Waiting at the gate

When the aeroplane you are due to take to Schiphol is greeted by a fire engine when it arrives at the gate, you wonder whether there might be a problem. I saw a man with a big red pack on his back go into the plane. Who knows? Our boarding was delayed a few minutes for "operational reasons", but we were away within five minutes of the scheduled departure time. There were, however, two police officers and an ambulance attending to us as we boarded. These things will doubtless remain a mystery.

We had a smooth journey to Finland. The only wrinkles were the young woman sitting opposite us on the train who sniffed and coughed all the way from Tikkurila to Tampere, and the fact that we struggled to find the flat. We had to pick up the key from the Lapland Hotel. That went well enough. But there was nothing to tell us which end of Tammelankatu we were supposed to be. We went to the wrong end. Bugger. Had to walk pretty much all the way back to the station to find it. Pleasant enough place, though, when we found it, and it's very close to a K-market, so we easily picked up some bits and pieces for a snack.

The streets are treacherous, though. It's snowed, and frozen, and thawed and refrozen. You get the drift. Luckily there's a lot of grit on the ground, but that doesn't always help. We managed to navigate our way around the streets this evening without either of us going arse over tits, but it's probably only a matter of time.