Okay. So following the adventures of Santa Land, I had a day that went not at all according to plan. Like… Literally none of it went the way I thought it would. Except maybe the bus to the airport.

My flight to London was scheduled for 12:45, and the airport is so tiny that busses from the city center run to the airport precisely timed for every flight. So my bus was scheduled to pick me up at 11:45. Cutting it a little close, but if the city of Rovaniemi thought that was enough time to get me to where I was going, I wasn’t about to argue.

That meant I had the whole morning to myself! Before bed on the previous night, I researched some breakfast places. There was a Finnish pastry I’d come across many times and had yet to try, so my mission for the day was to try that dang pastry. (Spoiler: it didn’t happen.)

I had it all planned to hit up one cafe for breakfast at 8:00 (opens at 7:30) and then to visit another at 11 for lunch. So imagine my surprise when I wake up, get quickly dressed, and am about to head out the door when I plug the first restaurant into Google Maps only to be notified that it is closed on Sundays.

The restaurant opens at 7:30 every day, but on Sundays? Closed.

Okay, that sucked. But I could just go to the other restaurant, right? That was also opens at 7:30!

Also closed. In fact, it turns out half the city is closed on Sundays. Ugh. One of those silly cities that values rest and family time! The worst! (Kind of joking.)

So I resigned to eating more free oatmeal in the kitchen while reading, like I had the previous morning. Here’s where misstep two comes in: I was reading on my silly Kindle. (I’m a physical book kind of gal, but I couldn’t bring ten physical books on the trip with me!) I’m one of those readers who starts to get anxious as the end of the book nears, especially if it’s a really good book, and ESPECIALLY if it’s the last book in a really good series. This book was both of those things. But I was not anxious yet, because silly Kindle told me I was only 88% of the way through the book.

Five minutes into my breakfast, I come to the Acknowledgements page of the book.

As in, the book was finished. As in, the other 12% of the book was actually just a sneak peek at a different book by the same author, and I had been tricked into thinking otherwise!

So there I was, finished without even realizing it, and having nothing to read for the next sad hour of oatmeal eating while I waited for the first cafe to open in Rovaniemi.

Eventually. I made my way outside, still in fine spirits, and trying to pretend I was used to the cold by now by wearing my hair in a bun instead of down in a neck-blanket fashion.

To make a long story short, the cafe that opened at ten did not have the pastries I was looking for. And the one down the street that opened at eleven didn’t actually open until noon, which I didn’t realize until I tried to pull the door open at eleven. I then ran across town to the swimming hall because I knew for sure they opened at eleven, and I knew for sure they had the pastries because I had seen them there the other day.

But of course, they didn’t have the pastries out yet, or else the little families of Finns had beat me to it.

Very sad and very cold, with another wasted morning, I quickly shuffled back to my hostel, grabbed my things, and ran out to the bus.

Upon arriving at the airport, I saw that the reader board estimated my flight to leave at 2:00 instead of 12:45. Eh. I guess this was fine. I probably wasn’t going to arrive in London earlier enough to visit any museums, anyway. This just sealed the deal.

At 12:30, though, a perky Finnish woman announced on the loudspeaker that our easyJet plane could not land due to runway conditions, and it would instead land in Kittila airport which was a two hour drive north from where we sat. We would all be bussed to Kittala and flown out from there. More information on the busses to come later.

Yaaaaay………..

A bit later, I overheard someone talking about how this happened on Wednesday when they were trying to fly in from London, and they ended up having to spend the night in Kittila.

Sure enough, about an hour later, the perky woman returned to announce that we would be spending the night in Kittila because the flight crew would be over hours if they flew us back that night.

Yaaaaay……

I spent the next bit of time canceling my plans for a day trip in Oxford and being thankful that I had only booked half my planned activities and trains in the London area.

In compensation, the woman said we would all be getting food vouchers for the airport cafe “for fifty euros.”

“Fifty euros!” some passengers exclaimed. “Yeah, they better! We’ll be feasting like kings in the airport!”

Other passengers heard “fifteen,” which made a lot more sense. I, too, had heard “fifty,” but I joined the Fifteen Camp. Passengers then began discussing that this sum would barely cover the cost of the €10 sandwiches the cafe offered.

Well, two hours later, after having stood in the line to receive these vouchers for over an hour, I learned from another couple of passengers that the voucher was actually “FOUR FIFTY EUROS.” As in, €4.50. Four euros, fifty cents.

Coffee at this airport costed €4.90.

Yayyyyyy….

Anyway, I gave up at this point, and when they told us our flight would not be leaving in the morning, but at 12:15, almost a full 24 hours from when our original was supposed to take off, I was not surprised.

