The Harwig Globetrotters

It's been a busy couple of weeks on this side of the pond.

Just in case you were curious, Helsinki is very cold and very dark around mid-December. Unfortunately, due to lots and lots of work during the week, I didn't really get a chance to do any sightseeting around town. I did get a very in-depth view of the main road via taxi (or taksi) from the city to the office park about 30 minutes away. But since those were around 8 am and 5:30 pm respectively, there wasn't a whole lot of sun to illuminate the voyage.


A few things I learned about Finland however:


1. The Finnish word for Finnish is Suomi (http://www.google.fi/).


2. You don't need to learn Suomi because everybody speaks English, which is awesome.

3. The normal greeting is "Hei", which sounds a lot like "Hey". So that way when you walk into a restaurant and the hostess says "Hei" and you respond in English, they naturally transition to English, but if you respond in some crazy Finnish tongue, they respond in turn.


4. The only other word I picked up was "Joo" which is pronounced like "Yo" and is an informal "Yes". The only reason I picked it up was becuase people say it about 20 times per sentence, much like you would respond to any question in English with "yeah" or "yup" or something to that effect.



On more globetrotting news, Laura and I booked a holiday last night for Christmas in Spain!


The original plan we had was to head to Italy for a Christmas/New Year holiday (that's "holiday in the British sense, aka "vacation"). However, as the date came creeping closer, we decided to abort those plans and stay local and possibly do some day trips around the UK. We were also thinking about doing a night or two in Paris, so Laura was looking up Eurostar (train) tickets online the other day.

That's when she stumbled across some very cheap last minute holiday packages on lastminute.com.


So we're leaving on Friday for Benidorm, Spain for 5 nights. It's supposed to be in the 60's, which will be a very nice change from London's current weather pattern. We're on the eastern coast of Spain, a little south of Valencia. We're both glad to be getting out of London for the holidays.

Also, Mike just got back into town last night after a whirlwind tour of Switzerland and Italy. Being the gracious hosts that we are, we're going to give him the keys to the flat, and then leave him to fend for himself for his last 36 hours in London before he heads back to Korea.

Twilight Zone.....

Since we're completely out of food in the flat and the grocery store randomly closed at 4:20 yesterday as we were walking up, Bobby and I decided to go out for some Italian last night at a restaurant down the street.  As we were sitting there trying not to gawk at the brits around us loudly popping Christmas Crackers and wearing the silly little crowns that come out of them, we noticed something heretofore unseen by us, everyone working in the restaurant was actually Italian.  The host was italian, all of the waiters were italian, the cooks were italian, the sparkling water I ordered was italian, everything.   We joked that in the states the best you would get was an owner with a vaguely Italian last name (as my italian professor used to say, just add a vowel to the end of your name and you're italian!) but all of the cooks would probably speak spanish.  

This was made more funny by the fact that a few friends of ours here recently informed us that there's a UK version of Chipotle.  For those of you (mom) who don't know what Chipotle is, its basically a kind of mexican Subway-like restaurant that makes burritos instead of sandwiches.  It's known for its 5,000 calorie meals and the fact that you can't move for days after eating one.  And, for those of you who really know Bobby, you know that if he had to choose between me and Chipotle, it would probably be a pretty hard decision for him.  He loves it.  So, needless to say, we were excited when we learned of a Chipotle-like restaurant in London.  When we asked our friends if it was the same as in the states they replied "Yeah, except that there are no Mexicans working there."

Whenever i'm living in a foreign country, I always get little bursts of clarity where it's like I suddenly realize that i'm not in America.  You don't walk around all the time thinking "i'm in a foreign place, i'm in a foreign place," most of the time you just don't really think about it until you see something that's so different that it reminds you of this fact.  I guess the lack of Mexicans in restaurants is a weird thing to jolt me into actually realizing that we're living in London, but thats what did it for me yesterday.  So, for the next 18 months (atleast), we'll be enjoying incredibly authentic and delicious Italian, Indian, Thai, French (the list is never ending) food, but I think we'll get a little sad and homesick when we're craving Mexican food and realize that there are only 2 Mexican restaurants in this city, and neither of them are authentic.     

Off to Helsinki

While Mike and Laura were busy romping around London, I was in the process of finishing up my current project for work and preparing for my next adventure.

I'm leaving on Monday for a week in beautiful, sunny, and warm Helsinki, Finland! Where the sun is out just short of 6 hours a day (seriously, sunrise: 9:15 am, sunset: 3:13 pm).

I'm actually very excited about it, a very small project for the week and a cool (ha!) new city to check out. I'll be taking lots of pictures, although most will have to be with the flash turned on I suppose.

Laura wasn't really jazzed about coming to Finland in mid-December for some reason, so she's going to have her own adventures around London for that week.

(race recap soon, with pictures)

Mike Roy and Laura romp about London while Bobby works...

While bobby works 10 hour days to support us, Mike Roy and I traveled about London this week while he was here visiting. On Tuesday, we took a free tour of the city and saw many of the major sites. Now, for those of you who know me, you know that I hate historical stories. What I do like are stupid factoids that are completely useless but will, for some reason, remain in my brain for years to come. So, while I can tell you very little about Westminister Abbey or Buckingham Palace, what I did absorb from the tour is this:



1. The Royal Guards don't always wear those big fuzzy black hats (sad). Some of the hats are over 100 years old. They are made from black bear fur and, by law, no bears can be killed just for their fur so they have to wait till one dies for natural reasons or is killed on accident to make new hats. Hence the need to reuse them...



2. This is Picadilly Circus. What's Picadilly mean you may ask? Well, during the olden times (thats as historically accurate as it's going to get here-sorry, I don't retain dates) this is the area of London where all of the prostitutes used to hang out. These "ladies of the evening" were referred to as "dillies". So, quite literally, this is where men would come to "pick a dilly".



3. Trafalgar square has a pigeon population problem. So, they are using some pretty unconventional means to try and control it. They're putting pigeon contraceptives in the food, and, possibly even cooler than that, they've brought in this guy with a hawk to hang out in the square and HUNT THE PIGEONS!! He just stands around with that hawk and waits for it to attack a passing pigeon. I watched for about 20 minutes and never got any good hawk-on-pigeon action so i'm thinking about going back to spend a day watching. It's amazingly fascinating.


4. The name of this building is actually St. Stephen's Tower, not Big Ben. Big Ben is the name of the bell inside of it and you can only get in to see that if you have a British passport.