Clearing up ...

I have spent my first Sunday alone in over a month tidying, ironing and doing the chores. It appears I am not the only one, as the city is working to get rid of the accumulated snow from the last week.

For the last half hour or so, this digger has been working up and down my street, shovelling up the mounds of snow into a couple of trucks. I shall be interested to find out where they take it to, there being no equivalent of a rug in the middle of the room to sweep it under.

Just the ticket ...

I spotted this driver's novel approach to the parking challenge mentioned in my last post- how to deal with the big piles of snow? Park on top of them. Of course, you need a big 4 x 4 vehicle to be sure of success.

However, I noticed as I walked past that the owner had a surprise to come back to. One of Helsinki's finest traffic wardens had left a parking ticket under the nearside windscreen wiper. As I can't read Finnish, I was not able to see whether it was for parking too far from the surface of the road. I suspect the truth is more down to earth, as the car was within 5 metres of a pedestrian crossing (you can see the sign just behind the car).

's no parking ...

Gunther (my Audi A3) has been spending a lot of time under the snow this week. The photo shows him on Sunday after we got back from lunch, but by Wednesday he was parked further up the street under about 10cm of snow.

One of the challenges when it snows is that some of the parking spaces end up full of the snow which has been cleared by the snowploughs. On Tuesday evening I had only one choice of spot and didn't notice that about 1 metre of Gunther's rear end was overlapping a restricted parking zone, where you may not park between 8am and 5pm.

When I went to drive to work on Wednesday at around 8:30am, I was excited to see that there had been a further fall of snow overnight. However, it had not deterred the Finnish traffic warden from writing me a ticket and reaching through the drift to secure it under my windscreen wiper; I was somewhat less excited to find that as I brushed the snow off the car.

It is only my third parking ticket, at €40 a time, since I moved here. If I add the €36 for each six months that I pay for an on-street parking permit, it still costs me less than renting a garage. But I can't help feeling a grudging admiration for Helsinki's traffic wardens, who don't let these adverse weather conditions deter them from their noble work. Yet another example of Sisu!

Easter in Helsinki ...

So, we had a blissful few days over the Easter weekend. Good Friday and Easter Monday are both public holidays in Finland, as they are in the UK, so my wife and daughters flew over on the Friday and arrived in time to get settled in the apartment before venturing out for dinner at Ateljé Finne. Stephanie tried the Licorice Creme Brulée.

After dinner, we walked through the very cold wind to Esplanadi and stopped for a reviving drink at Kappeli, a favourite spot. Following that, we walked home and saw the illuminated cathedral, as mentioned in the last post.

Saturday, as the only day that the shops would be open, meant some serious retail therapy for my girls. For dinner we visited Sundmans Krog, right on the South Harbour close to the market hall. The food was excellent and we walked home happily full, just missing the end of the Easter performance in Senatoori square in front of the cathedral.

On Sunday, we walked to the tram stop, in just enough snow to cause trouble for those of us with little experience of wintry conditions. We caught the 3T tram to Kapteeninkatu to take lunch at Sea Horse, a well known restaurant offering traditional Finnish fare. Their Salmon Soup was excellent, followed by a selection of traditional entrées. Somehow, Ellie's vegetarian cabbage rolls were filled with meat and Stephanie's Pike-Perch fillets had a few too many bones, but Sally's meatballs and my Scandinavian hash were excellent.

Returning to the apartment, we had our traditional Easter egg hunt with a twist - having no garden meant that we did this indoors, but Easter would not have been the same for any of us without it. We then tried a few Finnish traditions, eating mämmi, an oven roasted, malted barley porridge. It tasted a little like liquidized malt bread and is an acquired taste. We also tried pasha, a dessert of Russian origin. But rather than me try to write it all up, I recommend the article from the Helsinki Times which goes into much more detail. We did also try the Mignon eggs from Fazer, possibly the most palatable treat of the day!

On Monday we had a walk, a coffee and then I cooked Salmon for lunch, before we finished watching series 6 of Scrubs (probably our favourite TV show) and then drove to the airport for the flight home.

It was a lovely weekend. We reflected that back in the UK, we would not have spent so much time just being together as a family. So much has changed for us all in the last twelve months that it was good to take the chance to think about what we have to be thankful for and enjoy each other's company.

Snow at Easter ...

Last year at Easter, the family enjoyed a chilly outing to the Dancing on Ice show at Wembley. This year, we were performing ourselves, though less coordinated than the ice skating celebrities, as we have been walking around Helsinki in the snow. The snowfall has not been heavy by local standards, but it was been enough to help my long legged girls to do their impressions of a newly-born Bambi.

We've had a great few days together. More details to come, but I wanted to share this stunning shot of the Lutheran Cathedral, with graphics projected on it as part of the Easter celebrations here. We saw this walking home after a drink at Kapelli on Friday night.

Home from home...

When we set up the apartment in Helsinki, we wanted it to feel like a family home, even though most of the time I am here on my own. One of the things we love at home is the garden; we are fortunate enough to have a decent size lawn. A couple of years ago, our collection of sheep (which started as a joke in the kitchen) spilled over to the garden and we now have a small flock of half life-size glass fibre sheep, which look quite at home in the English countryside.

In Helsinki, I have no garden, but I do have a small balcony. Big enough for two chairs and a wine bottle, it was a pleasant place to watch the world go by from during the summer. But it was a bit shabby, with a very tired straw mat on the floor.

Now, it is transformed. A lucky find at Bauhaus (a Finnish version of B&Q) means I have the look of an English lawn, albeit 1.2 by 1.8 metres! The sheep has been here for a while, but looks much happier now.

As I look out on a snowy Helsinki, I can now dream of summer, sitting on my balcony with a glass of Pimms and thinking of home!