Last night I ate an early dinner at Havis on their terrace. My colleague in the Helsinki office recommended this restaurant for the fish. I had scallops with cauliflower purée and Parma ham followed by strawberries, vanilla ice cream and cinnamon cake.

Tonight I am back at the same Finnish restaurant my workmates took me to at lunch. At lunchtime I had the reindeer and mashed tatties, this evening I will try the lohikeitto, the creamy salmon soup I’ve been wanting to try since I read about it on wikipedia.

Breakfast was picked herrings, smoked mackerel, eggs and yummy dark grainy rye bread. Oh and it’s not all about food! The homeware brands they have here rock! Iittala, Arabia, Marimekko, and Aarrika. Marimekko is probably my fav, they have fabric designs to buy by the metre as well. And the cartoon characters Moomin are really cute and funny. Ok so I’m a little bit in love with this city and Finnish design!

Oh yeah that soup was tasty! And the bread they give is divine! If bread can be divine. They had the wine recommendations on the menu too so I had to take their advice. That leads me to now, when I’m sipping the Austrian  white that I can’t remember the name of, while I wait for my dessert (soft meringue with rhubarb cider sorbet) and the Finnish berry wine. Glass of, mind you ;)

The menu’s wine recommendations were tops last night as well. The Asti they recommended with my strawberries, ice-cream and cinnamon bread was worth taking a photo of the label! Wes and I cycled through that region last year on our Italian push bike holiday, so I had to try it :)

Needless to say, my work daily food allowance is not even enough to cover my two evening meals, but it’s been worth it. Like a mini holiday/work sandwich at almost no cost to me. Except for the presents I had to buy Wes – I only wish he was here too.

I just remembered another reason why I think I was meant to be Finnish. The government have implemented a recycling incentive scheme. Every time you buy a product which is sold in a recyclable packaging, you pay extra for it (20c for small plastic bottle, 15c for can, 10c for glass bottle, 40c for large plastic bottles). Let’s call that the packaging supplement. For example I bought a 500ml plastic bottle of water from the supermarket that costs €1.29, but i had to pay €1.49 for it. Then if you take the empty container back to the supermarket and insert it into a machine, it spits out a voucher of exactly the same amount as you paid for the supplement that you can use on your next purchase. Unfortunately the hotel cleaners nicked my empty bottle before I understood the concept so I’ll never get back my 20c! Take that britain, land of landfill gobblers (out of 16 flats, we are the only ones who recycle). Now it’s time for dessert.

Ok the Finnish berry wine was a mistake, not sweet enough. I should’ve stuck with the recommendation, which coincidentally was the same Asti I loved from last night’s restaurant. The soft meringue was lovely, the rhubarb sorbet and diced fresh strawberries good company for it, but the rhubarb and cider soup was unnecessary, having the texture of babyfood. Ew. Don’t worry I still ate most of it.

Back at the hotel now (which also has recycling bins in the rooms – go Scandic!), and I’m ready for bed. Only two downsides for me so far: most cache locations smell like pee; and at the end of the day my face is covered in London-style soot particles. Two small offsets for all those positives don’t you think! That and apparently some Russian bears have migrated into mid-Finland.

Holy crap a double espresso with a bit of warm milk costs €3.20!! I should’ve just popped into the office where they have an espresso machine. Goodness gracious me. I remember drinking single espresso in Portugal for 70c.

Another good thing is the language isn’t nearly as difficult to pronounce as it looks. Words are really long, but pretty much pronounced phonetically, give or take a few sounds my mouth just will not make.

Of course we had to nab at least one cache on our way out to the hike, so we nabbed the micro at Feugh Falls, and we had a DNF for a funky letterbox hybrid next to an ostrich farm. We had a lovely early dinner at the Potarch on our way home, and then it was time for bed!

Then it was time to hit the road again to the Finzean Farm Shop and Teahouse for afternoon tea snacks before a quick roadside TB drop cache then home again. Now we are settled onto the couch with our red wine, gorgonzola and Finzean venison chorizo. Yum! Fingers crossed Missy’s battery is charged enough for another spin tomorrow!

After finding the cache we stopped for a cuppa before heading back the way we came. As we were scrambling down the scree I saw ahead of us something unusual, alien-like on the ground. [The next bit is not for the squeamish] As we got closer we realised it was the scattered internal organs of a deer. We only figured out it was a deer, because one of the organs was a placenta complete with tiny dead foetus. It is easily the weirdest thing we have ever seen. I took a photo. We don’t know how far along the female was when she was killed, but the foetus is a perfectly-formed tiny baby deer, complete with hooves. Head diameter perhaps 3cm. If we had a shovel we would have given Harold a proper burial, but we just named him (obviously the gender is a guess) and hoped the buzzards would get him soon to complete the circle of life. What an odd experience. I’m including the photo; even though he’s dead, he’s so cute and peaceful.

So we went snowboarding – twice so far! The first time at Cairn Gorm with Gerrod and Kristy, the second time at Glenshee with my friend Cat’s husband and his mates. Cat was cosied up at home with little Aimee, bump and a hot chocolate. Snowboarding’s too dangerous when you’re up the duff, so she lent me her gear and off I went. And didn’t I find out how dangerous it is! Oh my tailbone. Two weeks later it still hurts when I walk and when I bend over. But it was so cool to be on the slopes doing something with Wes that he loves. He had a fantastic day up on Glas Maol in the afternoon cruising off piste from the black runs, he’s so talented!

And of course the surf is working as well, so Wes has been out in the water too (I’m far too chicken to get wet in this weather – water temp seven degrees).

We’ve also been out walking/geocaching. I’m completely addicted to geocaching now.

We popped out this arvo to nab a couple more geocaches, and it was a gorgeous sunset.

We still don’t have the GPS tech, but we were able to cheat a little, by starting with a city cache, and memorising the google map location and the hint before we left the house. The only downside is that city caches are usually nanos (tiny caches), so no chance for moving on any trackable items. In fact, the first cache we found was about the size of the middle joint on my pinky (or smaller than a 3D 5p coin, whichever you can picture easier!), it was a magnetic dot stuck on a well in the street. Seriously we were giggling like schoolkids when we eventually found it. This well is part of a series of well caches around Aberdeen (The Wells of Bon-Accord), and we will start to try and find them all.

Who knows, we may even get ourselves a GPS for Christmas, if we can wait that long! And yes it’s cold, maybe 6-8 degrees that day, Wes only took his gloves off to unscrew the tiny cap of the magnetic nano cache.