Helsinki, Finland

God I love Finland. It's like one giant Ikea. I'm loving the fact that as a travel destination it's totally offbeat. I mean really, who takes a vacation to Finland? The Finnish have a reputation for being very eccentric, but everybody I've encountered seems to be very down to earth. If you ask me, the Swiss are the eccentrics of Europe, but the true wackos of the world are French Canadians. The national beer is very good, but alcohol is heavily controlled here. Because of the long, dark winters, alcoholism is rapant and since they don't want to be like Russia they make it difficult to buy. The only kind of alcohol that supermarkets are allowed to sell is beer that is less than 4.7% alc/vol. Anything harder has to be purchased at a chain of government stores called "Alko." There is no shortage of bars, however. The keyboards here are idential to standard English QWERTY keyboards, except that they have a few extra letters with the umlauts at the end on the right hand side, so you have to be position your fingers just ever so slightly differently to avoid making a typo. The punctuation marks, however, are in completely different places which is annoying. There are actually lots of cute girls here, but there are some ugs too and I just came from Russia, where EVERY woman is beautiful. Finally tonight I had the meal I had been waiting for: sauteed reindeer over mash potatoes with lingonberries. It kicked ass. Now that I've eaten reindeer I'm really not sure how I can top that. Tiger? No, that would just be screwed up. Bear, of course, but that's apparently very expensive.

One month ago I was in Dubai.
Two months ago I was in Cairo.