Stockholm, pt. 2 and Helsinki, pt. 1

Hi everyone!

I am in Helsinki, Finland right now, which is a pretty cool city. It's very different than anywhere we've been so far. The architecture is very Eastern European, almost Russian, which gives the city a very industrial feel. I definitely did not expect to find a city like that in Scandonavia. It's also way colder than anything we've experienced so far, with the temperature hovering around 10-11 degrees Celsius (about 53-55 F). But not to worry Mom, I bought a jacket in Sweden that is keeping nice and warm. :) Right now I'm sitting in a coffee shop (luckily not the type of coffee shops that we found in Amsterdam) sipping a cappuccino and feeling very European, except the people talking around me are pretty much speaking gibberish as far as I'm concerned.

So cool story. We took a ferry from Stockholm (which by the way was a pretty fun city, I even ran into an acquaintance from high school) to Helsinki a couple of nights ago, and most of us were thinking that we were basically going to have to row ourselves here. K, not really, but our expectations were not high at all. But when we got to the docks, we found that what awaited us was, in fact, a small cruise ship. We were very excited, to say the least, and spent a good portion of the night expressing that excitement in the ship's night club. We've decided to call it a small miracle, because all of us were at a point where we really needed a surprise like that. I guess God works in mysterious ways. :)

Hopefully I'll get to write a little more about Helsinki once I've explored it a bit. In the mean time, I hope you are all appreciating central heating and/or warm weather as much as I have come to. :)

Ryan