'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!

Light sleeper...

My Finnish colleagues had warned me that the dark here in Helsinki was tough during the winter. I dismissed this initially, as back home I was used to going to work and coming home in the dark for a few weeks, but somehow here it seems worse. Perhaps it's because I am the only one in the apartment.

For a while, I relied on the alarm on my Nokia N95. But after a couple of times of turning it off while only half awake and then falling back into a deep slumber, I decided I needed a better solution. I tried having a second alarm in the bathroom, so that I had to get up, but found that when desperate I could ignore that one as it was not loud enough.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a Philips Wake-Up Light Alarm Clock, which gradually lights up the room over 30 minutes and then wakes me with birdsong. It has worked really well, I then feel more awake when my phone alarm goes off and am ready for the next part of my morning ritual.

One of the things I've missed from home has been listening to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 in the mornings. Of course, I can listen over the internet, but at the time I am normally getting up, Radio 4 is broadcasting the farming programme, not a lot of use to me. So, I have been using the podcasting client on my Nokia to get the two or three interviews that the BBC podcasts each day, automatically downloaded to my phone overnight through the wireless LAN in my apartment.

So, my morning routine goes something like this ... tweet tweet ... beep beep ... "This is a download from the BBC". And just to make the experience as authentic as possible, I play each interview two or three times while I am getting ready for work, just like they do on the real programme!

Zero degrees sea...

I had been told that the sea usually freezes in Helsinki in winter and was looking forward to this spectacle. Having grown up by the sea on the South coast of England, this is not something I had ever experienced, though sometimes even swimming in the English Channel in summer feels cold enough to scare a brass monkey.

On Saturday, I walked to the Kauppahalli (market hall) at the South Harbour to buy fresh Salmon steaks to cook for dinner, as my wife and youngest daughter were flying over for a few days. On the way, I noticed that the water around this old sailing ship, moored at the harbour as a restaurant, was solid enough for birds to walk on.

When I looked more closely, I saw that the ice on the surface was still moving and had taken on the appearance of "crazy paving", a popular finish for patios in my youth. I assume this is due to the conflict between the tendency of the ice to freeze as a flat sheet and the effect of the motion of the water cracking the sheet. Whatever, I found it intriguing. I am looking forward to when it is solid enough for people to walk on out to the islands in the harbour. Rest assured I shall not be the first one testing the ice!

Career progression...

Well, I am back from Barcelona and the pinnacle of my career in PR, directing pedestrian traffic from another press conference to ours. Those of you on Facebook may already have seen this picture, currently my profile photo on there.

This was my seventh Mobile World Congress. Actually, technically it was the first as the name changed from 3GSM World Congress this year. Whatever the name, the show is pretty much the same; the great and the good of the mobile world assemble to share views on the future of the industry (and a few bottles of Cava). The rest of us drink beer, in my case perhaps a little too much London Pride at the City Arms, a Taberna Inglesa! It comes to something when an Englishman, resident in Helsinki, has to travel to Spain for a pint of bitter brewed in Chiswick.

After six years of duty on the batwing booth, it felt like I had crossed the floor, as the politicians would say. I saw several of my old buddies from that company and caught up on their news. To those I missed, please do drop me a note, via email or on Facebook or LinkedIn, whichever you prefer.