James & Heather Travelogues

After attending Jon & Sini's wedding (thanks guys!), we returned the car to Turku (sniff, sniff - I was liking it) and caught a train to Helsinki.

We spent a short time with Sarah, Dan & Tommy - wishing bon voyage to Sarah and Tom as they were returning to Australia. The rest of the time in Helsinki was spent doing the rapid itinerary sight-seeing that we have perfected over the last few months so that we could take advantage of the beaches and the sun.

The main highlight with Helsinki was that it was the first use of the tent we had bought for Roskilde (our friends lent us their's when we there). Unfortunately, we were pretty hopeless without instructions and it took us two attempts to get it up (where have I heard that before?) and when it was up it seemed to shake a bit. Camping in Finland is a treat, the campsites are well equipped and the one we were staying at had a river alongside it where we could sunbake. One pain in the bum is the fact that the sun sets at around 1:30am and rises at 3:30am, at which point the birds think it is very entertaining to serenade the campers. Heather slept with ear plugs in and I buried my head under a towel.

Still good fun though.

After Helsinki, we caught the train back to Turku and checked ourselves into a hostel (that's enough camping for now). Turku is the former capital of Finland, and is seeking to be the European City of Culture in 2011. All this was wasted on 2 Australians and an Englishman though, as we had a much better plan.

One of the highlights of Turku is that along its river there are a number of boats moored up, which are licensed for sale of alcohol. The 3 of us decided that a pub crawl was therefore in order, working our way through as many of them as possible.

At around midnight, we decided that there was one more place we need to go: a bar that promised 150 different brands of beer. We headed there and read through a beer list that would put most wine lists in 4 star restaurants to shame. I managed a couple that were both English: Spitfire (an old favourite) and another one whose name escapes me (maybe I had too many). Very nice, all up.

Our last day in Turku was spent lying in bed trying to get rid of the drilling noise we could hear. Off to Sweden tomorrow...

Well, we have just finished a week in Denmark, where most of it was spent at the Roskilde Rock Festival.

The fesitval had about 160 bands playing (not all at once) including some famous old ones (Guns & Roses), famous current ones (Franz Ferdinand, the Streets) and some not quite so well known outside Scandanavia (Kashmir). One of the highlights for me were the Bellowheads, which are a group playing English folk music updated to a more modern style - lots of crazy dancing for that.

The other was a band known as Kaizers Orchestra, who are a Norwegian band that cross modern rock with that staple of Northern Europe: oompa music. If that is not surreal enough, half the percussion is made up of steel oil drums being belted repeated by steel crowbars - and these guys are wearing gas masks. It was all very surreal, and only attracted a crowd of around 80,000. Again more silly dancing for that, was the order of the day.

After Roskilde, we spent a couple more days just hanging out in Denmark, catching up with good friends. Then it was on to a train, then ferry through to Finland...

Just a quick posting to vent: we have just suffered the misery that is Charles De Gaulle Airport. I have been through some dodgy airports (the one in Lanzarote springs to mind) but seriously this CDG is the worst by miles, or more accurately lightyears.

On arrival at the airport station, you are presented with 3 choices of terminal to go to but no information as to which airlines fly from each terminal. Not a problem except each terminal is a couple of miles from the station and you have to catch a shuttle bus to each one, except terminal 3. We took a random guess of it being terminal 1, but it turned out to be terminal 3- naturally. We caught the shuttle bus back there and then had about a 1km walk to get to the actual terminal itself. During this walk, I suggested to Heather that the airport has to stop the traffic when a plane takes off because it looks as if they share the same road.

On arrival, we had a queue of hundreds in front of us and the check in staff quite frankly were not only slow but at random intervals wandered off for no apparent reason. When we eventually got to check in, the check in clerk said "your boarding time is now" - and we still had the joys of passport control to get through. However, that was not a problem as there were still people stuck behind us, so they had to delay the flight to get them all processed.

On getting through passport control, we were keen to get something to eat & drink because we had left the hotel at 6am. €19 Euro later, we were the proud owners of a sandwich and a coke each. I was tempted to get them preserved in isopon rather than consume them at the price we paid.

In short Charles De Gaulle airport is terrible and I will never whinge about Heathrow terminal 4 again.

We boarded our overnight train in Prague; fortunately we had a sleeper to ourselves so were able to relax a little. By 10pm however, we were both pretty tired having watched the Australia vs Brazil game earlier that evening. We turned the light off and looked forward to a good night´s sleep.

At around 2am, we were woken by the noise of our door being repeatedly bashed in and a harsh voice telling us to open up. It was the bundescoppers, and they were probably hoping for a couple of untermensch that they could play with. However, like good herrenvolk we handed over our passports, and seeing that we were both English, left us alone. It was at this point that I noticed the difference in the styles of border police: most glance at my passport photo and wave me through. This bundescopper examined my picture carefully and then looked at me. Unlike in Thailand, he didn´t laugh and seemed to be itching to arrest me. I think if I had not had Heather there, I would have been doing my own remake of Midnight Express.

Eventually we arrived in the town we were staying in (Aachen) and checked into our hotel. It was the day before the England game, so we took the opportunity to explore the town. It´s a pretty small one that was the regional capital under Charlemagne and seems to have an interesting attraction towards horses. Everywhere you look, there are statues of horses.

On the 20th, we headed in to Cologne proper for the game. On arrival at the station, it was a sea of people bedecked in national colours, whether Germany, England, Sweden or whomever. Fortunately, not a single person was in the mood to cause trouble and good natured bantering was the order of the day. We had planned on visiting the stadium before kick off but decided that it was more important to find a decent spot to watch the game. This is where German efficiency really kicked in...

After so many tournaments with fans turning up without tickets and hanging out in pubs before getting in to fights, the German authorities created outdoor stadiums with huge (6 metre or so) TV screens showing the games. Within these stadiums, they provide eating, drinking and toilet facilities and have a DJ playing music and keeping the crowd entertained. That way, fans do not need to get in to cramped pubs, get in each others way or cause trouble. The stadium we were in was along the Rhine and was packed with 35,000 fans - both Swedish and English, plus a few others thrown in for entertainment. The atmosphere was really good and it was nice to see England top their group. What was not so nice was that it was not a win, and Michael Owen´s injury has forced Crouch in to a first team position. England´s chances of winning the World Cup have just evaporated.