After landing in Helsinki from Copenhagen, I did the standard routine of navigating to my lodging in yet another new city, with yet another strange language (Indeed, Finnish is stranger than most languages). It is 14 minutes pass midnight; yet, the western horizon still glows faintly with light. Although the weather is a bit more dreary then the last two weeks in Scandinavia, glimpses of the sun did break through the gloom today — albeit, due to its low traverse, the sky maintains a strange luminescence throughout the late evening.
This is the land of two hundred thousand lakes, archipelagos, Sebelius, reindeer, birch, saunas, and the midnight sun.