No sleep till Sunday

Was that a great weekend or what?! Sure this posts title is a bit exaggerated but with Mighty as our first guest we tried to squeeze as much as possible into the little time we had. And we did that quite successfully, so sleeping long was not on the menu. The mighty man arrived last Friday noon at Helsinki airport. After a lesson in Dos and Don´ts concerning how to use Finnish cash machines (Blue slot? Jackpot! Go and spend your money. Yellow slot? Tough luck! Stay and spend one hour in the bank.) we had a good meal to prepare for the upcoming event: The Kallio Big Night Out. The plan was to check out the cheap bars in Kallio and many of them! If you want to make your night out a big one over there you better start early because they got this unpleasant 2 a.m. curfew. I think our saldo was a total of seven bars in the end, including a karaoke session.

The poor people in that karaoke place got completely steamrolled by us. Whispering into the microphone to mellow tunes at a ridiculously low volume they were unaware of things to come. You had to fill in a little form with your name, your requested song and believe it or not: the volume you want your song to be played in. One top of that tiny bill was a scale with ballot boxes from -5 to +5 where you had to mark your desired level of noise with a cross. We decided to turn the place into CBGB´s and yell along The Ramones´ "I wanna be sedated" (somehow fitting to the place), needless to say we made our cross at +5! The bartender lady asked me in disbelief whether we were sure we wan´t the highest volume possible. I made her understand that our decision was well considered and thoroughly thought through (I´m getting a lisp here) by saying: "Of course!" And lo and behold! They really cranked it up! BOOM! Some people even did a little pogo, quite cute. For our next song I had drawn an additional box on the bill for +6, maybe to make a point, and as we screamed at the top of our lungs to "No sleep till Brooklyn" by the Beastie Boys the whole bar was shaking. Well, at least we had the feeling it was.

Karaoke attack! Old farts need glasses to read the lyrics!

Saturday surprised us with perfect weather and was packed with record store tours, sightseeing, kahvi ja korvapuusti, sauna and a nice trip to Suomenlinna. That is one of the many islands at the shore of Helsinki. You can reach Suomenlinna by a ferry that belongs to the public transportation HSL, it´s like taking a bus or tram in Helsinki. The trip takes about 20 mins and I can only recommend it. Very nice view on Helsinki´s harbor with the big ferries going to Sweden, Estonia, Germany and Russia, the city skyline and all the other small islands surrounding you there. When you arrive at the island your feet touch the ground of an UNESCO world heritage site that is popular with both tourists and locals. Suomenlinna means "Castle of Finland" and is a very important strategic defense spot for the Finnish military, protecting the mainland. 900 people are living there and many Finns frequent the island for more peaceful purposes. In the summer time it is a picturesque picnic site, buns not bombs, just the way I like it.

Susu and Mighty on Suomenlinna.

 On Sunday we went to an indoor flea market, which is said to be the biggest in whole Finland and provided Mighty with a good variety of souvenirs. I wonder what his salmiakki craving collegues thought about his collection of licorice that he brought for them. Salmiakki chocolate anyone? Certainly unique. In the afternoon it was time to say "Auf Wiedersehen" and Mighty hopped on the plane back to Germany. Thanks a lot for the visit, my friend. It was great having you here! So schön, schön war die Zeit...