Winter in the Moominvalley

Winter came early in Moominvalley this year and everyone slept peacefully, apart from Snufkin who had long ago wandered to the South before the temperatures dropped to -20 C….

Well, It was not really the Moominvalley I visited but Finland, and Moomins are, sort of, national cartoon characters for the country. They were created by Tove Jansson after the World War II.

As soon as we landed at the Helsinki Airport we saw shops with Moomin themed hats, socks, magnets, tea, anything really!

After taking a few pictures and collecting my fencing bag, we decided (as we always do) to take public transport to our destination in the neighbouring city of Espoo. This included a train from the airport to Helsinki railway station, followed by Metro to Matinkylä station in Espoo.

The train station sits directly beneath the airport and it is an amazing engineering feast. To get to the tunnel with platforms which is located 45 metres below the ground, you go down two flights of extremely long escalators that are housed in an enormous shaft supported by a minimalistic and very brutalist in style, thick reinforced concrete walls. In stark contrast to these bare concrete surroundings, there is a huge, centrally located screen showcasing productions from the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. So here we were riding slowly down the long escalator and watching the ballet in front of us.

We found the public transport very efficient. Train to Helsinki took about 30 minutes, followed by approximately 25 minutes long ride on the metro.

As we travelled and each stop was being announced from the speakers we noticed that the Finnish language was quite interesting; laying the stress on the first syllable and generally very melodic. We soon found ourselves repeating the words after the announcements.

That night, when we were travelling from the airport to our apartment the temperature was close to -20 C! It was freezing, we brought lots of warm clothes and I had thermals on, but I thought my face would freeze over! We were worried that the place we were staying in would be really cold (I came prepared with two pairs of warm socks to sleep in), however, to our astonishment, all the windows in our apartment were left open! Soon after closing them, we found that you could not turn the radiators down and ended up opening all the windows again as it got quite stuffy 🙂

The next day we got up early to go to the competition venue where we started the day with weapons control and check in.

Since we still had an hour and a half before the competition start, we quickly made our way to a nearby post office to send some customary postcards (keep them alive people). The competition did not go as well as I hoped it would and I ended up 24^th out of 43 competitors. The next day, on Sunday, there was a teams competition where your team competes against other groups, but we decided against doing it.

On our way back to the apartment we stopped at a small grocery shop where we bought; bread, spread, cheese and ham to prepare sandwiches for the next day. Then we visited a pizzeria next door and purchased two chicken pizzas (poppakana) for the evening.

Sliced Finnished cheese and meat

We spent the rest of the day travelling on Metro and even managed to board a train that already finished its run at Tapiola station. If it was not for a lady that saved us by insisting (first in Finnish but having realised we did not understand a word, do learn languages!, then in English) that we left the carriage, we would have undoubtedly ended up in some sort of a service station.

On Sunday morning, we took a bus from Matinkylä to a Catholic Church of St Mary in Helsinki for a mass in Finnish. The Finns predominantly belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and apparently the country has the smallest Catholic population of any European countries.

After the mass, we travelled extensively on route 4 tram that took us to the Baltic Sea coast on both sides of Helsinki. Since the sea was completely frozen, there were a lot of people enjoying a Sunday walk, in the beautiful wintry weather, across frozen Laajalahti Bay.

We even saw some under ice angling as well as few people enjoying their morning run on the icy surface of the sea!

We stopped at a seaside cafe where I had a delicious pistachio croissant and some hot chocolate (Kaakao in Finnish).

We then hopped back onto number 4 tram (all the trams we saw in Helsinki where manufactured by the Czech car maker Škoda) that took us to the coast on the other side of Helsinki where the Ferry Port is located and then back to the city centre, with a quick stop over at the Senate Square where we took pictures by the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Cathedral.

Helsinki Cathedral

From there we walked to the train station to catch the service to the Helsinki Airport.

Helsinki Train Station

At the border control it transpired that although we were leaving Finland, we never entered it in the first place but we shall leave a veil of mystery over that.

One of the highlights of the trip has to be the massive dumper truck we saw in Espoo city centre full of huge blocks of frozen snow being removed from streets, that sums up the wintry weather pretty well.

All in all, if you haven’t visited Finland I would urge you to go! It is absolutely beautiful and I definitely want to come back in the future!