Welcome Home

So, we've been travelling. Starting with the train to Wellington at 6 am Tuesday morning local time from Palmerston North, New Zealand, and arriving in Turku, Finland, at about 1 am local time on the night to Thursday. All in all, that's over 50 hours of trains, flights and airports. Over 50 hours. *shudder* Fortunately everything went smoothly, with the main setback being a jar of Kraft's crunchy peanut butter confiscated by airport security (sniffle).

After two days of travelling, with no proper sleep during the whole time, one ends up in a certain zombie-like state. In such a state, we found the last flight of the trip, from London to Helsinki, to be very amusing. Hilarious, even. It was like a "welcome back to Finland" type of thing.

Some background first. On the way over, we went with British Airways from Helsinki (Finland) to London (UK), from there to Sydney (Australia) via Bangkok (Thailand), and finally to Wellington (NZ). Travelling back, we flew with Qantas from Wellington to Melbourne (Australia) and from there to London via Hong Kong. The last bit to Helsinki was with Finnair.

The BA and Qantas flights, especially BA, happily surprised me by actually having good food. For example the lamb and whiskey pot pie, or the nice chicken curry... All served with salad and dressing, bread, dessert and your choice of beverage (mostly wine in my case). In short, food with actual flavour and variety. Even the coffee was nice most of the time.

So, what about the Finnair flight?

Well.

Imagine, if you will, the following "meal". Overcooked, soft pasta. Strangely cooked chicken, with occasional inedible crunchy bits of... cartilage? (Actually, I don't really want to know.) Veggies that seemed to be that cheap kind of thawed frozen peas, carrot cubes and undefined beige "other". Anything alcoholic had a price tag and I don't even know how to describe the coffee.

Welcome home to Finland!

Then getting off the plane and stepping into the Finnish early spring weather; cold, dark and rainy with dirty piles of melting snow... Remembering the pictured warm sun, blue waters and 25+ °C (77+ °F) of that last day in Wellington...

Yup. Home sweet home. *sigh*