of hot Finnish babes laying in the breezy summer sun. I don't know how Connie found the guys.



We each had a protein bar pulled from the magic sack I carried around. After a little harmonika and sun bathing we split up and Mark and I made our own way to the harbor.

Mark just off the bus.

There we found a market under full swing. There were vendors everywhere with red roofs over their stands hawking fruits, veges, and what have you. I bought a few post cards there using Mark's Euros and we made our way to an old cathedral.


The banks to the cathedral overlooked the entire city from high up. The slowly moving sun blanketed the whole city in a bright golden glow. The clean curves of building below etched their shape into my memory. There we each wrote our postcards.

Mark in front of the harbour where there were
at least 3 cruise liners moored.

Off in the distance we saw a massive building that we discovered on the map was Helsinki Cathedral - or Tuomiokirkko (thanks Kaisa!) - situated on Senate Sqaure. The days are long in Finland and the sun's movement gave us the illusion that no time had passed since we had landed in Helsinki. Our time was soon coming to an end there so we quickly headed over to the Senate Square for a better view.

Me and Mark got an old French couple to
take our picture.

We quickly postmarked the cards we wanted to send home and made our way back to the airport just in time. We had to check in again as we had left the airport. The checking was easy this time. Since I was still carreying the antennas I simply asked them to put them in baggage and they did this for me.

Me in front of the Helsinki Cathedral.

Mark in front of the Helsinki Cathedral.

7h plane ride to New Delhi. We had bought two mickies of Jaegermeister and some weird mint liqueur. And they gave us a bottle of wine for dinner this time. It was a really nice flight comparatively to the first one.