Yesterday, I flew from Manchester to Helsinki, still feeling optimistic about the long road ahead and ready to see what I could see of Helsinki during my long layover. Helsinki, however, was not ready for me. The problem was that I flew into Helsinki at 10:30 at night, which to my dizzied internal clock felt like 10:30 a.m. And because of Finland's high latitude, 10:30 at night this time of year looks a lot like morning as well, with the sun still lingering in the sky as my plane touched down. Not realizing or not wanting to realize the local time, I ventured into the city at 11 p.m. by bus from the airport.
The sun rather abruptly set around 11:30, about the time I disembarked from the bus into the city square. The only Finnish I know is the numbers 0 - 4 and "thank you," and the complexities of its highly-synthetic grammar are utterly lost on me. If I had landed in a country that spoke a Germanic or Romance language, I probably would have been able to decipher some roots here and there to help myself get around, but Finnish is as opaque to me as particle physics. I felt uniquely disarmed, surrounded by entirely inscrutable Finnish signs in the rapidly diminishing daylight.
Around midnight, I realized I had been a bit foolhardy rushing into Helsinki without a plan. The streets had emptied, the shops all having closed at 11, and it suddenly dawned on me that the bus to the airport probably didn't run all night. Scanning through hieroglyphs in the dark, I discerned that my choices for returning to the airport were to catch the next bus at 12:50, or wait until 6 a.m. on the city's chilly, unnervingly quiet streets. And I didn't know where the correct bus stop was.
Aside from the all-consuming panic across the next hour, in which I darted around unknown and unknowable Finnish streets from bus stop to ever-more-puzzling bus stop, my excursion into Helsinki would have been just as charming as in Manchester. And I did eventually find the correct bus stop. But when I returned to the airport at 1:30 this morning, I was more emotionally and physically exhausted than I've ever been in my life. So I promptly curled up into a ball on an unforgiving bench and fell asleep.
The nice thing about Finland being virtually dead this time of day is that I slept well for almost 4 hours in the absolute darkness and silence of the empty terminal. A few minutes ago, today's travelers began trickling in, finally disrupting my awkward but pleasant slumber. The sun has already risen. I'm waiting for the first shop to open in 15 minutes so I can eat breakfast before sleeping a few more hours. My final flight to St. Petersburg doesn't leave until 9:50, so I still have plenty of waiting ahead of me.
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