St. Stephen’s Day hiking
Finland will never be the same. In the night before the Christmas Eve I found myself queuing in Prisma (a huge hypermarket, the first one in the country to be open 24 hours). I thought that I will be the only night owl / foreigner / agnostic there, but actually the queue was quite long.
And on the Christmas Eve I cycled to the church and after that went back home through the center. I was hungry and here it was – a truck with burgers, standing near the Central Railway station. On Christmas Eve, at 0:15 I had a tasty vege burger and a friendly customer service. Something like this would be impossible to imagine even 5 years ago.
I’m content with this Christmas also because I went hiking 2 days out of 3. On Sunday it was night hiking with torches (and testing new route near Saunakallio!), but today it was during the sunlight and I decided to take the camera with me. I didn’t have any expectations as the days are mostly gray this time of the year, but the nature turned out to be at its best today.
Today I was hiking with Meetup folks and one of them told that it would be nice to take ice skates. I didn’t believe that skating is possible at the moment, because the weather has been above zero for a few days already. How wrong I was! All the lakes were covered by a beautiful and trustworthy ice.
In some lakes the ice is more transparent than in others for some reason.
Sincerely yours, walking on the water ;)
The ice has so many shapes in the lakes…
…and on the land.
The forest looks like it’s 1st October, not 26th December. Which is beautiful in a way, but worrying.
Not your average leg selfie!
I really missed the sun. Last time I saw it for more than tens of minutes on 4th December.
The sun started to slowly disappear around 14:00. This is December, baby!
One more glance at the ice and then back through the forest to the bus stop (and my parked bicycle).
