France-tastic

And to finish off holiday stories, while I'm at it, for the third post today:

In other adventures, we took a boat to Finland! Accompanied by Camilla and Patrick (my sister and her husband for those of you not familiar with my family tree) we hopped on this boat:

...and sailed to Helsinki. The cruise takes 40 hours all up, and includes about 8 hours in Helsinki, and about 31 hours of eating, drinking, dancing, watching cabaret shows, and buying duty-free booze (though you can't usually buy duty-free stuff between EU countries, the genius of this cruise is that it docks for about 4 minutes on a little island called Åland in the Baltic Sea, which though not an independent country but actually part of Finland, is not part of the EU, and this all means that you can buy all the booze you can carry!)! Here are photos of some of the above activites:

The 8 hours in Helsinki were mostly spent trying to avoid the bitter, bitter cold, and trying to stay awake after very little sleep, and far too much dancing to cheesy Finnish pop! However, we did squeeze in a little tourist bus tour of the city, which was about all the sight-seeing we could cope with. Helsinki is actually a really pretty city (though bitterly, bitterly cold. Did I mention that?), and has some interesting buildings, including the Temple Rock Church, a Lutheran church that was built only in the last 50 years or so, I think, but looks like it should be a pagan temple from long ago times! Basically the architects were told to build a church on a little rocky mountain/hill, and decided the mountain/hill was so beautiful, it was a shame to raze it for a traditional church building, and instead just drilled out a round chamber from the actual rock, and put something like 26 km of copper wire into a big coil (around 10 m in diameter!), and turned that into the roof! And that is about all they did. The church is actually really amazing, these photos really don't do it justice (the second is just the roof):

This is a more normal church, but still really beautiful:

Our holiday also included Christmas of course, including all the eating that goes with that! We had two big Christmas feasts, the first on an island in "Skärgården" (the Stockholm archipelago), where we had a "julbord" (Swedish Christmas feast) in a hotel which was just fantastic, more herring than you could poke a stick at!

The second feast was of course on Christmas eve itself, prepared by the less famous, but no less talented in the julbord department, Camilla (with a little help from the rest of us- and I mean little)!

Aside from eating endless quantities of herring, salmon, reindeer meat, köttbullar, and ris a la malta, there was much silliness and general merriment!

From left, my cousin Dennis, me, Alex, my aunt Kerstin, Patrick, Camilla, and my grandmother. Behind the camera is my other cousin Simone, who some of you have met.

Camilla getting musical. (No guitar handy)

Cousins Dennis and Simone, and doggie Lotta, dressed for Christmas.

Alex and mormor deciding language was not a problem!

We also fitted in an icehockey game, and saw Patrick's team SSK slide home with a very unexpected 4-1 victory at Scaniarinken! Alex was so impressed, he even bought a T-shirt!

Finally, on our last day in Sweden, the real snow came, and Alex got to try his hand at shovelling snow from the driveway, in order to get the car up it!

He even continued to shovel a path for Lotta (my sister's little King Charles Spaniel), who was almost shorter than the snow level! So cute!

Camilla and Patrick's gorgeous house, which we then left to go back to Paris in time for New Years with John and Shari. Those photos will have to wait, this is more than long enough already!

# posted by Jenny @ 18:36