Author Archives: lydia

OK, so maybe traveling to Helsinki and Tallinn and Umeå all in the same week is not the most restful possible vacation… What a great little festival! Again, as at Linköping last fall, there were so many good concerts I wanted to go to that there wasn’t really any time left over for jamming. Favorites: […]

Anni maintains that it’s an important cultural experience to take the overnight ferry between Finland and Sweden, and also to try out the gigantic dinner buffet onboard. I think the buffet price itself may even have been more than the share of the four-person cabin, but together they still worked out to only about $70 […]

Tallinn is a popular quick-shopping-trip destination from Helsinki. In the off-season the ferry lines run specials together with the hotels they also own, such that it’s cheaper to go there and stay overnight than to take just a day-trip — or at least it is if there are four of you. Or six, if you […]

Just a slideshow this time, with some captions.

Anni took us on a little ferry excursion to Suomenlinna (Sveaborg, på Svenska). It was interesting to be doing a common summer tourist activity on a cold and blowy winter late-afternoon, kind of stark and quiet, pretty much just us and the locals. We walked around a little loop and took some dramatic photos and […]

One of the things I most wanted to do in Helsinki is get to play for a little while with my friend Juha, whom I met at the Vendelstämman in 2007 when he was on his way home from ESI’s summer course week. His Karuna CD came out around the same time as Northlands and […]