I’m at the airport. I’m at my gate. It’s 2:31 and the flight is at 4 so I’m pretty comfortable that I’ve made it in time and I’ve had lunch on the other side of passport control and bought korvpuustia.

I got up, did my packing, returned my bottles to K-Market and used the euro I got for them to buy some more cheese for today’s lunch. It’s not as good as the cheese I had last time.Then I took my luggage to the lockers under the station and went out in Helsinki. I wanted to go down to the harbour, walk around the island and see the icebreakers. They’re very impressive. Finland claims to have built 60% of all the icebreakers in the world and to have designed 80% of them. It was breezy but there was a little bit of park opposite the big ships which was fairly shaded and that was nice for a while. Then I sat outside Allas again. Bit more souvenir shopping, found the big food hall, sat on the sculptural thing and looked at the harbour from that side and then decided it was breezy and chilly and time to find something else to do. I’d considered Seurasaari but Google Maps said it would take about 45 minutes to get there and with only three hours, it didn’t feel worth it. I took the tram back to Lasipalatsi and went in the Forum centre to look at – and not buy – anything Moomin-related, then I went downstairs to McDonalds and had a small chips partly because I fancied some and partly as a reason to drink the entire bottle of Fanta I kind of wished I hadn’t bought last night. Then I reclaimed my luggage, found the I train and came to the airport. I’ve done the rest – security, lunch, korvapuustia, gate.

I’ve made two studies while I’ve been here. The first is of Marimekko. I conclude that the clothes aren’t worn that much, not by people who are out and about in the city centre anyway, but lots and lots of people have the bags. Lots of them are plain black bags with the name all over the strap. Lots of them are more tote bag-shaped, with the name written all over them. I’ve seen a few in the colourful patterns but they’re definintely in the minority.

The second, obviously, is of the language. I’ve not done a lot of speaking Finnish – I’m still not big on speaking at all – and I tend to panic when faced with Finnish, even though I’m quite capable of asking “Anteeksi, puhutteko te englantia?”. But I can pick out words I recognise and occasionally that’s enough to figure out roughly what’s being said. At least, I caught enough words when the plane landed to realise that they were talking about the local time and temperature. I can read a little bit as well. Not books or magazines but signs and the sides of buses and so on. If I was going to say it out loud, I can put together little sentences about what I’m doing. That’s all I really wanted from Finnish, to get to the point where I can see something other than vowels, double letters and umlauts. The Swedish still makes more sense than the Finnish but I’ve been trying to make an effort to ignore the Swedish and pay attention to the Finnish.

Moi moi. Se on ohi. Tee se uudelleen!