Postcard from Helsinki

Mark had workshop to attend in Helsinki this past week and I decided to spend some air miles taking Zoe here to join him for a long weekend. We flew out on Thursday and are going back tonight, Sunday evening. We are staying at the GLO Hotel Art, a newly opened boutique hotel in a refurbished castle. It is a great hotel and it has amazing service such as their carefulness of looking afte Zoe's doll, which she had forgotten it at breakfast, greeting her with it as she entered the reception later in the day. And I love that their crib has cute mummin sheets and a real little baby duvet. All alongside the usual criteria for a good hotel: free wifi, nice toiletries and an amazing breakfast buffet. This morning Zoe got her first Kinder egg (probably because of easter), a well-known thing amongst Europeans, but a piece of candy is banned in the US. It is a chocolate egg with a little toy inside and watching Zoe open it with utter surprise was the best part of it all.

Helsinki is a rather rough looking city, I am surprised to see the pavements being in such bad shape (the wheels of the stroller got stuck several times) but the people are nice and friendly, although a bit quiet. On Friday, when it was just Zoe and me, we went to the national museum. It has a workshop area on the top floor where children can touch and play with everything. Zoe and I spent an hour and a half just roaming around, grinding coffee beans (to show the history of how coffee was roasted and ground at home), playing hide and seek around the wooden building structures (to show how houses were built in the old days) and playing with old office equipment (see picture). In the end I sat down in the replicate throne to relax and just let Zoe run around by herself. She had already befriended the staff so I knew she was safe. In fact I realized a major perk of her being bilingual, with English as one of the languages: When traveling she understands everything. People kept saying "well she probably doesn't understand what I say" and I happily corrected them and switched to English for the duration of the conversation.

The plane ride here was easy. We still need to work on the 'mommy goes first through the metal detector, then Zoe goes' and she was very upset when she wasn't allowed to get her shoes checked like her mom (Stockholm airport has a shoe tester for when people beep; they alternate body search with just a shoe search because 90 percent of the times the beeping item is the shoes). The only fail of the trip was that Zoe did not want to sit in the seat next to me, which happened to be free (and since we flew SAS they allowed me to choose if she sat there or on my lap). She started off there but as we taxied to the runway she got annoyed with her belt and kept unbuckling it, so I had to take her in the extension belt on my lap. I'm a bit worried about this because in one month she will have to sit in her own seat due to regulations. As I have written about before, I might lie about her age in the beginning.

Tonight when we fly back, Mark will be there to help and since he is gold (I, for some reason was 1000 miles short this year) we get to go to the lounge and I am quite excited about skipping the queue for checking in. Other than that it will be business as usual :-)