An Anniversary weekend

Some notes from this past week and weekend.  

First, Christo injured his foot at school and was limping around for the end of the week.  We decided to rent a car for the weekend (100euros) to be able to run some errands, tote some hockey equipment and go to the local national park, Nuuksio.  The first picture left is from Nuuksio which is still in the Espoo city limits.  We hiked a little and generally had a good day on Saturday.  Friday was Steph and my 16th wedding anniversary, so Saturday we went to Helsinki for dinner at Lappi Ravintola, a place that specialized in Finnish food.   

 Here is a picture of the appetizer plate that we got. 16th Anniversary dinner with my beautiful wife last night at Lappi Ravintola. Salmon tartar, salmon mousse, smoked baitfish, salmon roe with cream cheese, reindeer liver, cranberry sauce, dried raindeer heart, raindeer carpaccio, farm cheese with cloudberries, white mushroom salad, pickled cucumbers and onions. Steph avoided the reindeer even though it tasted like Daniel's sneakers.  Elk entree was excellent and we had seabuckthorn cake for dessert.  A nice couple of hours to ourselves.

The last set of picture below is from the Finlandia Figure Skating Championships which took place about 600m from our apartment.  We got to see the top rated male and female figure skaters in the world.  Particularly impressive was Yuzuru Hanyu on the men's side.  Very young, very fluid, very athletic.  Clearly the class of the show.  Our tickets were just for the men's and women's freestyle/long program which were the finals.  Only bad part was that it was 5 hours long.

 This weekend we are headed to Turku, Finland where I'll be giving a talk at a conference called "American Voices."  Sunday we leave for Paris, then Calais, then London with a trip to Birmingham to see Aston Villa play Tottenham in English Premier League Football.