Toronto to Helsinki

It was easier packing for this trip as we only half-unpacked from our previous trip. We were pretty much ready to go by Sunday, in case we needed to buy anything (we left on Victoria Day and most stores were closed).

Our flight to Amsterdam left 20 minutes ahead of schedule! We also made good time crossing the Atlantic and would have arrived 45 minutes ahead of schedule except we couldn’t get a landing slot and circled almost half an hour.

We got through immigration and towards our gate, when Heather realized she had forgotten her reading glasses on the plane. The KLM folks for our Helsinki flight were right on it. They called the cleaning crew and within minutes Heather’s glasses were on their way to us! Heather was pretty excited, although the lost-and-found people seemed even more enthusiastic about returning the glasses than Heather :)

The flight to Helsinki took about 2.5 hours, arriving around 6pm, and then we were on the ground for our next adventure. Everything in the airport was very organized and efficient. Got a (free) cart, got our bags, picked up our 3-day Helsinki Card, bought two train tickets, caught the “I” train to downtown, and finally grabbed a taxi to our hotel.

We had dinner reservations at the hotel restaurant, good thing because it was super busy!

When we researched Helsinki this past week, we realized It is quite the foodie town, and booked dinners for our three nights here to make sure we got into the popular places. One of the food blogs we read also had a review of Tallinn restaurants (our next stop), and we realized that it too is becoming a big food destination. We’ll be there over a weekend, so made reservations for Tallinn too. (I then got carried away and started making reservations for Riga).

Dinner was excellent at our hotel (their restaurant is called Kultá). We started with an amuse bouche of a Jerusalem artichoke soup (excellent, our favourite) and split an appetizer (an assortment of typical Finnish starters). For the mains, Heather tried the grilled Arctic char and I had reindeer two ways (grilled sirloin and salted tongue). Heather’s aperitif was also excellent, sparkling wine with cloudberry. I stuck to their craft beers on tap.