mutelife

This past summer I had longer vacations than usual. We made sure they coincided with the girls’ so we could spend more time together and hopefully explore somewhere new.

We mulled over a bunch of different options, but South Korea kept coming up. It’s hard these days not to stumble regularly on the incredible Korean culture — food, movies, TV, music, you name it — and even harder not to be curious about the country itself.

Korea it was. We were immediately eager to be enveloped by a new place we’ve heard so much about and had created so many expectations about. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And then we started to think: “Well, it’s so close to Japan that we might as well hop over”. Seemed like a no-brainer, especially since it had been 10 years since we visited for the first time. Or rather, the perfect excuse.

So we booked the cheapest flights we could find. This time we flew with Finnair and our flight included a long layover in Helsinki. Almost 24 hours long. That meant we had a warm-up day to explore the city before heading to Korea and Japan, and we couldn’t be more excited!

We landed in Helsinki late at night. Everything was closed when we got to the hotel, so we ordered some food online and called it a day.

The next morning the sun greeted us behind the thick blackout curtains that are made to keep it away during sleep hours in the summer months. We stepped out quickly so as not to waste our precious time in Finland.

Then we started to see a commotion up ahead and remembered what the driver had told us the previous day: Joe Biden was in town to meet the Nordic leaders.

The police was blocking off entire sections of the city, choppers were in the air, huge crowds of people following every movement, and a seemingly infinite motorcade preventing us to explore further.

We persevered though, and after waiting on the last car of the motorcade, we made it to Temppeliaukion church. This place of worship was carved out of the bedrock and has a copper-lined dome — a stunning piece of architecture.

We then took the train to the airport, where we had a beer (or two) with a Lohikeitto, the Finnish salmon soup, before boarding the flight that would take us to Seoul.