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Flight 2407 Monday 22 April 2024 AY 131 HEL-SIN A359 OH-LWF Scheduled: 0025 Boarding: 0020 (Gate 42, Seat 2L) Pushback: 1252 Takeoff: 0105 Landing: 1833 Gate: 1841 (C13) My bird to Singapore I took a moment to get a shot of the plane. Somehow I screwed up the settings — admittedly it was after...

I had about five hours in the Finnair lounge before my half past midnight flight to Singapore. Not too hard to take, really. It’s a good lounge, as I knew from my last visit here in June 2023, when I bought lounge access on my Business Light fare. With a few hours up my sleeve, I planned to...

Going Home Tampere BookCrossers If I seem a little glum at times today, please know that I am not frowning over this convention. Tampere 2024 has been an event to hold close to the heart and pull out on those days in the future when I need a little extra push to get on. I see the organisers...

Current phones have some amazing photo tech. The lenses are very good - though of course through simple optics they have limitations - but with multiple lenses and sensors they can gather a lot of data about a scene, such as where objects are located spatially. They do a lot of analysis and...

More random Tampere photos:

Just an iphone shot but I ran it through Lightroom, straightened the geometry, adjusted the tones - lift the darks, drop the lights, push the whites and blacks to clipping, the colours come right out - and cropped a little.

Oh, I missed that. Finland does fish divine. Trout soup and sourdough; sounds like heaven.

36B Kuninkaankatu for the apartment. I love the way Scandinavian cities are built for people rather than cars. Easy to get around, never too far from shops or parkland, libraries built as places of spirituality and civic pride etc. etc. Some magnificent civic buildings, built for the people...

Morning snow cover Oddly enough, it hadn’t melted and vanished overnight. Parkrun in Finland begins at 0930 and I made my way down to the start point, a couple of packs of Tim Tams in my bag, about nine, crunching gingerly through the snow. Normal running shoes, some thick socks, track suit...

Naturally a visit to Finland involves sauna. “Sow-na”, as they say. There was some discussion about etiquette from the various nationalities. The Germans were quite comfortable with public nudity, others were horrified. I’m kind of in the middle. I used to hang out on nude beaches as a young...

It was Thursday before I was conscious again. Not to worry, Tampere was full of lunches and dinners and beer tastings and social activity. To be honest, the books are an excuse for a four-day feast. Harald’s Harald's Viking Restaurant  The supposedly Viking restaurant just around the corner...

Railway station  Apart from the BookCrossing convention, I had no reason to visit Tampere, Finland’s third largest city — and the biggest inland city in all Scandinavia — beyond the normal traveller desire to see everything in the world. There was a fair bit of beer drunk, I took a sauna, and...

Helsinki street signs — image by author Once we were outside again — in the cold — we were given some information on street signs. Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish, so every official sign has both languages. And in the old days, for those who couldn’t read either one...

Red Umbrella tour group at Senate Square, Helsinki I love Helsinki Airport. Straightforward, practical, efficient, elegant. I walked with Megan to immigration and drew her aside into a central hub where there were padded lounges for sitting, resting, or sleeping. In a continuous screen above...

In theory, my latest TR is PJ-themed, and yes there were QF pyjamas offered on the AY wet-lease to SIN. Delivered just as I stretched out flat and closed my eyes. I wore them on the two flights coming back. I was offered another pair SIN-MEL but I indicated I already had some, and she said I...

Flight 2406 Tuesday 16 April 2024 AY 132 SIN-HEL A359 OH-LWO Scheduled: 2150 Boarding: 2115 (Seat 2L/62C) Pushback: 2203 (Delay while awaiting luggage transfer from another terminal) Takeoff: 2206 Landing: 0628 Gate: 0631 My plan had been to approach one of the crew in the gate lounge but I see...

From research in this forum, I find that the Qatar lounge consistently rates high out of those available to oneWorld members, at least those at my OWS level. I found the place without difficulty - up the first set of escalators, turn left - and when I ask about the showers a series of smiling...

Bottles and ceramics are allowed on board and they can be broken to create sharp weapons. Certainly handier than whatever medals and medal bars might be used for. I doubt that they are considered with careful thought by the security operatives manning the scanners. I'm not sure anything is, to...

At this point in a long day and a half, I care naught for pyjamas. I’m dressed in reasonably dishevelled fashion - rumpled polyester trousers and a cotton shirt that has lost any freshly-ironed sharpness it may have had twelve hours, two cities, and a bus ride back - and my brain is shutting...

Flight 2405 Tuesday 16 April 2024 QF 191 SYD-SIN A333 OH-LTS (wet-lease from Finnair) Scheduled: 1025 Boarding: 1000 (Seat 4L) Pushback: 1038 Takeoff: 1050 to south Landing: 1650 from west Gate: 1653 (C18) My Singapore flight is indeed the same plane that flew in from Singapore. It and the...