Snowflakes that Stay on my Nose and Eyelashes...

Sweden is just beautiful.

I cruised into Stockholm on the Isabella (that's a big cruise boat operated by the Viking Line) and I was in love with this city even before I'd hopped off the boat. We came into Stockholm in the wee hours of the early morning and seeing the beautiful lights of the city through a curtain of falling snow was just magic...

Stockholm itself is like THE city for museums so I'm pretty much in heaven right now. They have like 50 museums in this city - they have to produce a separate tourist guide just for all the museums!

My favourite so far though is easily the Vasamuseet which is a museum dedicated to the 17th century warship The Vasa which sank in 20 minutes on its maiden voyage. The centerpiece of this museum is the magnificent warship itself which sank in in the 1628 and then lay on the seabed for 333 years before it was finally brought to the surface in 1 piece. You have to see it to believe it - that is one truly BIG BOAT.

Oh and note that the blistering snow here doesn't bother me so much. It's positively balmy compared to Helsinki (-5 rather than -20) and the snow is so beautiful. It floats down to sit gently on your face and it just makes everything seem magical...

Oh the photo you see above is from the Storykan (I don't think I've spelt that right), a cathedral in Gamla Stan (the old town) near the Royal Palace. It's extremely opulent without losing any of its spirituality as a church. I think the cathedral really typifies all the good bits of Stockholm - it is just extremely functional but in a way where the aesthetics of the architecture contributes to and complements the functionality. That's Swedish design for you.

Oh and please don't yell and scream if you don't get lots of photos from now on. My camera has just been damaged beyond economic repair. Oops...

Hei! (That's Hi in Finnish!)

For those of you that don't know (like Xin before today) the capital of Finland is Helsinki and that is where I am. Finland itself is the home of Santa and Nokia phones.

There are a number of things one immediately notices as decidedly odd here.

Firstly Helsinki is a really small capital - at least in terms of the sights. I haven't really had to hop onto public transport to get anywhere, you can just walk. A decided change from the vastness of Shanghai.

Secondly there are pokie machines in convenience stores!!! So here, when people nip down to the corner shop or supermarket for a bottle of milk they also stop to play the slots. I have this theory that it's because gambling raises intense emotions (eg guilt, happiness, despair) and so if they gamble before they leave the supermarket then they are in such a weird emotional state that they can't notice how freaking cold it is outside!!!

Thirdly there is a disproportionally high percentage of red vehicles. I don't know if this is a subconcious tip of the hat to Santa and his particular mode of transportation but from the air the combination of red cars, roofs and the white snow really makes it look like Santa's 'hood here.
Last but definitely not leastly it's soooooooooo COLD here!!!! Yesterday it was approximately -14 degrees celcius. And it's not just cold it's also windy!!! So when you go out, even if you have rugged up completely you face still feels like it's being sandblasted.My sightseeing here has been largely a refinement of the warm shop shuffle developed in Beijing (see earlier post for details) only more acute. I spent extra time in boring museum (yes there is such a thing even to crazy museum people like me) and galleries than any outdoor activity.

Anyway Helsinki is a very beautiful city. I got up early yesterday to go to the island fortress of Suomenlinna. Taking the ferry across was just magic - the boat cuts a swathe through the frozen Gulf of Finland churning up chucks of ice and I got to watch the sun paint the sky a beautiful pink hue. The fortress itself is amazing - it feels so stoically lonely - especially when you did what I did and sat in a battlement next to a huge cannon to watch the sun rise. (Actually I mainly did this to get out of the cold for a good 15 minutes but no one has to know that... :p)
Easily my favourite part of Helsinki though is the churches. They are absolutely stunning and so solemn in their majesty (note the Stone Wall chuch, which is basically a church cut into the rock face so that all the walls are natural, is excepted from this description as it feels more like a cool auditorium than a church).

Anyway now I am going to catch a train to Turku and then a boat to Stockholm! :p

Top 10 Things I Learned in Yunnan

Well lovely peoples, I am now back in Shanghai and kicking back for a few weeks before I leave for Europe.

But at this moment in time I would like to share with you some life lessons learned while I was travelling around Yunnan.

10. Never buy sunglasses that don't sit properly on the top of your head. Invariably you will be wearing a turtleneck which means that you won't be able to hang it on your clothes, and invariably you will put them down somewhere, forget to pick them up again and lose them... grr...

9. I can walk!!! Yes I can!!! And I can walk up and down stairs without falling over!!! I did 15km in one day!!! Up and down mountains! With super precarious little itty bitty steps in sheer cliff faces! Without falling! Go Xin! :p

8. I love dogs! Which is a good thing because everyone in Yunnan has a dog basically. They're everywhere, and super cute. I played with the puppy dog sellers on the street in Kunming (and went home hoping that the parents had been well treated and that someone will give them a good home) and the big golden retrievers in Dali... so cute!!! Actually people in Yunnan are dog crazy, I think there is a higher proportion of people with dogs in Yunnan then there are in Australia!

7. Yaks are awesome - not only are they uber fluffy and cute but I love yak milk butter tea (not as awful as it sounds initially I swear) and seeing them wander... soooo cute... Note this is not just my affinity with cows kicking in... I think...
Oh and a further note on the yaks in Yunnan, there ain't no yaks on the Yak Plateau. Or apparently they are only there in summer. I only saw one on the Yak Plateau, and the poor thing looked like it was stuck on the boardwalk. I didn't want to approach it though since one of its lesser cousins down the slope looked like it wanted to charge me and I didn't know if this particular yak would be likewise hostile.

6. Duck! Here comes a busload of tour group tourists!
I really, really, REALLY hate tour group people. I somehow consider myself a superior tourist because I am not in a tour group... I laugh and jeer when the bus drives off to take them to a crappy factory to buy 'silk' doonas at overinflated prices... muhahahah!!!

5. Firecrackers are irresitable to men... we stopped off in a little town on the way to Lijiang for lunch. Johnny saw a firecracker seller on the side of the street and went crazy - "Xin don't you know how awesome this is?!? These firecrackers explode underwater! We could get them, explode them in the river and eat the fish that die!" - yea whatever! I want to report that he wasted 2.5yuan buying these stupid firecrackers and never set them off because we had no time. They were eventually just dumped in a bin at Kunming airport.

4. The first that simple farm people learn when there is an influx of tourists is how to rip these tourist off. Johnny didn't bargain with the apparently 'simple' people on the Yak Plateau selling him tea (again despite my protestations) and paid 25yuan and 10yuan for bags of tea which back in Lijiang cost us 5yuan and 3yuan per bag respectively. Then Johnny developed his great economic theory of loss minimisation which is that he should buy more tea at the cheaper price because it means that it minimises the amount that he was ripped off by at the first place when you average it all out. But of course he can't even take all this tea that he now has back to Australia because of Australian customs regulations...

3. When travelling with companions there are only two governments that work. A strong democracy or a strong dictatorship. A democracy doesn't work if you have a dictator in the group. If you have people who are adverse to dictatorships when you actually have a dictator people argue. Johnny is a dictator, I hate dictators. We argued. A lot.

2. Don't let the people who rip you off and try to con you convince you that everyone is bad... Some of the best times I had was hanging out with the locals. A highlight was taking the last chairlift down from the Yak Plateau with the local ethnic lift operators in the chair behind us singing an ethnic tune for us to pass the time.

1. Travelling is one of the most exhausting things in the world but worth all the money and energy that you must expend. You see things that are indescribable and to which all the photos and all the stories in the world do no justice. You meet cool people and you learn cool things. Travelling really changes you. A cliche but one that is really tried and true...

I'm really looking forward to the rest of my trip... :p