We did make it to our restaurant booking, just. Caught a taxi from the airport to make up a bit of time. A jolly good thing too, because it turns out that Fagn is fully worth it’s Michelin-adjacent bistro status. We had the five-course mystery course with wine (and beer, as it turned out) pairing and left very well satisfied. Didn’t take a single photo.
That did leave us with just the single day to look around, and that turned out to be enough to get a pretty nice feel for the waterfront (where the hotel is), and the city center (where the Christmas market is) anyway. The ferris wheel was extremely large and fancy, but there was a significant queue, so we didn’t go up in it. Everyone seemed to be having a lovely time, especially the kiddies who had succeeded in pestering their parents into buying one of the baloons-on-a-stick-with-blinky-lights that were being sold by several vendors. One stall was selling corn-dogs and claiming that they were a Korean snack food. Now that I’ve looked them up on the internet I see that this might indeed be true: there is a variety claimed by Koreans that is distinct from the American version. It doesn’t involve corn…
We stopped for a rest as the sun set (you know, at half-past three in the afternoon, as it does) in a nice bar and had a couple of lovely pale ales (one the Kronnenberg 1664 that I saw first, the second the much better “tap-2” local variety who’s name I now forget). After that we got up the strength to do a bit more wandering down to the other waterfront and its stilt-warehouse buildings and then back to the bistro that we’d picked out for dinner.
Back to the hotel to crash, then up at six(-ish) to pack, have breakfast and then catch a taxi back to the airport to get to Helsinki. All of which went pleasantly smoothly. Even the two and a half hour lay-over in Sweden’s Arlanda airport wasn’t too bad, because we had one of the nicest burgers and beer for lunch. So that was lucky.
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