Escape to the forest

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The downside of taking a few days off is returning home and having to reenter reality, do laundry and go back to work far sooner than you'd like. Also finding an already sub-functional email application and inbox brought to a mostly non-functional state due to spam is less appealing than, say, driving through the European equivalent of the Minnesota boonies. We went to Naantali, wandered around Moominworld, watched some poor guy get thrown into the harbour at a ludicrously early hour only a few meters away from the President, sat in a Turkish bath, had our fat rubbed and plumped and drove to a few of the more oddball sights in Finland. My threshold for entertainment is decidedly low but not really getting out much can do that to a person. I'll illustrate just how low when the photos come back from developing sometime next week.

One small bonus of the IAAF World Championships and the ensuing mass of tourists in town over the next few weeks is a cool "Walk the Green" map and legend [both pdf] and an updated version of the Let's Explore Nature in Helsinki book. Those of us not lucky enough to rent out our homes for 2,000 euro per week will need to escape into the forest and avoid downtown until it's all over.