Fourteen years ago this week I was on my first ever solo trip. Well – that kind of depends on your definition. I’d done the trip to Italy a good few years ago; it wasn’t solo but my only companion was another fourteen-year-old, and I’d spent a year living in Switzerland and travelling around in my spare time. But this was the first time I’d got on a plane with the intention of spending some time in another country alone.
How did it come about? It was a Ranger meeting. I’d filled ten minutes at the end with a game of “where do you really see yourself in five years?” – in Rangers, you can be less noble about it than you might if someone asks at school and they’d gone through a list of a degree that they really wanted to do at their number one university, a dream job, marriage, babies and dogs. Bear in mind that my oldest at the time were maybe seventeen or eighteen and I was barely five years older than the oldest ones and I did not have this magical dream life they were describing. I was twenty-three, I was seven or eight months into my first proper grown-up job and my life was an endless circle of work-bath-sleep, broken only by Rangers once a week. And so I did what any travel blogger, or indeed grown-up gap-yearer does, and I immediately decided the way to improve my life was through travel.
This would have been Tuesday 14th October 2008. By the following Sunday, I’d booked a hostel and flights (although the flight confirmation has vanished from my email; I knew it exists because I printed it and it’s tucked into a journal from the time) and I was going to Helsinki between November 5th and 10th. That’s three weeks’ notice from the moment I realised it needed to happen.
I wanted to go to Norway, actually, but easyJet didn’t have any flights there at the time, or maybe not from an airport I could conveniently get to. Finland was close enough. Yes, in November. I evidently decided I wanted my first ever solo trip to be about as cold as I could get it. I was a polar bear before I even knew it. In hindsight, it’s quite a choice. Oh, I’d always recommend a Nordic country. They’re safe, they’re nice, they’re easy to get around – but the language barrier! Fourteen years on, some seven months of on-off learning Finnish and I’d still struggle with the language barrier. I got lucky: Finland is more or less bilingual with Swedish and I had enough Tourist German (from my year living in Switzerland and years of summer holidays in Austria) to be able to pick out words like “exit” and “tickets” to get around in Swedish.
I don’t remember the flight or the arrival. I remember buying a bus ticket from a machine, mercifully in English, and getting the correct bus to the city centre. It was my first time and so I made sure I knew precisely how I was getting to where I wanted to be – a habit I’ve kind of faded out in more recent years. Bus to the city centre and then I took a taxi to my hostel. I knew I’d be arriving in the dark in a strange city and although I’m a major taxi-avoider, that was my plan for arriving safely on my first night. I’d printed my confirmation so I didn’t have to attempt to explain anything to the driver, I could just hand over the name and address.
The hostel has since closed but I remember it being very quiet, very empty. I had a private room a couple of floors up and it felt more like an empty university hall of residence. I saw no evidence of large dorms or common rooms. I do realise, looking at the confirmation, that it’s called Hotel Fenno, not hostel. Anyway, it was ideal for me. These days, staying in a hostel sounds like a kind of eternal torture and I suspect I wouldn’t have been much more open to the idea of a large dorm back in 2008. Today I might find it creepier that it was so quiet than I did at the time – it was very quiet. It’s about 2km north of the main station, so perhaps not as central as it could have been for my first ever trip and it had a tram stop right outside.
In the morning, when Helsinki was light again, I walked into the city centre because while that tram stop was right there, I had no idea where to start with tickets and things. I must have figured it out at some point because I did take trams those few days but probably the central station was a better place to find out such things than a suburban tram stop.
I’d done enough research to know exactly how to get to my hotel but apparently not enough to realise that Helsinki is practically in the sea. My diary from the time says “everywhere I turned, I seemed to run into more water”. For my first expedition, I got a boat out to Suomenlinna, the Castle of Finland, a sea fortress built across several islands, but now more like a cross between a nice rural island and a living history museum. I think it’s still active, even today – well, with Putin only a couple of hundred miles away, it’s possible it’s more active today than it’s been in a long time – but active meant pretty quiet, a recurring theme here in Finland. I wrote very little in my diary. To be fair, when I say “diary”, I mean “blog meant to reassure my mother” and I hopped from public computer to public computer, wrestling with a Finnish keyboard. I did mention that the sun began to set very early and that “I was brave” by going outside on the boat to take photos.
Because it was cold! Finland in November! Helsinkin, on the Baltic! Cold! I thought I was prepared. I had a calf-length grey wool coat from New Look, the kind that looks good at Remembrance Parade but in real life, isn’t all that warm. I had a pair of sheepskin mittens from Primark – I still have them. I’m sure I took a warm hat but I have no photos because selfies weren’t a thing in 2008. I know I bought a kind of scarf/pashmina, also from Primark, because people raved so much about how versatile they were as scarves and blankets and therefore you won’t be surprised that the only time I’ve carried a similar thing since then is when I went to Ukraine and Russia, for covering my hair when I went in churches. But I must have taken a hat. I look at my cold-weather stuff now and wonder how I survived in Helsinki in November with what I had.
The next day, I took the train to Turku. Longish-distance train travel in Finland is spectacularly simple, even for a first-timer who doesn’t speak the language. I explored the castle and roamed the streets and got lost and arrived back in Helsinki in the pitch black, very proud to have figured out how to take the tram home all by myself. Turku is very nice. If I did this trip again, I’d definitely want to explore a bit more because I think Turku has quite an expansive history – yes, it’s the oldest city in Finland and was the capital between somewhere around 1229 and 1812.
I got a taste for it. The next day I took the train to Tampere where it rained and it was freezing and I didn’t really want to explore any further than the Moomin Museum, which I still maintain walked the line between “wonderful” and “sickeningly twee” absolutely perfectly and never put a foot on the wrong side. There were apparently 41 mini-scenes from various books, set up in a magic forest, and you weren’t allowed to take photos. Apparently I have some postcards of it somewhere, though. Probably in that journal. Ah yes, about my winter clothes: I wore jeans. They were wet halfway up to my knees and I kept crossing my legs on the train journey home, which meant they were damp all over by the time I got back to Helsinki.
My fourth day was occupied in doing very little. I mean, looking at it now, I didn’t do very much at all the entire trip. But on the Sunday, I went for a walk and took the tram back to the hostel. I think this must have been the day I stumbled on the Helsinki metro. I remember reading Watchmen and I’m pretty sure I remember reading in a newspaper over breakfast that Obama had been elected US president. Oddly, I think I remember it being in Norwegian. More likely it was Swedish. I couldn’t have picked out more than “Obama” if it was in Finnish and it wouldn’t have been in English. But Swedish is a possibility. My Tourist German could probably have figured out what happened.
The fifth day was my last. I took the bus out to an island called Seurasaari, reached by a wooden bridge rather than a boat, and spent a couple of hours wondering in the woods. I think it was one of these living history/ethnographic museums but the only thing I really remember was a kind of woodland amphitheatre and a very menacing squirrel. I’d absolutely go there again. I spent my afternoon in the city centre, crossing the two cathedrals off my list but going inside neither. Thought I lost my wallet but found it in my bag instead of in my pocket. And then I was done. It was time to collect my luggage from the storage lockers at the station and take the bus back to the airport.
So that was my first solo trip abroad. I wish I remember enough detail – and had good enough photos – to make half a dozen blog posts out of it. However, it served its purpose. My next trip wasn’t until the following June but it really started to pick up after that. I became a person who travels and eventually a person who writes about travelling, and thus it’s quite annoying to have an experience that was so formative and yet which I have so little to talk about. I went to Finland! On my own! In winter! I figured out public transport! I went to two islands! I saw Moomins!
