Farewell Helsinki

As our plane didn’t leave till 23:50 tonight, we booked our apartment for an additional night so that we had somewhere to hangout and take a late shower. We booked an Uber for the early evening and so had the day to do some further sightseeing, although rain and sleet was predicted from 10 am till 5 pm. We ended up visiting the Helsinki Fire Museum which was located in a lovely old building (1891) just across the road from us. It was interesting enough, with a lot of displays and pictures, but not really my thing.

We then went to PurPur (means purple in Finnish) Georgian restaurant also just down the street from us. It is beautifully decorated, very warm and comfortable. They are trying a new thing of having a buffet banquet on Sundays, and this was their second week. There were a couple of other tables of customers but not as many as we expected given that many restaurants close on Sunday.

The banquet was a good option for us as we had the opportunity to try a fairly broad range of their dishes. We had small blinis with pickles, onion, honey, sour cream and white fish roe. We also tried beetroot salad, Georgian salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, herbs, suluguni cheese and nut dressing), Phkali which is a tasty vegetable paste with walnuts, fried mushrooms and onions with sour cream and sulugni cheese, and Hachapuri bread. For mains there was vegetable stew of aubergines, capsicum, potatoes and onion, lamb meatballs, and a Georgian style potato hash with Kupati sausage. For dessert there was baklava, berries and something they called lemon pudding. It looked like cream but was so much more - it was bloody delicious. I think overall I preferred the starters to the mains but it all was very good, and we will go back there next time we are in Helsinki.

We came back to the apartment to relax for a while before doing the last pack of this trip. It started snowing lightly for a few minutes, before returning to sleet and rain. Our Uber picked us up at the allotted time and had us to the airport in under 30 minutes. There had been more snowfall inland as the pictures show. We are now settled in the Finnair Business Lounge waiting for our flight we should be boarding in about 90 minutes.Read more