Frozen Taivallahti

It was hard to envisage what Taivallahti - our local bay - would be like in the winter, when we first arrived and we were taking pictures of the sunset, from various angles. Even just before we left for South East Asia, it was still hard to imagine the white world we are now experiencing. If we thought that leaving Lapland on Thursday meant escaping the white world, we reckoned without the fact that since about Tuesday this week Helsinki has had the first significant snowfall of the winter, as well as a fairly solid period of below zero temperatures. The results are very clear. There is now an impromptu skating rink in what was a car park before Christmas, between us and the tram stop. All around the bays are frozen. And as we came back from a largely fruitless trip into the centre of the city (Hakaniemi market is closed this weekend as the stalls are being moved into the temporary new market whilst the old one is renovated), we could see people out on the ice on Töölönlahti, doubtless doing some ice fishing (that link is to a very old blip dating back to 2013 - ah, the wonders of blip!).

More generally, we've had a fairly relaxed day. Some travel arrangements were sorted out in the morning (at some cost...), and later on we watched some rugby on Eurosport. And I've created a new album for 2018 on flickr, which may give the impression (not wrongly) that I'm a bit obsessed with the view from the 10th floor.