I was surprised, however, when I finally entered my €200 hotel room, looked out the window, and saw that I was literally staying on a ski mountain.

The largest ski resort in Finland, in fact.

What a strange world. Oh, and here’s some pictures from the bus ride, on which a loud and friendly English boy (seen peeking over my shoulder) decided to open a pack of gingerbread cookies he’d bought for his co-workers so he could share with the entire bus.

But yeah. The hotel was nice. I made myself some hot chocolate and eventually made my way to the buffet dinner we were provided.

Quite yummy. Very Scandinavian. And paired with several glasses of blueberry juice, which is apparently another (delicious) Finnish thing. I kicked myself in the morning for forgetting about dessert, but I was in a rush to visit the ski village before the gondola stopped running!

Shortly after disembarking gondola, I found a sled, and I decided to use this sled to go sledding at the base of the mountain.

I don’t think I’ve been sledding since I was ten. Maybe younger. I was never much of a sledder. But dude, this was fun, and I had the whole mountain to myself because everybody else was being sensible and eating or sleeping or sauna-ing.

Then I walked around the village a little bit. Cute place.

But it was cold.

Like, very very cold.

Like, somehow even colder than it had been in Rovaniemi. And after only half an hour outside, my toes and fingers were starting to burn, so I ran to the gondola and let it carry me back up the mountain to my princess castle.

This is how I felt when I finally got to lay down that evening:

Flattering, I know.

I ended up staying up kind of late, watching Netflix, fighting with some stranger over the control of my TV’s Chromecast every few minutes, and hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern lights. No luck, though. Only clouds.

I started the morning with a beautiful, sparkling sunrise, a visit to the hotel’s sauna, and a hardy Finnish breakfast.

 

Then it was off to the airport much too early (the buses picked us up at 9:30 for our 12:15 flight), but at least the quick bus ride was gorgeous in the morning light.

Passengers continued sharing info during our wait in the airport, such as the fact that our plane had actually flown back to London the previous night, empty, and was not in the airport currently. It would have to fly in, empty, to pick us up. This sent several passengers into a tizzy, because obviously it was confusing and upsetting to know that we could have all been on that empty flight the previous night, and obviously it was easy to worry that the ridiculous plane would not be able to land again. Oh, and I forgot to mention that while we were waiting in the Rovaniemi airport the previous day, three other flights landed and took off. It was just easyJet that was incapable for some reason. Sigh…… Never easyJet! Never!

The plane did, eventually, land. (Below is a picture showing you how high the sun gets in the sky in January when you are this far north of the Arctic Circle. At noon, even!)

And it took off, too.

 

And it landed again in London, which I was unsettled to find had no snow on the ground. White had become my new norm as far as ground colors went.

I managed to zoom through border control and race across town to do the one thing I really wanted to do in London: visit the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I was not disappointed. Just check out this Chihuly chandelier in the lobby. Chihuly is a Seattle-based glass-blowing artist!

And they had a whole hallway of Rodin!!! My favorite sculptor!!

I stayed in that hallway for a long time, but I did, eventually, move on.

 

 

In one hall, I learned that some crazy rich people from the twentieth century had become obsessed with gold and silver, and they’d collected one of the largest personal collections in the world. They had then donated their collection, and it ended up here.

So many riches. Kind of eerie, honestly.

There was also a library, with some books that were two feet tall, but it was closed on Mondays! Drat!

Some last minute wanderings before I was kindly ushered toward the exit…

And then it was double-decker time.

I had dinner, tea, and a dessert in a cafe nearly 150 years old.

And then I watched Aladdin!

 

You can’t tell, but my hand is on the lamp, haha. Overall, a cute little show. I loved the sets and the costumes, and I still have no idea how they made the magic carpet fly. The boy playing Aladdin was adorable, and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to use an American or a British accent. The genie was great and hilarious. Lots of shirtless dancer boys with six packs. The woman who played Jasmine was kind of awful, unfortunately. Her acting was terrible, and her singing voice actually ruined A Whole New World for me. I’m really not sure what was going on…. She was so nasally and was saying the words in such a strained way… It was like a horrible impression of 2001 Brittney Spears, except that Brittney would have sounded better and had better dance moves.

Yikes. Sorry for the critique, but they seriously should replace her.

I then did a little more walking around and a little bit of Underground travel.

And then to Cambridge to visit a surprise guest! Well, actually, I’m his guest, but he’s a guest on the blog, and some of you might remember him from Zurich….

Stay tuned for more.

Cheers,
-Lizzy-wa