Onion River Exploration Project: Helsinki

Antti

Day 13 (8/13/2010) Day 6 Baltic Sea Adventure

Today we were reminded that when all is said and done, travel is still about the people. Sailing into Helsinki was nothing like the beautiful trip in through the Archipelagoes of Stockholm. We passed a few somewhat nondescript islands and landed in an industrial area. You could see some of the city off in the distance but it had none of the initial awe inspiring beauty of Stockholm or even Copenhagen. But it was here in Helsinki that we had two of the highlights of our trip so far. We had no real tour planned so we had decided to just take the shuttle into town and have a look around. We had a foreign exchange student from Finland at Cedar Grove last year that I had told him that if we came to Helsinki I would give him a call. As these things go he probably thought he would never hear from me especially since the only contact information I had for him was on Facebook and we didn’t want to use that for fear of letting everybody know that we were out of town. At the last moment I remembered that perhaps they would have his phone number at school so I got that right before we left. I am not exactly a savvy traveler so cold calling somebody I don’t know that well was kind of scary. We had trouble getting the pay phone to work but a young lady working at the counter offered to call him using her cell phone. With her help we were able to get a hold of him and make arrangements to meet at a place that she knew everybody would be able to find. It probably was quite involved considering that we didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him. He was totally surprised however that I had really looked him up and it was great seeing him. The young lady however that helped us became very interested in our success and asked us to stop back and let her know how it went. At some point we found out that her husband had actually spent some time doing a mission in Beaver Dam (I can only imagine what sort of difficulty he must have encountered with those heathens). She had also lived in the States for a year and a half in Los Angeles. At any rate it was one of those meeting were you just connect and she told us all about her home in eastern Finland, close to the Russian border and how beautiful it was. We gave her one of my Peace Papers and exchanged e-mails and promised to keep in touch. Even if we never hear from her again it reminded us that no matter where you go you can find people with which you make a connection.